Reading a book for pleasure sometimes is informative on the subject we consider dear to us. When I started reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Prey Love I was under the impression that I am going to read a travel book. But the book turned into an interesting book that dealt about cleansing the soul.

After a devastating divorce and a broken love affair the author undertook a travel assignment to recover from her bitterness and disappointment her journey starts from Italy and ends in Bali Islands. In between she visits India. If Italy is Gourmet delight to her, India showed her to achieve inner peace.

Her experience on mediation shows us how westerners value our practices more than us. Mediation makes us feel one with one God. With eyes closed and observing our thoughts we can see ourselves. If the man looks inward the inner reality can be felt. The essence of our self is not body or mind or individual ego but the silent and thoughtless depth of being with in. That is atman –soul. If you seek that self through meditation you can reach a state where in you will do no wrong. Evil thoughts would be banished. That is the essence of Hinduism.

“Monkey mind”- the thoughts that swings from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves and howl. From the distant past and the unknown future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. This it is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. Happy thoughts make me happy, but whoop. I swing again into obsessive worry blowing the mood; then it’s the remembrance of an angry moment and I start to get hot and pissed off all over again; and then my mind decided it might be good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions. The other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought is that you are never where you are. You are always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do you rest in this moment.”

Her escapade in Bali islands in search of love is an ordinary westerner’s longing for lust. It failed to interest me. But that apart the book is a good read.

“I sit there staring at the computer screen silence for long, sad time. It’s all for the best, I know it is. I’m choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I’m making space for the unknown future to fill my life with yet to come surprises.”