Excerpts from Sd_Guru Jaggi Vasudev's talk at the 'Mystic Eye' experience

What is the benefit of this meditation?

Sd_Guru: Where is the need to meditate, first of all? Starting the process of life was not your conscious choice, it “happened” to you. When you were born your body was so small, and now it has grown. So obviously, the body is something that you gathered. It is an accumulation. What you call as “my body” is an accumulation of food. Similarly, what you call as “my mind” is an accumulation of impressions.

Whatever you accumulate can be yours, but it can never be you. The very fact you accumulated it means that you gathered it from somewhere else. Today you could gather a 70 kg body, but you can decide to make it a 60 kg body. You don’t go looking for that 10 kg, because that was an accumulation. Once you drop it, it is gone. Similarly, your mind is an accumulation of impressions.

The moment you are identified in your experience, the moment you are identified with something that you are not, your perception gets distorted. The moment you start experiencing this body, which you gathered from outside, as “myself,” the moment you start experiencing the impressions that you have in your mind as “myself,” you cannot perceive life the way it is. You will only perceive life the way it is necessary for your survival and not the way it really is.

Once you have come as a human being, survival is very important, but it is not enough. If you had come here like any other creature on this planet, stomach full – life would be settled. But once you come here as a human being, life does not end with survival. Actually, for a human being, life begins only after survival is fulfilled.

Meditation gives you an experience, an inner state, where what is you and what is yours is separated. There is a little distance, there is a little space between what is you and what you have accumulated. For now we can understand this as meditation.

What is the use of doing this? It brings an absolute clarity of perception. You see life just the way it is – no distortions about it. Right now, your ability to go through this world is only to the extent that you clearly see it. If I have no clarity of vision but confidence and I try to go through this world, I am going to be a bumbling idiot. Whenever there is no perception, people try to overcome that by building confidence in themselves. People are trying to make up for the lack of clarity with other kinds of substitutes. There is no substitute for clarity.

Once you understand this, you naturally become meditative; you want to clear up everything and just look at life the way it is, because you want to walk through life with the least amount of friction, without stumbling on this or that.