Some thoughts on Meditation
A Guide to Meditation
Meditation is not something new or strange that we
should impart it from external world.
Actually, every work done with a feeling of
devotion is a kind of meditation.
If you love a thing constantly without break, it is
meditation.
Meditation is the affirmation of the mind and
confirmation of Reality.
The act of uniting the reason with the feeling is
meditation.
Meditation is the art of setting oneself in tune
with God.
Meditation on Reality is spiritual life.
Meditation on God is the highest of Sadhanas.
To love God is to serve him, to serve Him is to
meditate on Him, to meditate on Him is to know Him, and to know
Him is to realize Him.
If you want to know creation, you have to enter
into the substance of creation.
Feel your identity with the Supreme Being in
meditation. That is the essence of meditation.
If you can convince your deep feeling that whatever
you see is inside that Supreme (including yourself and everybody)
that is the meditation.
It should not be that you are happy inside the
meditation hall and unhappy outside. You must be happy in the
street, in the market place, in the bathroom and not only in the
temple or the meditation hall.
Meditation is the art of contacting Reality, and
for that you have to first be sure what Reality is.
Meditation on the Eternal Being is the supreme form
of love.
Meditation starts with duality and ends in Unity,
from an adoration of God to the Being of God.
Meditation should be continued till death, or till
the rise of Self-knowledge or until the goal is realized, without
any anxiety, or impatience on one's part.
The essential thought to be remembered in all
meditations is that there should be no thought except that of the
chosen object, or the ideal of meditation.
If life is to become a healthy whole, the spirit of
religious worship and meditation has to saturate and seep into
the secular life.
Knowledge and meditation, however, are not possible
for one who is worldly, sensual, deluded, proud, egoistic and
selfish.
One who meditates on the Universal Prana has no enemies.
Prayer is a current flowing with the thoughts
towards God. Meditation is the highest prayer where the thoughts
are fixed in God.
Meditation is hard for those who are
psychologically and philosophically bankrupt.
Moksha is the immediate non-objective experience of
Brahman on which one has been meditating all along with intense
devotion.
Knowledge is Jnana or Anubhava of the Nirguna
Brahman, and meditation is Dhyana, or Up asana on Saguna
Brahman.
A meditating mind is like a still lake.
The meditating principle is not the ego; it is the
Universal Being itself. It is God meditating on God
ultimately.
Meditation is nothing but the recognition in
consciousness of the connecting link between subject and
object.
Clear-sightedness, passionless ness, serenity,
self-restraint, indifference to the world, fortitude, faith,
collectedness of mind and yearning for liberation from bondage
are the prerequisites of spiritual meditation.
Dream is an unconscious occurrence. You have no
control over it. But meditation is a conscious effort.
The entire psychology of meditation is nothing but
a setting right of errors in thought.
Success is achieved in meditation in proportion to
the extent of the honest feeling within ourselves that Brahman is
the only Reality, and is the one aim of life.
Thought is being; consciousness is Existence. If
this is asserted, then meditation will succeed.
By meditation, observation and reasoning one comes
to realize that Existence is not space and space is not
Existence.
Brahman's all attributes mentioned in the
Upanishads, positive as well as negative may be brought together
in a single group as aids to meditation.
Brahman is the Absolute, and one cannot meditate on
Brahman, because it is inclusive of even the meditator
himself.
Contemplation on Existence-Consciousness-Bliss as
the whole of Brahman, in Sattwa, is the highest form of
meditation.
Different symbols used in meditation give rise to
different experiences corresponding to each.
Desire less meditation's result is only ascent
and no reverting to the mortal world.
Desire ceases when you behold the Atman, and this
beholding the Atman is called meditation.
Desire is the assertion of the personality. In
meditation the personality is dissolved.
Directly the Absolute is known through profound
reflection and meditation.
The highest kind of meditation is Sarvam Khalvidam
Brahma.
It is your soul that is actually meditating on the
soul of the object.
Indestructible is the knowledge attained though
meditation on the truths of the Vedanta.
Indirect knowledge received by means of instruction
from the preceptor requires to be deepened into experience by
reflection and deep meditation.
It is advisable to engage oneself during spare
hours in the study of such subjects as are conducive to
entertaining the thought of the object of meditation.
Meditation leads to the gradual ascent of self by
degrees of expansiveness.
Nobody can do so much good to the world as a Yogi
engaged in meditation. You must know very well that the value of
work depends upon what you think in your mind.
Nirguna form of meditation is laid down in several
of the Upanishads. The main type of meditation inculcated is on
Pranava, or Omkara.
No meditation will become successful if the senses
are active, because the senses are the opposite of the effort at
meditation.
On the path of Jnana-Yoga, as a necessary condition
of spiritual meditation, the value of philosophy is
incalculable.
Of all things, Selfhood is the ultimate
meditation.
One-pointed ness is the secret of meditation. This
is an essential feature that we have to remember.
Prana-Agnihotra is a religious performance of the
one who practices the Vaishvanara Vidya, who meditates on the
Cosmic Being.
