Thus, when you are seated for meditation, have a clear mind first. Viveka precedes vairagya and mumukshutva. Understanding is at the back of your renunciation and your aspiration for liberation. This understanding should guide you always. All your performances should be based on understanding, says the Bhagavad Gita. "Establish yourself in buddhi Yoga, the Yoga of understanding," which is the operation of the higher reason.

There are two types of reason: the lower reason and the higher reason. The lower reason is always attending upon the reports of the sense-organs. The lower reason says nothing new, apart from what the senses say. But the higher reason warns you, mentioning to you from moment to moment that there is a higher than what you are, higher than the world, higher than people, higher than even the gods in heaven. With this surety in your mind, sit for meditation.

When you are tired of sitting for a long time, do not continue the meditation. There may be an ache in some part of the body - knees, joints, back, spine, neck; even a slight headache may be there because of erroneous attention, erroneous concentration not properly analysed. At that time, stop the meditation. Lie down for a few minutes. Wash your face. Stroll on the verandah for a while. Take a few deep breaths and again relax yourself for some time. Then sit for meditation. You should not do anything continuously all the day. Persons who eat too much cannot meditate; persons who starve themselves also cannot meditate. Those who sleep throughout the day and night, or who do not sleep at all, also will not succeed, says the Bhagavad Gita.

Harmony is called Yoga, balance is Yoga - balance between the inner and the outer life. The extrovert and the introvert conditions of the mind have to be balanced in an awareness of your larger individuality. People who are always busy working, without even thinking about themselves, are half persons - only fifty percent. They are the extroverts. Those who have nothing to do with anybody in the world and only brood inside their own ideas in themselves in a corner of the world are also only fifty percent. They have severed a part of their connections with the world by this overemphasis on one side - either internally or externally. You should neither be an introvert nor an extrovert, but a balanced person which will produce a sense of cheer in your face - a smile, a kind of satisfaction which a healthy person has after a good meal, for instance. Such a satisfaction will arise in the mind.

"On what do you meditate?" is a question that repeatedly will come up. Devotees of God take to a form of God. After all, we have to worship only God. The idea of God is mostly made to arise in our minds by study of scriptures or company of saints. We have read the Vedas or the Upanishads, the epics, the Puranas, the Koran or the Bible, or some such thing which has compelled us to form a particular idea of divinity. According to the cultural background in which you have been brought up, even considering the ethnic impressions at the back of your mind, take to the concentration on that visualized form of the Supreme Creator of the universe.

Every religion believes in a Creator, but every religion differs in the idea of the Creator. We should not try to impose upon ourselves any new thought alien to our svadharma or svabhava, i.e., personal predilection or essential character. Don't try to introduce into your mind a concept that is alien to your belief and your faith. Take to that particular form of the higher ideal which is satisfying to you, because it is your faith and your religion, your culture: "My God is in front of me." God is not necessarily standing in front, but the habit of the mind to conceive everything as existing outside persists even in divine contemplations. "Bhagavan, come! I want to see you." This is how devotees offer their prayers. You would expect that divinity, God Almighty, to present Himself before you, and stand before you in the very form in which you expect Him to appear.

Conceive this form in your mind for as long a time as possible. If you cannot conceive anything in the mind because of the fickleness of the mind, have a portrait of that conceived ideal of your divinity in front of you; concentrate on that form. From head to foot, from foot to head, contemplate on all the parts of this wondrous manifestation before you. Why do you meditate on this divinity? Because, it is all-power, all-knowledge, all-blessing. Then feel in your heart that Bhagavan Sri Krishna is standing, Rama is there, Christ is there - whatever your god be in your mind. Tremendously, deeply, adjust yourself to the feeling that beams of compassion and power emanate from this divinity, as if the great god is blessing you and a ray of hope, divinity, power and solace is projected from the palm of that great god, and it is flooding you all over. You are bathed in the waters of knowledge, in the satisfaction of the sweetness of the nectar, and you feel a sense of security that nobody can shake a hair of your body, because here is the protecting force before you, ready to offer you whatever you want. This is the initial stage in which you can adjust your mind to the concept of your ishta-devata.

But is your god only standing in one place? Anybody else, also, anywhere in the world, can meditate in a similar manner and that very god of yours will be appearing there also before them. Then, in a second step, you raise your thought and feeling to the presence of this very divinity in many places at the same time. In all directions of your room you will find this divinity gazing at you from all directions. Many are the forms of that great god. As the sun can manifest himself in millions of rays, so God can manifest Himself in millions of forms. This is a step in advance over the initial concept of God standing in front of you, alone before you.

