There is no Hindu in Hindutva

 What if the world’s largest democracy with 1.4 bn people spirals into a brutal Hindu-Muslim civil war? That was the direction India’s Hindu supremacist government was taking us before the pandemic froze things. From a model multi religious country, where Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains have existed together for centuries, where 200mn muslims have lived peacefully despite the violence in Islamic countries in our neighbourhood, we could become a battleground for extremist Islamist organisations to operate in and recruit from.

Why? Let us examine the validity of the Hindu supremacist argument.

Hinduism is alone amongst the four major religions with a well-defined metaphysics. Hinduism was spawned by the Rig Ved around 1500BC. The Upanishads, composed later starting 900BC, are pure metaphysics, no dogma no ritual no superstition.  Termed Vedanta or ‘End of the Veda’ the Upanishads have a distinct identity of their own.

There are ten principal Upanishads. These are a truly soaring set of metaphysical meditations. Their essence can be condensed into a single word, the focus of all the Upanishads: Brahman. Brahman is described as the Self, dwelling in all, the consciousness of the universe. Brahman is the first cause uncaused, the prime mover unmoved, that which existed before existence, that which will be there after all existence ends. God, formless, dimensionless, timeless, all pervasive.

The concept of Brahman is secular. Its spiritual not religious, abstract not revelatory. Anyone can seek Brahman. You do not have to be Hindu; you do not have to come to Christ to be saved; you don’t have to accept Allah as the only God with Mohammed as his only messenger. Brahman is common for all mankind.

Brahman is the defining Hindu metaphysical belief.

The second tenet of Hinduism which runs right through every branch and form of the vast religion is: Karma. Your actions are your karma. The Bhagvad Gita, the holy book of the Hindu religion defines moral life as the pursuit of karma: do good for everyone, and if you can’t do good, do no harm. Karma is carried forward from birth to birth.  Each birth is determined by your cumulative karma. Buddhism, though atheistic, shares this belief.

And now on to Hindutva.  Hindutva is not a religion at all. It’s a modern political belief, that started in 1923. A belief that India should be a Hindu country. It has particular animus towards Muslims for their invasions, plunders and massacres centuries ago. These injustices, these hurts are nurtured carefully as grievances by the body politic of Hindutva. Christians are also disliked for the conversions they have encouraged. The fact that the converts were mostly downtrodden lower castes who willingly fled is considered irrelevant.

The subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 into India and Pakistan (West and East) based on the geographic concentration of the two major religions. Hindutva zealots believe it follows that there should be no Muslims left in India, though that was never the intention and India’s constitution is secular. That most Muslims in India were born post 1947 is also considered irrelevant.

Hindutva motivated the recent atrocities against Muslims in India. From discrimination and hatred to lynchings and even recent pogroms.  Hindutva is a cherished goal of the ruling party which has been seeking to disenfranchise Muslims with new controversial laws applied selectively with blatant discrimination. This has led to protests, demonstrations, demonization of Muslims, violence against them and extreme polarization. The situation is ripe for a civil war which could well end in a militant theocracy. The pandemic has provided a stasis – but not without Muslims being accused of deliberately spreading Covid (Covid Jihad!).  The beast of bigotry must be fed.

A single step towards Hindutva is a violation of both cardinal tenets of Hinduism.  First, distinguishing between different religions, a complete disavowment of Brahman. Second, hatred, even violence towards Muslims and also Christians, a complete negation of karma.  Hindutva believers are no longer fit to be called Hindus.

There are no Hindus in Hindutva. Hindutva isn’t Hinduism. Being reactionary and thin skinned in essence, Hindutva is a bristling compendium of negatives like bigotry, intolerance, misogyny, obscurantism, ant-intellectualism and militancy.

A civil war in India leading to radical Hindutva rule looms. Such a retrogressive future for the largest democracy in the world, the bulwark of democracy in Asia, should be cause for global concern.

Karma, the metric of life

The Katha Upanishad asks a fundamental question that I keep veering back to, so captivating is its power: ‘what is it that everybody knows but nobody believes?’ The answer it gives: ‘that you are going to die’. Well, about 3000 years later the question retains its elemental power but the answer has changed. Now, the answer should be: ‘that you will be judged for your actions, your karma.’

