Getting up

The best time for meditation is undoubtedly early in the morning, taking advantage of the fragile tranquility that exists before the rush hour. Sri Chinmoy recommends that his students meditate at six in the morning if they can, or even before that if possible. However, the lethargy-monster that inhabits the human body is a surprisingly inventive beast. When I first started getting up early to meditate my mind would tell me I was turning into an ascetical mortificationist, to which I could only sweetly reply "What the mind calls discipline, the soul calls food!" Sometimes the lethargy monster used to make me wake up 5 minutes before the alarm, so I would be fooled into thinking "OK, I'm awake now" and switch off the alarm. Another thing it did is schedule all my nice dreams so the alarm would interrupt the best bits...

It's much easier now, but still I have to put the alarm clock right at the other end of the room so I have to physically get up and turn it off. But even then that's not enough, because sometimes the monster actually turns the alarm off. I'm not kidding, there's been a couple of times where I swore I had the alarm on the previous night...I also suffered another setback when the monster figured out that the alarm would turn itself off after beeping for a minute. The only solution, I found, was to install a hi-tech IPS (Ignorance Prevention System) consisting of alarm, and mobile phone synchronised at minute intervals.

For those of you wondering "why go to all that fuss?", I can only relate a really nice experience I had this morning. As you can probably guess, there is a part of me that loves the stasis-nectar of the dream world and just really wants to settle for that and not get up and fight in the battlefield of life anymore. So usually the first 5 seconds after I get up are accompanied by a "why do I even bother?" But today was a reminder that if I can just haul myself in front of my meditation shrine to express gratitude for the chance to get out there and battle to expand and better myself, then the reasons for that gratitude will just come flooding in. Life is great, when I can tear open a window of my mind-cage to see it.