For years human beings have been chasing and hunting animals. At the dawn of humanity, hunting was the only form of subsistence. If you didn’t hunt, you didn’t eat.
As time went by, human discovered that animals could be domesticated and thus, always be kept at reach when they were needed.
It took us thousands of to realize that hunting a beautiful animal of any species is no longer necessary to feed ourselves, nor does it constitute a trophy. On the contrary, the act of sacrificing a life to satisfy a biological need or simply to enhance our ego, has been progressively in withdrawal, to the point of generating rejections and very adverse reactions in today’s society.

However, this evolution in the human behavior has brought with it a new type of “hunters.” Hunters who, “armed” with powerful equipment, patiently wait for the moment to fire their “weapons” and “capture their prey” in a way never seen or imagined before.
Yes, these new hunters are the photographers, who armed with cameras can capture images and videos, without intervening, damaging, possessing.
We have simply managed to take a new step and redirect an activity to a higher plane that at first was unthinkable.
What is the relationship between hunting, photography, philately, and meditation?
Well, for years we were taught that we should collect stamps. Initially, we collected from all the world … it was normal … no one asked what you collect, it was simply the only way to do it, putting together what arrive to our hands.
Over the years, it became evident to separate the stamps into countries. The great and magnificent albums arose in which the collector was already beginning to glimpse, in a very basic way, a certain mechanics or ordering structure.
The years passed and the pages became few, the stamps began to leave behind the designs of famous people, battles, and wars and began to see flowers, animals, paintings, sculptures, and endless designs, colors and shapes of the stamps. A new way of collecting was given way: popular themes emerged.

At the same time, coexisted those collectors who chased the holy grails, they tried to find unique pieces, unknown stamps, exotic, errors, aberrations, omissions, points, stripes, cancelations, filigree, colors, papers, and everything under the sun that in the eyes of the keen hunter of stamps constitute an error or a rare piece.
It is here that ancient hunting and traditional and classical philately intersect and converge. In both activities, what the protagonist tries is to make a piece or a trophy and display it either on a wall or in an album.
In both cases, it is the ego that is satisfied by having a magnificent male Oryx with huge antlers or a first issue with 4 margins that belongs to me and that will undoubtedly be a specimen worthy of being envied and desired.
So far we have traveled the tribal path, the one that everyone does, the one that everyone knows and about which everyone give opinions.
Times have changed, and they will continue to do so… human beings seek to be better.
How many times have we been amazed or “stuck” in front of a picture?
A photo of a mountain, a sunset, a beautiful woman, an animal, a flower or an insect … makes us think and leads us to travel, smell, feel, touch, imagine …, is that …, is the difference we have with respect to our younger brothers, the animals. Human beings are one step ahead …, because we have the ability to ABSTRACTION. That is, with the power of our mind we can imagine, project, and materialize what we have thought.
With our mind, we can travel without limits; we can abstract ourselves in front of a photograph, sculpture or image without even having to become physical owners of it.
Here is the turning point between the stark struggle to own a piece and the ability to admire and delve into it without even having it in front of me.

This is where classical philately ends, and this is where the other way of seeing and understanding philately bursts into glory and majesty.

We leave behind the habit of having, owning, or hunting pieces to show off in our collections and instead we “appropriate” images and concepts that we will treasure in our memory. We will embark on a Nao next to Columbus with an unknown destination, we will know what it feels like to orbit the earth with Yuri Gagarin or to put our feet in the Louvre Museum and admire the paintings captured in the wonderful Virtual Museum series.

No one more qualified than my great friend Prabhuji (David Har-Zion), who with patience and dedication has unveiled, developed, and decided to make MEDITATIVE PHILATELY known, challenging the classic philately, but at the same time proposing and pointing out this new path, in where it is not required to know technicalities that, rather than bringing people closer, alienate those who are unaware of technical terms and subtleties.

MEDITATIVE PHILATELY is undoubtedly the NEW STEP to a new way of perceiving, considering, and enjoying this wonderful activity that offers us infinite forms of delight. The famous sentence “De parvis grandis acervus erit” (big things are nourished from small things) makes sense, where compared to a piece that in the eyes of a classical philatelist is considered of little or no material value, the MEDITATIVE PHILATELY manages to see and grasp the value and importance that each of us is capable of assigning to it. Without a doubt, we are facing a new way of seeing and perceiving this beautiful hobby. I invite you to invite, invite, and invite those who know nothing about philately and enjoy each piece, meditate and travel in time and space leaving behind our prejudices, dogmas, and orthodox reasoning.

Fernando Melcher, scholar in German philately.