India's Ancient Culture

by Swami Krishnananda

Chapter 16: Some Aspects of the Essentials of Meditation

I feel that I have conveyed to you enough information on the foundations of cultural values, religious principles, and the very meaning of what spiritual life can be. But you have to progress personally, individually, and it is not only some information, some learning, some increased academic dimension of your mind, though that is very good indeed. You are also spiritual seekers, not merely students in an academic, university sense. It is necessary for you all to do some practice as well. There is no purpose in merely learning and becoming a scholar if it has not changed your personality, made you a better person, and given you an enhanced insight into your own self.

It is necessary for you to have a daily program of your occupation, whatever that occupation be. First of all, you should calculate how many hours of the day you should devote to your profession. Suppose you are a student; how many hours have you to devote to studying for an exam, and so on? Out of the twenty-four hours of the day, so many hours are absolutely necessary for you to study in order to appear for an examination, so you deduct these hours which are essential for your line of work, your occupation, from the twenty-four hours. Afterwards something remains. You have to take a bath every day, you have to take your breakfast, lunch and supper. Daily ablutions take some time. So make a second set of calculations: How much time do you require for bathing, washing and cleaning? How much time should you spend for your diet every day? Deduct that many hours. You must sleep as well. How many hours should you sleep for your health? Deduct that also. Then you must have a little time for exercise, call it recreation, going for a walk, doing asanas, etc. Deduct one hour at least for that. Something will remain. That something should be the cream of the hours of the day. That is to be utilised for another kind of study, intended for assisting you in meditation.

The study that you make in schools and colleges is quite different from the study which generally goes by the name of svadhyaya, or sacred study. Only one book you must read. It may be the Bhagavadgita, it may be an Upanishad, it may be the Veda Samhita, it may be the Bible. Whatever is your way of life, based on that you select one book for deep concentration, and absorb yourself in the thought of that book; ruminate over the thought again and again, again and again, so that this repetition of the same idea continuously, every day, in light of the scripture that you are reading, would be a kind of secondary meditation. Instead of sitting alone without any kind of guidance or assistance and trying to meditate, you will find it easier to concentrate your thoughts in the right direction with the help of a scripture which contains noble thoughts and direct guidance for meditation. Some half an hour every day, at least, you must spend in reading a book. You should not think you know everything and therefore it is not necessary for you to read. That is not a proper attitude. Even though you have studied a lot and it is true that you know something, it is not easy for the mind to be thinking the same thought every day. Especially very high, elevated thoughts cannot come to the mind frequently. They get dampened and diluted due to other, extraneous interests that the mind has. Therefore, it is necessary to have a pocket guidebook. Open a page of a scripture. Generally in a scripture, every page is equally good. Something noble, wonderful and elevating is mentioned there on every page. Whether it is the Bhagavadgita or the New Testament, they are all equally good.

If you are used to reciting the Divine Name, doing japa, that also will be a part of your sadhana. Spiritual sadhana, a daily routine of practice, generally consists of three processes: study of a holy scripture, japa of the Divine Name, and direct meditation on the Supreme Being. These are the three prongs, as it were, of the trident—the trishula, as it is called—of spiritual practice.

Now we come to the highlight of all these endeavours, namely, meditation itself. How do you meditate? Sometimes you feel that you are spending a lot of time in meditation. You sit for one hour, or half an hour, but from the fruit you know the tree, as they say. The feeling with which you get up from your session of meditation will be an indication of the quality of the meditation which you have been carrying on for half an hour or one hour. Do you feel relaxed, relieved of some tension? Do you feel some protection coming to you from nature outside and God above? Do you feel, after an hour of sitting, a sort of harmony with the environment of nature, with creation, or do you feel tremendously individualised, the same ego personality? Have you gone to meditation to come back the same way as you went, or is there a difference?

Every day a little check-up of personality should be done, because every day you sit for meditation. Perhaps most of you do that. One day, two days, three days have passed, and every day you do this kind of meditation. In what way are better now in your feelings? Are you happy? Happiness, relaxation, a spirit of buoyancy of personality, lightness, elevation, all these will be part and parcel of the effects that follow from right meditation. If you feel heavy, lumbering, lethargic, drowsy, and nothing seems to be happening to you in your meditations, it is because of some mistake in the technique adopted. Meditation is not merely thinking something, because you are thinking of something every day. Instead of thinking of some object in a shop or some file in your office, you are thinking of another thing. The objects have changed, but the process of thinking is the same. That should not be the case. In spiritual meditation, it is not merely the change of the character of the object that is important; your way of adjustment of the thought of the object is more important. The adjustment of your thought to the object concerned is a special novelty of meditation; it is not the way in which you generally think of an object.

