Meditation is revolution

By Marco Mandrino

In some parts of the world, and everywhere until relatively very recently, we are talking about a couple of centuries, free thinking and dissent were not permitted and were suppressed by force. It was not possible to question social and religious dogmas: in other words, you could not dissent without risking your life. Today dissenting and doubting are permitted, but it seems that only a tiny percentage of people truly have the real ability or desire to use this right. Most people like to stay in the group, protected by the herd. What I witness every day is people who believe they are thinking freely what others want them to think. Free thought is not suppressed by force, but smothered by the constant buzz, by delegitimisation through categorisation, by chanting in chorus the television and newspaper mantras that are mistaken for one's own free thoughts.

We are the jailers of our own free thinking.

Yoga, and above all meditation, play a fundamental role in recovering the capacity to be free. In today's world freedom is mostly not suppressed physically, as it once was, but is smothered by propaganda that produces "reheated" thoughts which are then taken for an original product. You end up hearing people repeat, like so many automatons, what has been drummed into them, as if they were great creative axioms. In essence, human beings unconsciously suppress themselves.

Meditation is creating space, it is letting the weeds be spotted by the eye of awareness, so that the flowers of free thought may blossom spontaneously. Meditation is the ability to listen, without categorising and delegitimising out of hand. Meditation is the ability to listen to someone who thinks differently, without attacking them two seconds later over something that has nothing to do with what they are saying. Meditation is cultivating the capacity for observation, listening and discernment.

If you believe you are capable of this regardless, because this ability is "normal", I'm sorry to tell you that it isn't. If you are not aware of the constant pressure of propaganda, which pushes towards a single, indistinct way of thinking, whatever the subject, you are probably an "inmate". If in the past freedom had to be carved out through outward revolutions, today it has to be won first of all inwardly, through meditative practice (training), to accustom the mind to seeing everything with many different shades.

m.m.