Meditation...

Is it necessary to close eyes to meditate?

Do designers meditate? Do we have our ideas come in complete silence or in a crowded place. At a serene location or at a place buzzing with activities? Can someone meditate in a crowded place? Ok , so basic question.. What is meditation? I am no saint, neither do I evangelize anything on this, but this small piece from the book “The Tibetan book of Living and Dying” by Sogyal Rinpoche, did make lot of sense . As we all embark on our journey towards another projects and another after that, I found this will definitely help.

The purpose of meditation is to awaken us in the sky-like nature of the mind, and to introduce us to that which we really are, our unchanging pure awareness, which underlies the whole of life and death.
In the stillness and silence of meditation, we glimpse and return to that deep inner nature that we have so long ago lost sight of amid the busyness and distractions of our minds. Isn’t it extraordinary that our minds cannot stay long for longer than a few moments without grasping after distraction; they are so restless and preoccupied that sometimes I think that, living in a city in the modern world, we are already like the tormented beings in the intermediate state after death, where the consciousness is said to be agonizingly restless.
We are fragmented into so many different aspects. We don’t know who we really are, or what aspects of ourselves we should identify with or believe in. So many contradictory voices, dictates, and feelings fight for control over our inner lives that we find ourselves scattered everywhere, in all directions leaving nobody at home.

Meditation, then is the bringing the mind home.

If your mind is able to settle naturally of its own accord, and if you are inspired simply to rest in its pure awareness, then you do not need any method of meditation. In fact it might even be unskillful when you’re in such a state to tray and emply one. However, the vast majority of us find it difficult to arrive at that state straight away.

I feel that meditation has a lot to do with letting things go, being just able to relax, of being to be in a fresh state f mind before starting onto another project. Doing whatever please the soul is perhaps the best way to relax.
In his book Emotional Design, Don Norman mentions, “We have long known that when people are anxious they tend to narrow their thought processes, concentrating upon aspects directly relevant to a problem. This is a useful strategy in escaping from danger, but not in thinking of imaginative new approaches to a problem. Results from experiments show that when people are relaxed and happy, their thought processes expand, becoming more creative, more imaginative.”