Swami Chaitanya Keerti
In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari writes: “New Age cults frequently argue: Happiness does not depend on external conditions. It depends only on what we feel inside. People should stop pursuing external achievements such as wealth and status, and connect instead with their inner feelings.” or more succinctly, “Happiness begins within.”
This is quite strange that he is suggesting to stop pursuing external achievements after he himself pursuing these things successfully, as Gautama the Buddha had enjoyed the comforts of his life in the kingdom and palaces and got bored with everything. After such an indulgence, he renounced the world of pleasures and moved to the jungle to meditate as deeply as he could. After six years of non-stop meditation, he was blessed with enlightenment. His boredom was total and his renunciation was also total and as a consequence, his illumination was absolute. Vipassana– the insightfulness, and watchfulness –has been the greatest gift of the Buddha for the world since then. Happyho also provide best Meditation classes in Noida and Delhi NCR India area.
Prof. Harari is the author of international bestseller books and has been on the path of the Buddha since the beginning of the year 2000. He has been doing Vipassana meditation regularly. He received his PhD. from the University of Oxford in 2002 and is currently a lecturer at the Department of History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prof. Harari is a two-time winner of the Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality, which he was awarded in 2009 and 2012. He has not moved to the jungle like the Buddha to meditate–He lives in the world and continues meditating one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening. He says that he undertakes a meditation retreat of 30 days or longer, in silence and with no books or social media. In short, he has not renounced the outside world and continues living in the world, with a longing to keep meditating, balancing the outer with the inner. In the modern times, this approach is more suitable, as envisioned by the modern enlightened mystic Osho. I am sure that Prof. Harari is acquainted with Osho as all the intelligent people of the world.
Responding to a question from a seeker, Osho says: Meditation in the marketplace is my whole message, but the sense in which you have understood it is not right. Firstly, meditation is not something within the mind. The world is within the mind. Meditation is beyond the mind. The mind creates the world, but the mind cannot create meditation. The mind can create frustration, satisfaction, pleasure, pain, anxiety, anguish or an animal-type contentment, the buffalo contentment – but the buffalo is not in meditation.
He adds: You are right when you say the mind creates its own world; it projects itself upon objects. The same object can be a beloved, a friend, or a foe. You can die for the same person, you can kill the same person too. You can desire riches, power, prestige, respectability; you can even desire desirelessness. You can create a world empire, you can be Alexander the Great; or you can renounce the world and can be a recluse in the mountains, in the Himalayas – it is your mind game.
Meditation transforms us within and enables us to observe our mind games. It is a metamorphosis. Modern people should pay attention to what Prof. Harare says: “Corporations, money, and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?”