Then, take to the third higher step of feeling the presence of this divinity not pervading merely your room or the nearby atmosphere, but even all the sky and all space. When you look up, you see nothing but this flood of the forms shining like brilliant stars everywhere; wherever you cast your eyes, you see only that god.

In the Mahabharata, towards the end, there is an event described when the Kauravas were overthrown, and Duryodhana fell. Dronacharya's son Asvatthama was bosom friend of the fallen hero. Asvatthama was full of anger against the Pandavas because they caused the death of his father, and destroyed his friend Duryodhana, as well as the whole Kaurava army. Asvatthama had a cruel feeling in his mind. When he was brooding as to the method to be adopted, he saw in the twilight during sunset crows attacking a corpse, and even animals that were about to die. He thought, "This is the lesson for me. I shall follow this technique." He entered the camp of the Pandavas in the night. Fortunately, the omniscient Krishna knew what was going to take place, and had told the Pandavas not to sleep in the camp that night. Only Draupadi's children, five in number, were sleeping there.

But when Asvatthama was about to enter the camp, he found that it was not an easy affair. He found a tremendous, fierce figure standing in front of him, extending from the earth to the heaven. Nobody could know what it was. Fire was emanating from its mouth. The great poet Vyasa says in the poem that by the sight of that form, even the mountains would break to pieces - such a terror manifested itself when Ashvatthama was just entering to do a heinous deed.

Not only was this form terrible to look at; millions of Krishnas started emanating from every pore of the body of this being. The whole sky was filled with Krishnas, the very thing that he hated and would not like even to think in the mind. Everywhere round about, top and bottom, all the sky was filled with Krishna. This fierce being was Lord Siva, an alter-ego of Krishna.

This is how you have to conceive your divinity as present everywhere, in all places. Suppose you see stars only everywhere, without any gap between one star and another star - just a flood of light everywhere, and then feel a thrill. In this way you contemplate your divinity, your ideal, your Rama or Krishna or Christ, whatever it is.

Then go a step further. If everywhere this divinity is seen, then where are you sitting at that time? You also have gone to the stars. You have become one of the stars; you have become one of the forms of this divinity. When the divinity has flooded the whole space, do you think it has excluded you? It has transformed you with the magical touch of its manifestation everywhere. You have also started shining like a star at that time. Stars are contemplating the stars, divinity is looking at divinity; God is meditating upon Himself. "I am what I am," - not this little Mr. "I," Mrs. "I." It is the "I" of God, the only "I" existing everywhere, supreme aham brahma, as the Upanishads say. This is a very high state of meditation, penultimate to merging completely, in which you do not know what actually happens to you. Several stages of your ascent have been described in the Yoga scriptures.

Don't be under the impression that it is all so easy, as it has been described here. Your physical nature, your bodily impulses, will prevent you from taking sudden steps of this kind. You have to be austere in your thinking and detached in your personality from all contacts in the world, and learn to be satisfied with your own self.

Each one of you should know: Are you completely satisfied in your own self, and you don't want any contact with anybody? "I am sufficient to myself." That sufficient individuality only is capable of taking such steps in meditation, as described. So the prerequisites come to our mind once again: yama (self-restraint), niyama (self-discipline), viveka (reasoning capacity), vairagya (non-attachment), shatsampat (sixfold moral virtues), and mumukshutva (longing for liberation). We should pave the foundation of cleansing before the meditation commences. A dustbin cannot meditate. There must be the clarity of a crystal, which is possible if the dirt of kama-vasana, krodha-vasana, lobha-vasana are melted down from their gross condition to the transparent condition of luminous spirit. Then meditation becomes possible.

This is the reason why the Yoga texts tell you that meditation is not the first step. The earlier stages are not to be ignored (yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara), about which we learned something already. Dharana (concentration) comes later on; dhyana (meditation) is very far indeed. Though meditation is what you should practise every day, you must also have paved the ground of all the previous stages in your mind. Either you go stage by stage, or, with your power of discrimination and will, transform yourself through all the earlier stages also at the same time and become a giant of understanding. Either way is possible. One way is called the ant's process, another is called the bird's process. The ant goes slowly, crawling, but it will reach its destination one day. This is how you go slowly enterize yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana for years and years, and then go to meditation. This is the ant's process.

But the bird flies at once to the point where it wants to reach. You can compress all the stages into your personality, if you have the power to do that. That power will be there if you have no desires in your mind. It is up to you to decide whether you are an ant or a bird. The bird has two wings; the ant has no wings, so you have to develop the wings of viveka and vairagya so that you may fly like the bird. Both things are possible, and in fact you have the capacity to do both the things. But if you are not sufficiently competent, don't endanger yourself by breaking your legs, running fast too early.