Every religion, every society exalts the belief you that you will be judged for your actions. That has been enshrined as a primary organizing principle for societies since the beginning of civilization.  The point being: if you have figured out how to commit the perfect undetectable crime, you wont really get away with it: god will nail you for it, so cease and desist.  Almost every human being on this planet understands and believes that, has a sense that there is a scalable price to pay for bad actions, perhaps even rewards ranging to glory for good ones. Few in the world actually think that actions will not have consequences. Even atheists subscribe to a sense of morality – often superstition also, but that’s another story, one that makes you wonder how many professed atheists are truly atheist.

Yet hardly any of us behave as though this applies to us, though we are pretty confident others are going to get hauled over the coals for bad karma, especially those who have harmed us. Schadenfreude is universally adored. If we truly took to heart that we will be judged for our own karma, we would give that single belief command over our minds and let it dictate each and every action - to the extent we can assert such control. But we don’t. That’s cognitive dissonance of epic proportions.

If karma is all that survives after this life then karma is all that truly matters, in a spiritual sense. Someone said the ‘the real never dies, the unreal never existed’. Everything other than karma will get left behind in the constraining confines of these three dimensions, only karma will survive death, so in that sense only karma is true and real and enduring.  Which brings us to the answer to the Katha Upanishad question. Karma is the only real thing, and is the one thing we know yet shrug off.

That is maya. Maya is the illusion that our physical selves and the flow of events that constitutes our lives is what is real, eclipsing our souls and our spiritual existence. As normal unenlightened humans we are unable to sense our own souls, our true selves.  We submerge our consciousness in the flows and eddies of events while we seek maximum extraction from whatever streams of life we choose – sensory, material, emotional, intellectual, creative.  Some sense the existence of the spirit, of something beyond the here and now, and seek a spiritual path. Yet the spiritual path is not illumined, and it is easy to lose our way without guidance. Even those who gain consciousness of the spiritual as an additional dimension of life most often fail to link it back to the time bound three dimensions of material life, and can remain driven in their actions and insensitive to their karma.  Maya is powerful and its gravitational pull difficult to escape.

Bad karma takes many forms.

In the conscious or unconscious pursuit of karma there is an almost unavoidable pitfall of behaviour - cruelty.  We all fall in, are cruel to one another, and to other sentient beings.  That is the single biggest negative action staining our karma, draining our karmic balance. We are cruel to others –other people, other animals, to whoever or whatever we define tribally as ‘other’. From another class, another caste, another race, religion, political or belief system, another geography. ‘Other’ can be defined as narrow or as wide as we choose, all the way to every sentient being other than self (I and Not I is the world).

We are also perfectly capable of being cruel to what we accept as our own, yet we just may just feel guilty about that since societies have done their unswerving best to inculcate that sense of guilt. But we generally have few qualms about treating the ‘other’ poorly – societies sanction that, even promote it as a means of defining their own identity and boundaries.  People do that for a variety of reasons sometimes just because it makes them feel good. A sense of power, of being superior, of masking hurt and low self worth. The closer the person we are cruel to, the greater the betrayal of both that person and ourselves, of our own sense of integrity, and the greater the damage to both. We cannot hurt others without wounding ourselves both psychically and spiritually.

Then there is lust: for money, for power, for position, for sensory pleasures.  We will thoughtlessly or coldly or even self righteously do people out of their rights, appropriate what’s theirs, use people, deceive them to help ourselves to what we want rather than what we deserve, driven by our egos and greed, by maya. This is another common form of karmic failure, and in a sense links in with our attitude to ‘others’. Our sense of the ‘other’ moves in concentric orbits, from close in to far out, depending on the nature of the action, and also on how much harm we sense we are causing to the other. We can treat the same person as ‘own’ or ‘other’ depending on our assessment of self-interest in that situation.

Indifference is also poor karma. Those of us who are privileged in some fashion and see the misery around us near and far, should do something to provide the kind of help which we would welcome were we in that situation. Not doing bad isn’t enough – we have to seek to do good. How big a lapse that is depends on how dire the need for help is. Like everything in nature, karma is nuanced and hierarchical, not black and white. There isn’t a single point of transition from ‘bad’ to ‘good’, it is an almost endless scale running from barbaric, psychotic savagery to kindness, compassion, altruism and beyond…to enlightenment, moksha, nirvana.