Seeing the noumenon is the art of meditation; the
merger of object with the subject and vice-versa.
Subject wanting the other, the object. This is
materialistic meditation and not spiritual meditation.
Study, reflection and meditation are the processes
of the method of Self-transcendence.
The resting of the consciousness in its own self,
which is universality of being, is the highest Yoga or
meditation.
The object of meditation is not just one among the
many objects of the world; it is rather the only object before
us.
The quickness of the process of attainment depends
upon the intensity of the power of meditation, both in its
negative and assertive aspects.
Unless the idea becomes God, the meditation will
not yield results.
Vidya is a meditation, an art of thinking on the
Supreme Goal.
When the mind is tired and unwilling, you should
not meditate.
When meditation deepens, you can lessen your
activities and take to meditation more and more.
When Prarabdha dies, all activities cease, but
while it functions, it cannot be overcome even by the force of
meditation.
When there is an abandonment of interest in names
and forms, meditation on Brahman becomes unobstructed in every
way.
When you meditate on the Absolute, you are equally
thinking of yourself. The
Atman is the Para atman only. You are merging with
it.
When one sees a stone, for example, its
existence-aspect should be separated from its name and form and,
thus, its existence should be meditated upon as an aspect of
Brahman.
Whenever you breathe, you get connected with the
Cosmic Prana. The intention of meditation is to connect one's
Prana with the Cosmic Prana.
We should not meditate when we are possessed by our
ego.
We live religion when we are in a state of
meditation, because religion is the relation between man and God,
between the soul and the Absolute.
When one sits for meditation, there should be no
anxiety.
When we want to be seated for a long time for
meditation or Japa, if we have some sort of restraint and control
over the functions of the body, it yields to our
requirements.
It is a well-known fact that the process of
meditation in the field of spiritual life is centralized in the
attempt of consciousness to concentrate itself on Ultimate
Reality.
Unite yourself with that One Person. Then you will
have no problems. This is called Yoga, spirituality, religion, or
meditation, and that is the aim of life.
You are part and parcel organically entwined with
the whole universal fabric.
If you can maintain this consciousness always, you
are perpetually in a state of meditation.
If sometimes one is tired of meditation, we have
only to conclude one has only engaged oneself in another kind of
activity, calling it meditation, while really it was not so.
Aspirants on the spiritual path are generally
conversant with the fact that meditation is the pinnacle of Yoga
and the consummation of spiritual endeavor.
All the procedures of meditation are, in the end,
ways of awakening the Soul-consciousness which, in its depth, is,
at once, God-consciousness.
In meditation, thought and being coalesce and
become one.
The apparently inseparable connection of the body
and, in fact, the whole of one's life, with the physical
elements of creation gets gradually loosened when one
progressively advances in meditation.
Meditation is a self-integrating process
throughout, from the beginning to the end, and hence any form of
self-alienation is opposed to and becomes a hindrance in
meditation.
The pinnacle of Yoga is the absorption of the mind
in the object of its concentration.
But meditation is adventure, which opens up a new
vista before us and surprises us with our relationships which
were not apparent in our waking work-a-day life.
When the meditating consciousness so gets absorbed
in the object that the idea of the object and the name of the
object drop out altogether and there is a consciousness of the
object alone, independently, without any kind of external
associations, where one becomes the true friend of the object,
not merely an observer or a judge of the object, but an organic
mass of sentience in which the object is dissolved, as it were,
in one's being,-that is to be known as the great freedom of
the self.
The false idea that meditation is an individual
affair has to be removed from the mind.
So, in meditation, the whole mind assumes the shape
of a mass that moves wholly, entirely, totally, completely
towards the object, the great point on which we may be
concentrating for the purpose of our union with it.
The all-pervading nature of God excludes nothing
from its purview and inclusiveness, and that which we regard as
the best thing in our life may be regarded as our object of
Meditation.
Even during meditation one may have to face many
difficulties, such as the inability to reconcile apparently
contradictory statements occurring in the scriptures, the
persistent feeling that the world and the body are real, and,
finally a sense of hopelessness and a feeling of impossibility in
regard to the achievement of the supreme purpose of life.
Constant meditation on Om allows the individual
consciousness to take the form of Om itself which is unlimited in
its nature.
Meditation is our duty. It is not something that
you are doing as an occupation; it is the art of being
yourself.
The masquerading veil has to be torn asunder and we
have to see the object 'as such´ in meditation, and not
as it appears to the senses and the mind.
The object of meditation is a concentrated focus of the entire
structure of the universe.
It is to be remembered that the value of meditation
does not so much depend on the length of time that you take in
sitting for it, but in the quality or the intensity of feeling
operating at that moment.
When one is in a mood of meditation, one is
practicing true religion, but by so doing one does not belong to
any particular religious cult. We live religion when we are in a
state of meditation, because religion is the relation between man
and God, between the soul and the Absolute.
We must remember that ritualistic worship also is a
kind of meditation. Worship is not a mechanical action.
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