Meditation

Meditation is generally understood as the process of fixing one’s mind on an image that gradually absorbs and lends the mind its own qualities. When you fix your inner attention on any form of God, the goodness, purity, and sublimity of the form gradually become yours. If you meditate on the flame in its three stages, you find yourself eventually bathed in a sea of light, gradually becoming a part of it. If you meditate on breath, you become conscious of a constant presence in you. In all this, we start with a thought and pass on to a stage beyond that. We use a thought to replace another thought until the instru­ment is also obliterated.

Swami speaks of another and more eff­ective method that He explains with the help of two parables. While the mother watches from the doorstep, the child keeps playing, sometimes indulging in mischief. He pays little attention to the mother’s calls, shouts, and threats. The more exas­perated the mother is, the more playful the child becomes. But, if the mother turns her back on the child and walks inside, without ever chiding the child, or shouting at him, the child stops his play and comes back to the mother. Then the mother has a very obedient child.

In another parable Swami describes a traveler who wants to see his own image. He goes to a wayside well and bends over the edge. He sees his own form in water. He hasn’t seen it earlier, for he had not desired it. But now he loves his own image. He thinks of the nose, the smile, and the frown in the image, and as he continues his journey, he loves them and hates them. The image did not exist prior to his desire to see it, and now he has nightmares of that which never existed.

What is the meaning of these parables? As long as we are after our thoughts and want them to take the road we prefer, they are sure to be mischievous. All our powers of persuasion, entreaty, and prayer will end in failure. We get angry with ourselves and start punishing the body. But we forget that as long as we acknowledge the shadows, and look for them, we continue to sanction their rightful presence. Then we want to tell them, “Hey, you can’t exist.” That does not work.

So the mother must turn her back on the child. The traveler must walk away from the well and never peep in. In Swami’s language that sounds like a mantra [formula], “Don’t run with your thoughts. Keep quiet, watch them.” Watch Them, that’s the mantra. “You are not the mind, not the buddhi [intellect], and not the indriyas [senses]. You are their witness. Let the thoughts come and go, they are insignificant to me!” Swami drives this home by two illustrations. Neither a boat plowing through the water nor a plane cutting across the air leaves any trace of water or air. To own the thoughts is to perpetuate them. To be conscious, even intellectually, of the overwhelmingly quiet state of our being, is to start putting our thoughts aside.

To achieve this, one must first accept the proposition; then, building up convic­tion, one has to assert and live it every moment. This involves constantly disen­gaging ourselves from the shadow figures that continually dash against our twilight awareness. When a thought strikes hard, smile at it; don’t say anything by way of owning it or rejecting it. Try to see it as different from you. The depth of your being remains unruffled. Then that thou­ght will go, giving place to a subtler one: “I have driven that thought away!” It becomes harder to fight it. But don’t fight it either. Simply try to watch this one also, constantly disengaging yourself from these passing strokes, trying to be a witness.

Sometimes, we like to talk to our tho­ughts. That’s what Swami refers to as `internal dialogue.’ Someone sends us a thought from the background. We see it come, and we either take interest in it or get dis­turbed by it. In either case, that some­one, the shadow‑king, the silhouette‑I, the ego, takes up the game quite earnestly, and sends thought after thought in quick succession, letting the process go beyond our grasp.

If we but try to watch it, we can see there are two persons par­leying with each other in this. One is the ego, the other that we can hardly dis­tinguish from the ego, stands apart and gets involved. If we try to refuse to carry on the dialogue and try to be only a wit­ness, the dialogue slowly dies down. In fact, this internal activity in a person is more intense than the external drama, as the ex­ternal is only a projection of the internal.

It is interesting to see how a section of contemporary psychoanalysts are, in their own way, arriving at similar results. Dr. Hubert Benoit postulates a concept that he calls `inner gesture’. It is synony­mous with ‘witness.’ He says, “Each one of us lives in a state of satori [sudden enlightenment]… which is independent of birth and death,” and this satori, he insists, is the source from which all our thoughts or imaginative-emotive concepts rise and finally merge in. To be free from this disturbing process and see our real state is that for which man must live. Then he talks of living in this state.

He advises not to suppress the activity called thinking, but to evoke and awaken that inner gesture and see the very birth of the concepts. For this, one must have, first, active attention, or con­stant alertness toward the whole process. To quote him, “If I take up, in the face of my inner monologue, the attitude of an active auditor who authorizes this mono­logue to say whatever it wishes and how­ever it wishes… I observe that my mono­logue stops.” This results in “seeing with having no objects to see”, and that is not different from the “watch them” and “you are the witness.”

This is the end of meditation. As to how long one must meditate, Sri Ramana Maharshi [a saint] is reported to have said, “Meditate until your know that you are not meditating.”

~B. K. Misra, Prasanthi Nilayam
Source: Sanathana Sarathi, June 1984