Jimmy Carter once confessed that he had committed adultery in his heart many times, as he had looked at a lot of women with lust. Do thoughts constitute karma? Thoughts are the seeds of actions, and every thought would lead to an action unless some other thought or impulse prevents it.  So is it okay to have terrible thoughts just as long as we can rein them in? At a simple level one could say yes, I may have had horrific thoughts but I never acted on them, so my actions, my karma are okey dokey.  Yes… but, you cannot have a mind seething with terrible thoughts and not have any osmosis from that flow into your basic stance in life, your basic approach and attitude. Even if such thought doesn’t lead to negative actions it occupies the mind and crowds out good thought. Bad thoughts and great karma don’t go together. If we want to improve our karma, we have to improve our thinking with reflection, contemplation, meditation, mindfulness. What is our intent, and what will be the effect of possible action? We need to think about that, and think more about others today than we did yesterday.

For most of us, there are only two periods in life when our karma are truly our own. As children our actions are guided to a large extent by parents and teachers as we lead supervised lives. Later we take on a partner, and a lot of actions are joint or influenced.  The very first period in our lives when we are truly free to exercise our own judgment is as young adults, when we have left home and before we pair with someone - but a lot of that is thoughtless and immature. The second period which comes to about half the population (of those who enduringly marry/pair) is when you lose your partner. Then you are truly on your own, as mature and informed as you will ever be, mostly in the final phase of life with enough time on your hands to consider your actions.  That is a stark call for reflection, to mull over, re-evaluate your life and make whatever course correction you can. How and on what basis are we selected for this – is outliving your partner the privilege of good karma or the punishment of bad karma? Is it an opportunity to build karma or just the punishing desolation of loneliness?

It isn’t, of course, essential to be single to review your life and karma.  The true challenge is to think and act as an individual soul even when ensnared by the myriad ‘nets of stone’ of our relationships. The rush and tumble of existence is no excuse, just a challenge. There is an imperative in living a life examined for reviewing our past not just as a series of events, triumphs and failures, but also as the flow of karmic events. That is a completely different filter to see things through, its like using a mental scanner that doesn’t see or show the outlines of life that we normally see but looks only at the inner workings of our intent and actions, the karma, the ‘real’ and enduring.  Seen karmically our lives look unrecognizably different, our biggest failures could be our greatest achievements and our greatest achievements karmic fiascos. Overall, our sense of our lives can shift seismically. A sense of satisfaction at a ‘successful’ life can be shattered, and a fragmented sense of an unsuccessful life can be knit together, miraculously repaired. Or a bit of both. The key is: did our karma improve over time, remain the same, or get worse? Or was there no pattern at all as we lived lives unconscious of the one thing we all know but don’t believe?

Every religion has its own do’s and don’t’s.  Islam is the most heavily specified, it has binding rules for everything.  ‘Directed’ karma? Is that real karma, or is free will an essential part of karma? Or is the suspension of free will an act of free will? Orthodox Judaism is also pretty prescriptive. Hinduism and Buddhism work off the lofty unifying metaphysical principle that all sentient creatures are connected – which eliminates the greatest karmic stumbling block, the ‘other’. If you take that message to heart it is powerful and can impact your mind and behavior in a very profound fashion – you cannot hurt anyone without hurting yourself. Both religions in their myriad forms have unfortunately largely abandoned their soaring, transcendent metaphysics for earth bound dogma and superstition and with a mind numbing imposition of cant and credo. Christianity at its heart has Jesus’ Sermon of the Mount, which in its elegant and deceptive simplicity captures the essence of ethics: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Beautiful and minimalist. The countless versions of Christianity though are laden with layers of groaning dystopic rules that would horrify Jesus. Religion sadly most often leads you away from, not towards, the spiritual.

