News18 – 30 January 2017

Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama who identifies most strongly with his role as a simple Buddhist monk, was ordained at a very early age and his daily regimen includes spending several hours in prayer and meditation. While his daily practice may include several different types of meditation, the Dalai Lama often recommends a particular form of Buddhist meditation called ‘analytic meditation’ just as he did recently while addressing the FICCI Ladies Organisation in New Delhi.

In this type of meditation, he said, one needs meditate on the information accumulated by the mind from various sources and use reasoning to decode and decrypt it. Reasoning hones positive states of mind and alleviates thoughts and emotions that lead to suffering and dissatisfaction, he believes.

Analytic meditation brings about inner change through systematic investigation and analysis thereby leading to optimum and proper use human intelligence.

Talking about the prevalent violence and anger across the globe, he said one should systematically investigate and reflect upon the destructive effects of anger.

Anger has major repercussions on one’s physical health, one’s family relationships and in society. One should analyze this and reflect upon it not just once or twice, but repeatedly until it becomes part of one’s deeper understanding, he added.

If one reflects upon the destructive nature of anger, it immediately makes you more cautious of how the anger might escalate leading to destruction and collateral damage. On further analysing and systematically investigating whether responding with anger is ultimately constructive or destructive, you might get an answer to whether it will improve the situation or not, and so on, explains Dalai Lama.

“You might also want to analytically meditate on how you might have contributed in some way to the situation that made you angry. And while the midst of anger, your tendency is to perceive the person who harmed you as 100% bad. But deeper analysis will make you realize that every human being is composed of both positive and negative characteristics, and you can try to get a more realistic view of the person, thereby diluting the anger harboured against the person.” Says Dalai Lama.

Analytic meditation may also play a role in a field of psychology that focuses on developing positive states of mind. According to the Dalai Lama, using techniques adapted from Buddhism may help actively cultivate positive states of mind such as kindness, compassion and tolerance.