Ask The Master: 05 Feb 2008

If meditation is a 24-hour process, how can life go on? If I am always focused on 'just being', how can I get any work done?

Meditation is not against action!

Once you learn the knack of remaining undisturbed in your Being, you can perform any number of tasks while remaining in the same state. External action or inaction is irrelevant.

This is a two-step process.

First, you need to get in touch with your inner Being. You have to realize that such a thing exists! Learn to enjoy the state of just being. Initially, you will do this only for half an hour or an hour everyday -- when you sit down to meditate.

Once you are comfortable with this state, try and extend it to periods outside of the formal meditation period.

You can start with little tasks: trying to remain centered, even as you are eating, walking, washing dishes. Once you do this, you can move to more complicated tasks.

Externally, your life goes on in a normal manner. In fact, you can carry on your life in an even better way --- because now you have greater clarity, greater intensity. You will be more aware, more creative.

Yet internally, you will experience a deep, undisturbed silence. Because you are no longer doing -- you are watching.

This is the whole secret of meditation -- to become the watcher, to become the witness of your own actions and emotions.

As you start witnessing your own actions, you will realize that there is someone inside you who does not change, who does not get angry or feel sad, who does not care about money or security or fame. That is the real you. The rest is just a personality you have formed around yourself.

Once you become aware that you are not the one who works, that you are not the one who feels angry or hurt or depressed -- you experience a tremendous sense of freedom.

This will happen through meditation.

Meditation offers you the ultimate freedom -- freedom from yourself, freedom from the bounds of 'personality' that you have created for yourself.

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This excerpt has been taken from the book: "Meditation is for You" -- an introduction to the science and art of meditation