So how are we to redeem our lives, our karma? My own guru reduced it simply to: “Try and always do good for others, and if you cant, at least do no harm”.  Clichéd and trite? Like something your grandmother might tell you? Fasten your seat belt. By ‘do good’ he meant never ever even think ill of others - he was known to get mad at people for finding fault with others: ‘How could you even think that!’ This takes the game way beyond Christ’s sermon on the mount, which was centered on actions and that too relative to oneself. This treats thoughts and actions as one, and moves from the comparative to the absolute plane – is good just what you would accept for yourself in that situation or is good what is essentially the right thing to do? First, this brings reality and immediacy to how we define the ‘others’ to do good to. Those we come into contact with? Everyone in the family – nuclear or extended? Everyone in the community, in the country?  All of humanity?  All sentient beings?  What weightage should we give whom – how much good? Should you treat a neighbour’s child, or a child in Syria the same as you would your own? Can you - does it make sense? Second, this takes you right into the realm of thought: should the good be just in action, or thoughts related to actual or possible action, or should the good extend to thought even when there is no possible action? Are you allowed to think poorly of others’ actions and fate that have nothing to do with you, maybe even quietly enjoy a delicious bit of schadenfreude, while doing good or at least no harm? Nope, sorry. Even a harmlessly malign thought is wrong, offside. The flow of thoughts and actions have to be perfectly aligned and impeccably worthy, for true karmic excellence. Still seem simple? Or more like a camel trying to figure a way through a needle’s eye?

This is a true karma driven call to action, and can set up a lifelong journey of ever improving karma.  The challenge is to take this simple sounding maxim as our primary and over-riding call to action, to understand it profoundly, drive it deep into our hearts, and to surrender to it such that it drives every action, and progressively colonises even our thoughts. When you are dealing with others, even in social situations, seek to be aware of this maxim. Yet, how do we change our behaviour in a comprehensive and sustainable way? Overcome all the seemingly uncontrollable reflexive patterns that we have inherited or developed over a lifetime, and which determine our behaviour, in effect define who we are? That requires a deep, deep dive into issues of identity and ego, it requires coming to terms with and deriving the existential wisdom and the liberation that comes from facing up to and understanding mortality and death, subjects I have reflected on earlier.  The deconstruction of our own identity and ego can help us look back on our lives without the distorting refraction resulting from all the damaging experiences of our lives and the lives of our parents, grandparents, going back generations, and see clearly in our karmic patterns the good, the bad and the oh-my-goodness. Equally, looking karmically at past situations where we were hurt, humiliated, cheated will no longer aggravate us if we see that our own karma was clear, and so any negative feelings are entirely related to the ego; and the opposite, if we look at successes and see our own karma was a little dodgy, the smug positive feelings are pure ego too. This can help deconstruct the ego, the most critical spiritual task.

To think deeply about what we have been doing and why, what we intend to do and why – that is the challenge of karma. To own our karma, and see it not as the result of our actions, but as the driver of our actions.

Completing the thought

There is much that I thought that I knew about my life that I actually didn’t. About myself, about people around me, about situations and dynamics past and existing. About thinking itself. A lot that I thought I had thought about deeply. Several rude shocks lurked there.

Life is like a 400 meter run, the track representing a lifetime, say 80 years. The first 100 meters or 20 years is highly eventful (curved on the track), as we move from helpless baby to physical, emotional and intellectual maturity as an independent, full grown, educated adult. The second 100/20 is a mad rush straight ahead, building family, career, a place in the sun. The third 100/20 is again full of change (curved), when our responsibilities peak and plateau at home and in the office, we may lose dreams, our body no longer feels indestructible, and then the established order ends, kids leave home, work pretty much ends, we retire.  That’s when we enter the last 100/20 and for the first time the tape, the end, comes in view and the end is death. And being faced with our own death can illuminate life like nothing else can.

We have a largish oil painting at home, semi-abstract, which has yielded itself to me slowly over many years. At times I would sit and stare at it and see it in yet another way … the movement across the painting of a particular colour, the interplay of colours, the emergence of form in what seemed formless, and now the picture is completely different to what I saw at first, it has yielded a lot.