Every object in the world, whatever it be, is something totally outside you—'totally outside you' is a very important point. Nothing in the world seems to be having any relation to you. The building in which you are staying, the food that you eat, the association that you have with people outside, this society, and this world of nature, are all entirely outside you. They do not have any vital connection with you, though you can think of them for various reasons. You can think of your harvest, the market from which you purchase things, the house where you live, the members of your family with whom you have daily concourse, but they are all independent from you. None of them are part and parcel of you. You have a mechanised contact with them, an artificial relationship, a kind of give-and-take policy. This is how you think of things in the world. In meditation, this is not the way of thinking.

What do you meditate upon? You may say that you meditate on your concept of God. Do you consider this new entry of thought into your mind as identical with the thought that you entertain in respect of other things in the world? You utilise things in the world as instruments for your personal purpose, but an instrument is not a vital part of your personality. A fountain pen is not a part of you, and no tool that you have employed during your work is essential for you except for the purpose of executing that work, and only for the time being, as long as the work is being carried on. Otherwise, you throw the tools down. Therefore, the things in the world are only of tentative utility to you. They are not ends in themselves; they are only means to certain ends.

The object of meditation is an end in itself, and not a means to an end. Here is a distinction between the object of meditation and any other object in the world. You are not connected with anything in this world; therefore, you are using things in the world as instruments, whereas the object of meditation is something vitally connected with you, and so you cannot utilise it as a means to some other end. The object of meditation is the end, in which you want to achieve release and absorb yourself, and it is not to be used for some other purpose. All things in the world are used for some purpose other than themselves, but the object of meditation cannot be used for any purpose other than itself, because there is nothing other than itself. The choice of the object of meditation is the crucial issue here, and this choice is generally done in consultation with a spiritual guide, a teacher, a Guru, a master, some good friend in whom you have faith and who is in a position to help you in your practice.

The inclusiveness that characterises the object of meditation is the factor that distinguishes it from any other object in the world. All things in the world are exclusive; the object of meditation is inclusive. Here is the difference. Everything in this world excludes everything else in the world, but here, in this great adventurous process of meditation, the object, so-called, is somehow or other included in the organism of your person and, vice versa, you also are included in the very location of that object. What is that object?

Different students have different notions in regard to meditation, perhaps due to their cultural background or upbringing in family circumstances, etc. How do you meditate? Some students concentrate on their breathing process. They breathe in and breathe out, breathe in and breathe out. They go on thinking of this continuous activity. This is good enough, but it is not sufficient. It is good because the breath is so very near to you and so very inseparable from you. You feel so very friendly with it. It is so vital, and one of the most intimate things in the world as far as you are concerned is the breathing process itself. It is as if you are thinking yourself as a function in some way.

Other students are taught by their teacher to move their mind along the parts of the body from head to foot, and then take the mind back from the toe to the crown of the head. This is one technique of meditation, of a psychological nature. The mind moves only within the ambit or the circumference of the body, and inasmuch as you are moving it, it has little chance of jumping from the body and going elsewhere. If you compel the mind to think only of one part of the body, it may do it for a few seconds and then jump to some tree that is in front of you. The advantage of this technique is that you are giving it some active occupation. Movement is involved here. Here again, the body being your own self for all practical purposes, you feel a satisfaction that you are brooding over your own self. It is very painful to go on concentrating on something with which you have no connection, and so some intelligent teachers have prescribed certain methods of concentration on things which are somehow or other inseparable from you. The breathing process is one, and your own body is another.

The third method is something very funny. You may wonder whether this kind of meditation really exists and people are practising it. Look at your face in a mirror, and look only at yourself. As you consider yourself to be the most attractive person in the world, the most beautiful of all people, and nobody can be so lovable and dear as your own self, the mind will concentrate itself on itself. You cannot normally see your own face, but in a mirror you can see your face. It is called darpana yoga in Sanskrit, the yoga of a mirror. Try it and see. You will be amused, actually, at the effect that it produces. Look at yourself. You will find that the mind stops. The mind stops because it has got what it wants. And what does it want? It wants itself, and it does not want anybody else; and inasmuch as you cannot see yourself except through a mirror, you can see yourself in a mirror and then get absorbed thoroughly in your own self. This method works because, here again, the love that is hidden in respect of one's own self is manifest in actual action of the mind.

