It is good news that Bill Gates is meditating daily — for precious 10 minutes. And now for him, meditation is no longer a “woo-woo thing”, whatever that means. He might have thought that meditation is “tied somehow to reincarnation”.
Well, such misconceptions have always been there about meditation and people in the West have been ridiculing the Eastern meditators as navel-gazers, escapists and renunciates. Such fallacious assumptions discourage these intelligent people all over the world in using such a wonderful tool to raise their consciousness and transform themselves and the world at large. As we all know that when intelligent people do something remarkable and great, the ordinary people follow them, because it looks like a success story. People become followers of these great people. It makes sense to them.
If in India similar statements are given by Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Azim Premji, Narayana Murthy, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai or Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that the secret of their success is meditation, this will create a huge impact on the minds of intelligentsia and the ordinary people. Recently, superstar Rajinikanth said in an interview that he has been meditating since he was seven years old. He explained: “From childhood, I had the Vedas, the Upanishads, meditation with me. Later, there were many gurus and I made many trips to the Himalayas. It is a deep subject. Only someone who experiences it knows about it. It is difficult to convey in words. Mainly, you get peace. When your mind is peaceful, whatever you do, you do it well.”
Rajinikanth did not renounce the world and made a tremendous contribution to the world of movies.
Osho, the enlightened mystic of modern times, made meditation the central point of his spiritual teaching. Thousands of Osho centres around the world are offering meditations on a regular basis. He has a very unique take on this subject. According to him, meditation is a way of life. It is life-affirmative. One does not have to run away from life and practice meditation in some ashrams in the Himalayas. Yes, one can take a few days off to go somewhere and learn meditation, but one has to return to the world and continue living meditatively.
He says: “Meditation cannot be a fragmented thing. It should be a continuous effort. Every moment one has to be alert, aware and meditative. But the mind has played a trick. You meditate in the morning and then you put it aside. Or you pray in the temple and then forget it. Then you come back to the world, completely unmeditative, unconscious, as if walking in a hypnotic sleep. This fragmented effort won’t do much. Consciousness is a continuum. It is like a river, flowing constantly. If you are meditative the whole day, every moment of it — and only when you are meditative the whole day — the flowering will come to you.”
