Clip about Meditation from a recent Wednesday Conversation in Bangalore

so first of all in India everybody that I meet has a lot of ideas about meditation and the first idea everybody has is that meditation needs to be an experience of thoughtlessness everybody I meet and their hand people seem to have trouble because when they close their eyes then when they close their eyes they don't experience thoughtlessness they experience they become more aware of how many thoughts they're having and then they don't know what to do so the first thing that I try and explain to people is that in order to experience timeless depth thoughtlessness is not required so the mind is like the mind is like a machine the mind is a mechanical process it's it's a process of conditioning conditioned thinking patterns of thinking habits of thinking that have been learned from a very young age we've been learned we learn how to have to have a conceptual relationship to reality and we have a conceptual relation to bring it with reality with through thought it's reusing thought so we've been having we've been cultivating a conceptual relationship with all of reality and all of our experience from a very young age and it's it's it's it's an unconscious habit but this unconscious habit can also be understood as accumulated momentum the thought is an expression of the accumulated momentum decades and lifetimes of conditioned thinking and each time we try to understand something each time we try and reflect on something every time we plan our day we're adding momentum we're adding mind timbre any momentum so we're always busy with this momentum all the time we're always do always adding adding to this momentum and therefore it's unreasonable to expect that that all that accumulated momentum that comes from decades and lifetimes is going to suddenly disappear right now I think that if we would go away from the world go to the gate lived in a cabin in the woods and live in a cave in the Himalayas and we threw away our cell phone and we stopped listening to the radio stop reading newspaper stop reading books and spend eight hours a day meditating and not communicating with other people eventually that momentum would slow down because we weren't engaging with it anymore and maybe after a few months the mind would begin to become very slow and we would experience long periods of quietness in the mind and of course quietness in the mind is where makes us feel very peaceful because thought creates agitation but the mind the conceptual the capacity to be able to think is a great gift of evolution the thinking mind is in the frontal cortex and it enables us to have a very complex and sophisticated and informed and they elude any illuminated relationship to life into the human experience so without the mind we wouldn't be able to understand so much we wouldn't be able to do so much so the mind is an extraordinary instrument and it's a it's a it's a it's a gift of evolution so we want to appreciate that the mind is a great gift and I don't think we would want to be without it but the question is we don't want to the problem is not the fact that the mind exists it's that these the self-identity identity of the small self the ego is identified with the mind as being self so it creates the torment or creates the problems for us is not the presence of mind in the presence of thought or the movement of thought but the identification with thought itself so I clear the identification that I that I am my thoughts so then therefore all the emotions that are related to the thoughts that arise and pass away in the eye of our mind are all are all related to us to a separate self sense called I and therefore some thoughts disturb us some stuff some spots make us happy other thoughts make us angry for frightened or insecure but that only happens because we relate this process of cognition to an individual self so what's very interesting is that when we learn how to assume a position in relationship to thought of profound attachment profound attachment non identification when we allow all the thoughts to be there we don't push any thoughts out we don't move towards any thoughts and we don't move away from any thoughts we don't move towards any thoughts and we don't move away from any thoughts but we allow all thoughts to be there no matter what they are but in in the meditative context we choose to have no relationship with any of them so when we assume a position of no relationship to cognition no relationship to the thought process you know relationship know when there's when there's no relationship how many is there no relationship is 1 or 0 when there's a relationship there's 2 so when there's no relationship there's one or none so no relationship to the arising of thought and the presence of thought is the experience of freedom freedom because as Vedanta clearly explains the ultimate truth about the nature of reality is that there's only one and not two right this is the ultimate truth that Vedanta proclaims is that the ultimate truth is that there's only one and not - it's called a non duality or oneness not Tunis so when we assume a position of no relationship to the content of consciousness and we assume the position of no relationship no relationship no relationship as we assume Li as we assume this position no relationship we begin to experience have become more conscious of consciousness when we assume in the position of no relationship to the content of consciousness and the the consciousnesses thought right content of consciousness is thought when we assume the position of no relationship to the content of consciousness we begin to suddenly become aware of consciousness itself because usually I mean consciousness is ever present throughout changing states consciousness is always the very ground of our experience but we tend to we tend to not be aware of the presence of consciousness because we're always busy with the it's content which is thought in the thought form of fears desires memories opinions beliefs world views etc so we're always busy with the content of consciousness and when we go to sleep we're busy with our dreams right so we're always busy with the content of consciousness unconsciously busy with in the process of identifying identifying whether the content of consciousness is in the form of thought so meditation if it's the real thing I believe should be about moksha or the experience or discovery of freedom from the very beginning not sometime in the distant future so the way the way the experience of meditation can be about the discovery of inner freedom from the very beginning it's through this simple practice of assuming no relationship to the content of consciousness which is thought I choose to assume no relationship to the content of consciousness I choose to assume their relationships with the content of consciousness so as I always enjoy to say in India where there's so many beggars there's actually more beggars in New York than in Bangalore but that's another something in India when you see a beggar coming towards you if you have no intention for whatever reason if you have no intention to give the beggar any money you don't make eye contact do you so you choose to have no relationship with the bag of the beggars coming toward you the beggar is trying to catch your eye but you don't because you don't want to have a relationship with the beggar you see the beggar but you choose to have no relationship with the beggar so the presence of the beggar is like the presence of thought if you choose to have no relationship with the content of consciousness and you choose to have no relationship with thought or the content of thought its presence is not disturbing what creates the disturbance and the distraction and the discomfort and the frustration and the anxiety and the confusion is the unconscious deeply conditioned have the habitual relationship with thought so we can experience infinite boundless depth in meditation very quickly simply by choosing to assume no relationship to the content of consciousness and we do that it's very easy it's very natural it's very effortless it's very easy it's very natural it's very effortlessly easy it's not hard it doesn't involve 200 percent focused concentration like yoga concentration we simply pay attention pay attention to pay attention and let go let go let go if you pay attention and we let go and we pay attention and we let go and that's it intention then we let go pay attention and let go pay attention let go so once again the presence of thought makes no difference our relationship to thought makes all the difference and this is actually very important because for example the problem for the problem for most people is unconscious identification we thought that's the problem it's unconscious unknowing unconscious identification with thought we identify with this thought that thought this memory that memory this fear that fear this desire that desire and we act on it and we don't even know what happened because we weren't paying attention we were unconscious we were asleep we were lost sleepwalking in the habitual identification with the content of consciousness so it's this becoming this practice of awareness in the context of and the the practice of awareness helps us not only in discovering what meditation and inner freedom are all about who teaches us how to be free in the midst of life that's what's most important no if we can be free on the top of a mountain because we haven't spoken to anybody in six months but when we come down into the world we lose all our freedom that freedom doesn't need much for them so the secret of meditation and the secret of moksha is learn looking into this question of no relationship