The same is true of life. As I reflect on it, I see things I never saw before, even though they were in plain sight. Even the familiar can become quite different to what it seemed earlier. My picture of myself has changed radically. My flaws, which I covered up functionally, which I rationalized defensively in the rush and tumble of the first 300/60 are now coming into stark, clearly etched, inescapable sight. We are quick to spot even subtle flaws in others and can give genuinely good advice, but even the most obvious flaws in ourselves can remain shrouded forever. The idea is to bring them out of the dark into the light of reasoned thought.

Flaws distort our view of reality, cause us to live a life of partial lies, correction is an imperative. Correction isn’t easy, some is smooth and quick, some is painful, repetitive, and can be haltingly slow, some may never happen. That is something to work through piece by piece, rigorously, patiently and with unswerving commitment and honesty. What has started to emerge is that not only is the reality I see different to what I thought it was, but the illumination of it is leading to further change. Like Heisenberg uncertainty. Who I was wasn’t who I thought I was, and once I started to see who I am that started to change who I am, and continues to change me. The protective shell which we cover ourselves with during our ‘busy’ years can be broken off bit by bit exposing our true selves to light, renewal, growth.

This is also true of the dynamics of our existence. I see failures and limitations of my progress in all dimensions (sometimes even those where I thought I was highly successful) caused by who I truly am or was. I have also seen and been surprised by strengths and successes that I either didn’t know I had or had ignored or discounted earlier. I have had a wrong assessment of my successes and failures, my strengths and weaknesses, a wrong view of the dynamics of my past. There is a big lag between reality and perception, we keep seeing weaknesses we may have fixed, may assume strengths and characteristics we may have lost, may not see strengths we have developed.

We cannot go back and fix things, but we can recognize and accept them. This can be unsettling with failures but it can be a relief to let things go. I now see the natural limitations in myself that led inevitably to what I saw as failures. They were often failures only in comparison to unrealistic expectations I had of myself. Also, things I failed at at one point of time I learned to succeed at later - it was not so much failure as learning, a part of success not failure. Equally I began to see my successes in perspective, how much was me, how much was circumstance, how much was others, how much was not unalloyed success, if it was success at all. Some successes in one dimension of life led to failure in a different arena, and equally some failures led to success in a different aspect of life. The interaction between professional life and family life is the best example, and I can see where I sacrificed professional success for my family and vice versa. In sober judgment, we have to assess failures and successes not only relative to our opportunities and constraints, but over a wider arc of both life and time.

As I went deeper, not only did the classification of some successes and failures switch around, but even the definition of success and failure changed. In any case it is difficult to distinguish where one ends and the other begins as they are all so intertwined, and it is also difficult to separate my impact on them from my inheritance from circumstance. Once we see this we can strive for equidistance from both, view both successes and failures equally, dispassionately as occurrences, not as successes or failures, without pride or shame and with perfect equanimity. That’s the holy grail that sets us free of the past. I am far from that, but also far from where I started.

As an aside, while I have always thought of myself as a liberal, I now see many flaws in liberal positions. Liberals are prone to creating holy cows that are meant to be worshipped and adored, never questioned. Liberal positions can be quite extreme, even absolutist, not measuring up to any standards of logic or science. As I have sought to complete my thinking on various subjects, my positions have gotten less absolute and more nuanced. We can shed the pride and comfort of being a ‘liberal’ or a ‘conservative’, and determine our position on issues objectively and pragmatically, without being concerned about what will be considered politically correct. As polarization between conservatives and liberals is becoming starker across the globe, the danger for conservatives is that the center will not hold, and for liberals is that it will.

Part of this happens just due to availability of time. I can complete thinking on things that I never had the time to fully think through in transience, because at the time I had to make a decision, embark on a course of action. Also, situational dynamics coupled with my own limitations and neuroses triggered responses in the first 300/60, responses which might have been very different had I no pressure of time and could think things through and bring more sober, objective judgment to bear. Then there is the fact that now I am older, more experienced, possibly even a little wiser.

