Meditation is just an exercise for one's mind and how to let go off the fantasies and get in touch with reality, according to author Yuval Noah Harari.
Sometimes, people think that meditation is an escape from reality, but it is actually the opposite, according to the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
"I have been meditating vipassana for 24 years now. Everyday, for two hours now," the historian told NDTV Profit in an exclusive interview. "I come to India almost every year to do a long-term meditation retreat for one or two months."
Yuval Noah Harari (Photo: Vishal Patel/NDTV Profit)
"For me, the key question of meditation is what is reality?," the philosopher said. "The mind is constantly producing fictional stories, imaginations and they come between us in reality."
Humans almost never encounter reality and only encounter the fictions produced by their minds or the minds of somebody else or increasingly by fictions produced by artificial intelligence, according to Harari. "And we do not react to reality, we react to the fictions, to the images."
Meditation is all about telling the difference, what is a fiction and what is reality.Yuval Noah Harari
"When you close your eyes and sit down, at least for me, the question that keeps repeating is what is really happening right now?" he said. "It starts with the simplest exercise, of feeling your breath coming in and out of your nostrils — that is reality and you just observe reality."
Most people can meditate for five seconds to 10 seconds, after which some image or fiction hijacks their attention, according to Harari. "Then for the next five minutes, you roll in some fantasy, until you realise that you need to watch the reality. And finally, you come back to breathing," he explained how fantasies can disturb one from getting back to reality.
At the age of 48, the author trains his mind for at least two hours daily to get in touch with reality via meditating. "If I cannot observe the reality of my breath going in and out of my nostrils because of all these fantasies, what hold do I have for understanding the realities, and then it will only be fantasies," he said.
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