A more difficult method is to think of the thoughts—one thought, two thoughts, three thoughts, four thoughts, a hundred thoughts. Let them all come in a pageantry, in a procession, but they are your thoughts. And here it would be advantageous for you to note down on a piece of paper or a diary what are these thoughts that occur to your mind during these one or two hours. Mostly they will be bundled up into a certain category, which you will observe by writing down the various components of the thought process which is carried on for some time, say for one hour.

These are preparatory methods. They are not the final step in meditation. Whether you are concentrating on your own body or your face, or the inner constituents of your thoughts, though they all appear to be connected with you vitally, really they are extraneous to your true being. Neither your breath, your body, your face, nor the thoughts of your mind are actually you, because of the fact they are moving. Action is taking place. Nothing that is moving can be regarded as identical with your being, because movement is what is known as becoming, and your nature is being. You do not move, you do not change, you do not undergo a process; you are. Do you not feel that you are, or do you feel that every minute you are changing and your personality changes every second? You do not feel that every minute your personality goes on changing. You are the same person. The sameness of your personality is what you have obtained from the true being that you are, and therefore all these techniques that have been mentioned here are also not adequate finally. They are good enough, but not sufficient.

The inclusiveness of the object of your meditation in your own being is a higher technique in meditation than including it as a part of your thought process or your physical personality. The casual absorption of the objective environment in your own conscious being is what is known as samadhi. In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali especially, there are certain terminologies such as samadhi, or samapatti, the communion of the environment with your true being, carried on gradually through a process of ascending degrees. In the beginning it is an outward adjustment, and later on it becomes an attempt to imbibe the very essence of the object into your own being.

The gradational absorption of the environment of the universe into your personality, also gradually, is what is known as samapatti, or samadhi. The identity that characterises this process of absorption is what distinguishes it from ordinary perception, or contact of the mind with the object in your daily activities. Usually none of the things in the world get absorbed into you. They always remain outside you. Thus, perception is different from absorption, and meditation is absorption. Meditation is not thinking; it is not perception. That which looks like an object of perception, usually in your daily life, is to be transmuted into another location of itself; it should be absorbed into yourself. You mostly repel things, thinking they are not you, that you are totally different from everything that you see and everything that is around you. This is the usual empirical sensory reaction to the environment of the world, which is the opposite of yoga. Yoga is union with the environment, and all perception excludes the environment from one's own perceptual or conscious process.

In yoga, which is meditation, communion, a technique is adopted which is the opposite of ordinary sensory perception. In ordinary perception the object is utilised as an instrument of action for a purpose other than itself, whereas in meditation the object is not utilised for a purpose; it itself is the purpose. It is drawn into yourself. You do not want the object for some other purpose; you want it only. Here is the difference between thinking of a vegetable in the market which is only to be utilised for some purpose, and the object which is your concern in meditation.

There are degrees and levels, as I mentioned, in the absorption process. It is not that you suddenly enter into the core of things, even as you cannot enter into the core of your own being. You have skin, you have bones, you have flesh, you have sense organs, prana, mind and intellect; you have to pierce through all these layers, called koshas, so that you may find what you really are in your essential being. So is the case with the objects. You cannot suddenly enter into their essence. The objects, even from an ordinary commonsense point of view, look like physical embodiments, but inside the object, within the object, as a constituent of the object, you will find molecules. In a way, you may say the molecules are inside the object, the components of the object, just as the inner layers of your personality, the koshas, gradually become more internal as you move inward from your physical personality. Within the molecules there are atoms, within the atoms there are other more minute particles, and so on, until you go to the very core of that object. A stone or a brick looks square or round or oblong, but it loses its shape, its name and form, as you go deeper and deeper into its essential nature. The gradational probing into the very core of that object is an objective process that you carry on in meditation, simultaneously with a corresponding probing into the depths of your own personality, so that, at a given level, the two aspects, the subjective and the objective, click in one harmonious way, and these two sides click on different levels also. There is no disharmony between the levels that you have reached in your own self and the levels that you have discovered in the object of meditation. This process goes on deeper and deeper, until you find that the object is no more there. It is the very being of yours that you are visualising in the being of that object.

Such a gradational attempt at identification of the being of the object with your own being is the purpose of yoga samadhi, samapatti, leading to a universal confluence of the two streams of light, the inner and the outer, the subjective and the objective, so that in the end you attain a merger of all the streams of consciousness in a sea, an oceanic expanse of Being as such. This is called nirvana, kaivalya, moksha, God-realisation, or entry into the Absolute.