The other essential part is volition, the desire to straighten things out in your mind. Slowing of life doesn’t necessarily lead to reflectiveness. Neither does it lead to slowing of the mind which can race away wildly in crazy directions. Meditation can help calm the mind and aid contemplation, and as I have started to observe what my flow of thought consists of I have begun to see what causes me pain, anger, joy, sadness and I can trace them back to their roots in my life, and start to deal with them.  And as the flow starts to still a little, things appear more clearly, not distorted by the turbulence of a mind on a tear from one subject to the next – or at least on somewhat less of a tear. And as always, nothing succeeds like success: each issue I deal with successfully removes ‘noise’ from the picture, and as the picture becomes clearer that helps deal with more issues. A corrective, upward-onward spiral.

This last 100/20 coincides with the prescribed vedantic sanyas, renunciant phase of life, and perhaps this was part of the purpose of sanyas - to deconstruct our lives and see ourselves and reality with clarity, and to correct our attitudes towards others, towards reality and towards ourselves, learning lessons and getting to even keel as preparation for the next step in our spiritual journey and for the journey into the next life. To get away from the forced activity, the rush and tumble of earning a living and into a phase where we can gain greater control of our own lives, activity and thought. To develop oases of stillness and solitude in our lives even if we don’t actually head to the stillness of the forest for sanyas can help still the mind and we can do so purposefully with meditation and contemplation, the most essential ingredients of sanyas. Stillness of course being relative and not absolute. The activity of my mind moved from nearer the surface, held there restlessly through 300/60 by unavoidable relentless activity, to greater depths, eased down by solitude and contemplation. This is very much the path of spiritual progress, where the greatest requirement is dimming of the ego. Completing my thinking on life is helping me see through the constructs that my ego had built up to safeguard itself, to protect itself from discovery. The aim has to be discovery and partial extinction, which is the best I can hope for in this lifetime.

The opportunity is to move further along the scale from a life just lived, to a life fully examined. This is the reflective phase of life, where we can ruminate over things in a multi-gastric fashion, examining, re-examining and fully digesting what wasn’t fully digested earlier. And thereby seek the true wisdom of age.

Meditation

Free will is not a given. Free will is also not binary – it isn't a case of either we have it or we don’t. Free will is related to self-awareness and self-control.  Some people are so driven by their unconscious impulses that their decisions and actions are not in their control, their self-awareness is practically non-existent, and free will is more an illusion than a reality in their lives - like the grin on the face of the Cheshire cat. Others, more reflective, are more self aware, more aware of the effects of their actions, and have a higher degree of self-control and free will. And some expand their self-awareness over time, exhibiting greater and greater command over themselves and their actions, greater and greater free will.

Stillness of the mind prevents your consciousness from being overwhelmed by unconscious impulses. Stillness of the mind draws your center of gravity inwards, stabilising you, making you less dependent on the external world and giving you peace of mind. You can detect stillness at the core of people with self-possession, people who are aware of and in synch with themselves. Such people don't repeatedly do and say things that they later feel bad about, things that lower their sense of self worth and put them at odds with themselves. The brain is structured for the amygdala - the center of emotions, to fire before the cortex which is the center for thought and consciousness, so triggering the essential fight or flight instinct that secured our survival and evolution as a species. The amygdala is of less importance to our species now, but evolution takes a while to respond. Meanwhile, those who want greater control over their thoughts and actions have to take steps to gain control of their brains. 

The constant noise in our brain has a lot to do with past psychic injuries, stresses, traumas. Not just our own, but those of our parents, who transmit the lingering pain of their wounds to us, and have received the residues of the pain and stresses of past generations through their parents. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents .... it soon adds up a to a complex web of tributaries feeding the river of our psychic influences. You can factor into this the impact of karmic inheritance from previous lives. Each generation anneals to the extent they can their stresses and transmits the residue to the next. We inherit this long and varied genealogy of disquieting mental activity just as we inherit our DNA. No less distinctive, no less potent, this cache of psychic disturbance is what drives our unconscious urges, and traps us into dysfunctional modes of behaviour.

