Muscles for the mind

 

We all are keen to do meditation. But is it that simple? This is what I read.

A person went to the gym for body building. The instructor asked him whether he had any physical problems. He said, not much, just some arthritis, a bit of asthma, ulcers and spondilosis. But he wanted to do weight training. The instructor told him, first cure your ills, make your body suitable for weight training and then come back.

Meditation is body building for the mind. We suffer from rigid attitudes, we start wheezing with anger at any provocation, our mind is full of bleeding ulcers from prejudices, and we are pains in the neck personified. Yet we think we can just plop down onto the ground, sit cross legged and experience a serene mind?

Read up Patanjali's Yogasutra, O aspirers to meditation, and first makes your mind fit to sit. Yama and Niyama are perhaps the toughest stages to cross.

The fertile field of uncertainty

In many discussions, I have heard concepts rejected, saying it is not scientific. Something being "scientific" seems to be the ultimate approval stamp on a phenomenon, that makes it worthy of discussion. 

Yet, what is a scientific phenomenon? One that has gone through the steps of hypothesis, data, formulation, validation and subsequently used for prediction. If it is not possible to carry out these steps, the phenomenon is not a scientific one. But I feel that putting a scientific framework in place is itself a marginal activity, because each of these steps are limited in scope.

Hypothesis is limited by human imagination.

Data is limited by instrumentation.

Formulation is limited by intelligence.

Validation is limited by choice of field.

Prediction is limited by boundary conditions.

As we filter out one phenomenon after another, we are left with a scant sample that can stand the test of this intellectual game. Yet when we are faced with any uncertain process, we call it unscientific and be done with it.

In that sense, Hiesenberg was perhaps the biggest iconoclast, because he knocked the validity of observation out of the window when he said that the position and velocity of a particle cannot be determined at the same time. This makes space itself uncertain. Holding the hand of Hiesenberg, scientists are now taking a few steps out of their small cottages of certainity and exploring the fertile fields of the uncertain.

After all, experience is a far stronger determinant of truth than experiment.