Living worldly life with a meditative state of mind

Many a  time, it so happens to us that we get disturbed by an incident or a person. Even after the lapse of a significant time, such a person or incident keeps occupying our minds. The more we think about that the more disturbed we become. It seems that we have almost lost control over ourselves and the thought process continues in an auto mode.

Our mind is like a big home having thousands of rooms wherein we keep moving from one to the other room quite frequently. However, sometimes it so happens that we get stuck in one of those rooms. Not only do we get stuck but also we close the door and do not allow any other person to come in. Since we stopped moving to different rooms, the mental activities in that room slowly outgrow the activities in the other rooms disproportionately. That room slowly becomes the center of our life so and so that slowly we close the windows also not allowing any fresh air to come inside.

It so happens when we are deeply hurt by a person or an incident. Such incidents confine us to one of the mental rooms. We keep thinking about such incidents again and again. The more time we spend in such a mental room the more our life gets focussed in and around that room. We slowly start forgetting the other mental rooms. We make more mental stories while staying in that room. Slowly, we close the door and the window of that room almost cutting off from the rest of the rooms and the rest of the world.

But the reality does not change by our getting confined to a room. The other rooms continue to exist irrespective of the fact whether we are aware of those rooms or not. The world outside that room continues to exist and grow irrespective of the fact that we have closed the door and the windows to that room. We start getting more and more cut off from the rest of the world and our perception becomes more and more unrealistic. With such a distorted perception, we feel more threatened by the thought processes and actions of the rest of the world.

Whenever we sit for meditation practice, we start with one or the other such room. Sometimes, the doors and windows of the room are closed and even after sitting in a meditative posture for 15-20 minutes, the mind is closed inside that room. The thoughts do not leave us. They keep coming back in one form or the other. Sometimes the doors and windows are open, and it takes less time to come out of the room. However, the moment we come out of the rooms to wide open, taking the support of the breath, something miraculous happens. We become extremely mobile. We almost fly from one room to the other as if there are no walls between the rooms. Even to the extent that slowly all the rooms also disappear and what remains is a wide open field with no divisions.

However, when we come back to the family life or office, we come back to the same super-structure. Sometimes they move across different rooms and sometimes get stuck in one or the other room. Our worldview again becomes narrow. We again close down the doors and the windows. 

A crucial question is the marriage between the meditative and the worldly state or an amalgamation of the two. Can the meditative state continue while operating in this world? The challenge is that while operating in this world, we have to interact with different human beings who operate in those thick-walled rooms. Social and religious customs and rituals, rules of the organizations, and community divisions are the primary centers of operation. They all create thick boundaries among human beings. Love which lays of foundation of whole of the existence becomes distant and these boundaries become primary. 

It takes a leap of faith each time we interact with a fellow human being confined inside a thick-walled room. While from a meditative perspective, those thick walls seem to carry no significance, from the perspective of the person confined to the room, that room and its entropy is the only reality of this world. At times, we ourselves are caught inside different rooms. 

I feel that this world is such an amazing place. We keep landing in different situations forcing us to enter different mental rooms. Each room has quite different possibilities. We may get fixated on the room and close the doors and the windows. On the other hand, we may just get out of the room after exploring the room in a meditative state. That's the fun of life. While stuck inside the room, life seems limited. While roaming around freely life appears to be unlimited. In between these two extremes, we live almost the whole of our life and keep exploring different rooms almost whole of our life. 

The durability and quality of the marriage of the worldly life with the meditative state depends upon the purity of the observation in the meditative state and the strength of equanimity. If equanimity is strong, and observation is pure, when we come back to the material world, we will be able to realize the futility of most of the boundaries. We will also be able to see clearly where different human beings are stuck. A person can not be brought out of confinement until and unless he himself makes an effort. But, with the realization of the temporariness of these boundaries, one can at least ignore them at a psychological level keeping their role limited to functional usage.