I had been to Swami Swaroopananda's (Chinmaya Mission) talk on "The Art of Medidation - and The Power of Gayathri Mantra" . I should say it was really a enlightening talk. Though some concepts that he covered were OHT (Over Head Transmission) most of the contents of his talk were very practical and relevant to day to day life. After my upanayanam I was religiously doing the "Sandhyavandhana" [which I have currently discontinued ;) ] but now after attending this lecture I really feel that I have not done justice to it, even while doing it. One lesson that I have learnt is : just uttering prayers etc. and repeating shlokas are good but only to serve the purpose of chaneling the wavering mind and streamlining our thoughts so that we can concentrate on particular thing. The true power of meditation is to achieve greater mind control. I just tried a simple test, I counted how many different thoughts that crossed my mind in just 10 secs : I counted about 8 + 1 counting process = 9, that makes 9/10 = ~ 1 thought process per second. In Computer Science a well established fact is that "Context Switching is Expensive". Thus I have come to realise that I lose so much time in unnecessary context switching overheads. If I can tune my mind to concentrate on a particular thought without distraction for longer periods of time then I could be much more productive and efficient.
2 comments:
My grandfather used to tell me that people go to the temple and pray for hours together only to build concentration. He also used to tell me not many people understand this.. they pray to ensure that god takes care of us.. i dint understand what he was saying then but i do now!
He was a wise man and i learnt the power of questioning from him :-)
A very good observation Easwaran. On a parallel, I have trying to do some Zen stuff. It is on similar lines of channeliing thought and controlling your breath. Your posture and breath have a sublime influence on your thought process. When the back bends, our concentration loses it seems.
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