Why Meditate?🔗

In the following four chapters as well as those on meditation techniques that follow in a later section, I give you the pathways to experience the truths we talked about. By now, you have the intellectual understanding about what needs to be done and why.

We now come to the part of how. All the understanding will remain only theoretical if it is not converted into experience.

What is your ultimate aim in life?

To earn more… ? To stay forever young, healthy, beautiful…? To have better, longer-lasting relationships…? To improve your personality…?

Each of us is actually searching for bliss, but we search in many different ways. But ninety-nine percent of us are not even aware that bliss is our true goal! We search everywhere in the outside world for something which is there within us, just waiting to be discovered.

A small story:

One evening, a man was searching hard for something in the courtyard in his house. His wife asked him what it was. He replied that he had dropped a gold coin. His wife also joined in the search. Soon, others gathered and practically the whole neighborhood was searching for the lost coin.

Suddenly one neighbor asked the man, ‘Where exactly did you drop the coin? How come we still haven’t found it?’ The man replied, ‘Oh, I lost the coin inside the house.’ Everybody searching became angry and asked him, ‘Then why are we searching here?’

The man replied, ‘The problem is I have no lights inside my house. So I started searching by the light of this streetlamp here!’

This is exactly what we do in our own lives. We are all experts in searching for answers in the wrong places. We search for bliss everywhere, be it in money, power, relationships or ideologies. But we don’t move in the one obvious direction which is inwards.