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| A
Guide to Meditation (Continued) |
by Swami Krishnananda
The Divine Life Society - Sivananda Ashram, Rishikesh, India
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- One-pointedness is
the secret of meditation. This is an essential feature that we have to
remember.
- 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.
- Poor we are
psychologicaly and philosophically bankrupt, therefore meditation is hard.
- Provided it gets
universalised in meditation, anything can become a passage to God.
- Prana-Agnihotra is a
religious performance of the one who practises the Vaishvanara Vidya, who
meditates on the Cosmic Being.
- The principle of
meditation is this - whatever the object of your meditation be, that has to be
taken as Absolute.
- 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.
- Sadhana (practice)
concludes only in experience and never before. It is also possible that even
though one practises enquiry and meditation till death, yet the Atman has not
been realised.
- 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.
- That act of uniting
the reason with the feeling is meditation.
- Thought is Being;
consciousness is Existence. If this is asserted, then meditation will succeed.
- 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.
- The Vaishvanara
meditator is in communion with the universe, with the very self of all beings,
attuned to the Supreme Being.
- 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.
- We must remember that
ritualistic worship also is a kind of meditation. Worship is not a mechanical
action.
- 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 Paramatman
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 exsitence 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
centralised 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 endeavour.
- 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 practising 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.
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