Cliff Johnson has a forty-five year history as a journalist, free-lance writer and book and magazine editor. This career has included editor and compiler of Vedanta: An Anthology of Hindu Scripture, Commentary, and Poetry (Harper & Row, 1971), written during a ten-year period as a monk in a Hindu monastery. He presently conducts meditation classes for both adults and younsgters.
Most of us are busy in the world. We have an education to pursue, we work at jobs, we also incur obligations that take a great deal of our time. We also have enjoyments. We go to movies, watch television, use the computer, chat with our friends on the phone–and even read a good book now and then. These activities have one thing in common: they create a very crowded mind! And if you have ever been in a crowd, a really big, active, angry, pushing crowd, there is one thing you want to do, don’t you? Get out of it!
Meditation is a way out. A way out of the crowded thoughts, activities and disturbances and trivialities that we mentioned earlier and can often make our lives discontented. When we are too busy with all those thoughts and activities that crowd in upon us, how is it possible to be happy? And we all want to be happy and at peace. Everyone does.
Picture your mind as a huge room. Let’s imagine this room filled with a lot of people talking, a television on the wall noisily projecting images, a band playing in the center, and...well, you get the idea. Chaos! How can you think in such a room? How can you be at peace there? You can’t.
Think of another room that is totally empty. Its walls are painted a beautiful, restful color and there is a soft carpet on the floor. It is absolutely silent there. Not a sound. Now imagine yourself sitting alone in that room with eyes closed. You are completely at peace. You have never felt such quiet, such inner quiet. Then, ever so softly, you hear the sound OM. (We’ll talk about that later.) It seems to come from nowhere; it fills the room with its gentle resonance. All thoughts that have disturbed and even frightened you fall away as that sound OM enters inside you and replaces all those thoughts that have caused you so much trouble.
Meditation is learning to create that quiet inner space and, through practice, control the disturbances we all face in the outside world. That is one part of meditation–control. Through practice we learn to control what enters our mind, what we want to keep there, and what we want to release. Later we will learn how to go about this, but for now we have to recognize that the mind under control is the happy mind.