Meditation stills the mind, gives it pause for reflection. In the rush and tumble of existence, carving out time to sit quietly and focus on your breathing, or on a mantra, or as in vipassana on your body slows the mind, stemming the upsurge of thoughts from the unconscious, and bringing the focus of the mind into the present from its spasmodic oscillations between the past, the future and pure fantasy. By quieting the uncontrolled movement of thoughts we gain domain over the unconscious and improve self-awareness, free will. Current research has shown that the brain is adaptable, and meditation actually helps change it beneficially. This strengthens both the conscious and the conscience, making our actions more deliberate and also more ethical. Recent studies of babies suggest that ethical behaviour is innate, not learned but a product of biological evolution, the inherent human norm which gets distorted by the hinterland of traumas and stresses in the mind.  Meditation seeks to reset the brain, releasing the stresses built up in the mind, and easing the warps in thought and behaviour.  Our actions no longer derive mechanistically from the reverberations of the past. They come out from under the shroud of compulsions and get bathed in the light of the conscious, get more healthy and rational. That is the stuff of free will. 

Sadly, meditation is far from simple. Anyone who has tried it will confess that it is far easier said than done. The unconscious mind is like a wild stallion and does not bear being saddled and controlled. You can sit quietly for long stretches of time and feel you haven't gotten far, while your mind runs riot from one thought to the next.  The unconscious has a drive of its own whose very essence seems to be to thwart free will. Mastery over the body is far easier than mastery of the mind. When you sit to meditate the mind will wander, that is a given, and you have to keep walking it calmly back into the present.  It is this repetitive leading of the mind back into the present, and stilling it in the present, that provides control over the unconscious. 

It can be despairingly difficult, yet even when you think meditation isn't working, it works. If you are regular about it, over a period of time you will see the difference, and the difference is palpable. The blocks you experience in behaviour will ease, and you will find that quirks of personality will dissolve. The ego, the greatest block of all, softens. You begin to see your own patterns of behaviour, see insidious impairments of judgment, and start to curb them.  Even physical problems can be eased. My hypertension has disappeared, and I have stopped medication that I was on for fifteen years. Yet, benefits to the conscious mind and the body are just milestones on the way to giving greater definition to your spirituality. The ultimate benefit of meditation is in the separate dimension of spiritual evolution. 

The major religions that originated in the subcontinent, Hinduism and Buddhism, are both reforms of the Vedic religion, and both put a lot of weight on meditation as a means to spiritual salvation. According to received Hindu wisdom, truly stilling the mind through meditation can lead to discovering the atma within oneself, to realisation of your true self, to sweeping away maya - the illusion of duality or separateness of individual existence which is the basis of ego. The true realisation of the oneness of all creation and its essential, intrinsic nature as being part of the all encompassing divine infinite leads to moksha or liberation from the cycle of birth and death. Hindu belief is that this knowledge is within ourselves, concealed by our egos, and by stilling the mind we can let it blossom into our consciousness.  


The Buddha defined the goal of meditation as cleansing yourself of worldly desires and cravings that are the source of all suffering. Once you are liberated from attachments and desires and discover your true nature as connected to all sentient beings, you achieve moksha. While the Buddha talked about rebirth and karma and moksha/release from this cycle of birth and death, he did not acknowledge the existence of God, leaving a wide open question as to who is behind creation, who defines and enforces the rules of karma, rebirth and moksha. When the Iberians went to the Americas, they found primitive people who had never had contact with the rest of the world, had not discovered the wheel, shipping or metals, but believed in God as did all civilisations throughout the world. Humans since time immemorial, in unconnected civilisations around the world have believed in God. Buddhists, needing a god, worship Buddha - something that would have mortified him! Either way, whether you go by Hinduism or Buddhism, whether you believe in God or not, destruction of the ego through meditation is the key to spiritual advancement. 


Like in every pursuit, it helps to have goals. What legitimate goals can we strive for in meditation? Moksha is a bridge too far for most of us. If that is to happen it will probably take more than one lifetime. It is best to work for more achievable goals. Improving karma is an effective and worthy one. You can also have more limited goals such as improving your temperament or enhancing your concentration. When you have a goal you can gauge progress, and develop a productive feedback loop to generate motivation for what is a daunting and grudgingly slow but ultimately incomparably rewarding process. Meditation is in essence a tool that allows us to take a step towards shaping our own evolution as individuals, and collectively as a species. Evolution in both the temporal life and the spiritual one.  A degree of control over our own evolution is both powerful and empowering, a truly transcendent goal for life conscious of itself.