The Philosophy, Psychology and Practice of Concentration and Meditation – Part 2

In the middle of our elaborate discussion on the way of salvation according to the Brahma Sutras, we entered into the subject of concentration and meditation because I was told that you would like to listen to that aspect of the study also. What I mentioned to you last time in this connection is that mostly ordinary people will not find it easy to concentrate the mind on anything because of a basic lack of knowledge of one's own mind. You don't even know whether you are keeping the mind inside you, or you yourself are the mind - even that question cannot easily be answered. When we speak of "my mind", "your mind", etc., you falsely make a distinction between yourself and the mind which you seem to be possessing as a kind of object. Why do you use the word "my mind"? What is the significance of this statement? Are you yourself the mind, or you can exist independent of the mind? This is a very interesting point. When you say, "my mind is like this" you imply thereby you are not the mind. Are you sure that you are different from the mind? Don't make statements which are incorrect. If you imply thereby that the mind is not you, then what are you? Here is the basic confusion in thinking itself. Without knowing anything about what is happening inside, we go on saying something gibly, by rote, hearing something from somewhere, reading something from some book, etc.

You must understand the mind is yourself only; you are not holding the mind inside because you do not exist minus the mind. Though in a transcendental manner you may say you may be existing independently of the mind, to which subject we need not divert just now, for all practical purposes mind is the person. As you think, so you are. All your joys and sorrows are the operations of the mind. I am happy, I am unhappy, which means the mind is happy and the mind is unhappy. That means you have identified yourself with the mind; you are a psychological existence, though that is not the ultimate reality of yourself.

Now, coming to the point of concentration and meditation. I mentioned last time that when you direct your attention towards something that you consider as your ideal, you simultaneously try to set aside the thought of any other thing which you do not consider as your ideal. You think that everything is fine now, because you have shut off the entry of a thought which concerns things which are totally irrelevant to the effort of the mind to concentrate on a chosen ideal. But it is not like that – you are still in the doldrums. It is not possible to have a single thought directed at a chosen ideal without simultaneously being aware that there is another thought connected with that which you do not want to bring in to the field of your concentration. That you want something implies that you do not want something else. It is not possible to have only wants, without no wants.

Then how would you entirely concentrate the mind on a chosen ideal? The word 'entirely' is to be underlined. The mind operates in a holistic manner. You cannot cut the mind into pieces, half for the desired objective, and half for the undesirable - that cannot be done. The mind is an organistic, organic completeness, in the same way as your personality as a whole is a total organism. You cannot cut yourself into two parts – the wanted part and the unwanted part. Even so is the mind, because you are the mind. Thus, you have to go a little deep into your own self.

The difficulty in meditation is the hardship you feel in reconciling between two kinds of thought at the same time, though you may think that there is only one thought. You may be imagining that you have only one thought of the chosen ideal, but there is another thought which is slowly whispering into your ears, "I am also here, don't ignore me." That second thought is concerning something which you do not regard as your chosen ideal. If that thing which is the other side is not your chosen ideal, it has no connection with you. If it has no connection with you, why does it whisper that I am also here, you cannot ignore me? That is because you have segmented the mind into two fractions – the ideal and the non-ideal.

The mind operates as a whole, as a gestalt, as they call it in modern terms. You cannot isolate a section of the mind from another section. When you take your meal, the whole personality is operating. You cannot tell the stomach, "You mind your business. You take the food but I'll be thinking something else in the mind, doing something else with the hand, and with leg I'll walk." This kind of thing will not be permitted. The whole being has to eat the food – only then it can be digested, and it can be assimilated, and it will energize you. You walk on the road with a plate of food in your hand, thinking some mathematical solution and then eat – see what happens to you. This is not the way of eating food – it is an insult to the holy act of eating.

Like that is this act of meditation. That the mind is universal in its nature is the thing that you have to principally admit. When I say mind is holistic, it is incapable of segmentation from any part of the universe. In the mind, everywhere, in every point of space, in every particle of sand, from the galaxies onwards to the lowest cells and atoms – that is the real whole of mind, which is the reason why you cannot concentrate one part of the mind on one part of the universe.

When you say "I concentrate my mind on a chosen ideal," you have cut the universe also into two parts – that which you consider as your ideal, and that which you are not considering as your ideal. You have created a war between the devas and the asuras in this meditation. The deva is as you consider the object of meditation; the asura is the other one. But, as the great Lord in the Bhagavadgita speaks to you, devas and asuras both manifested themselves as the right hand and left hand, as it were, of one creative activity. In that universal karma or action of emanation of the whole universe from the creative principle, the so-called segmented aspects of deva and asura, the positive and the negative, rolled themselves into a single flow of an oceanic flood, as it were, from the universal whole, and then, being entangled in the two obstructing principles of space and time, they separated themselves.

These two separated things have to be brought together. When you think something, you think another thing at the same time. The idea that there is another thing cannot arise in your mind unless there is a third mind, a third aspect of the mind, which connects the two thoughts. This was the theme that I took up at the end of my speech last time.

The necessary and the unnecessary aspects of thought cannot even be known to exist and be operative unless there is a third synthesizing mind which transcends both the necessary and the unnecessary. Just as the subject and the object in a particular sentence is harmonized by a principle called the verb and without the verb sentence cannot be there, so you cannot know that there are two things unless you are there between the two things. So a third transcendent aspect of the mind operates, knowingly or unknowingly, when you are busily engaged in isolating an aspect of the mind as a desirable one, and another aspect as an undesirable one. This is the reason why the mind cannot concentrate on anything, because it has an opposition from the other side which it has ignored.

I mentioned to you last time that there is always a continuous activity going on of position, opposition and synthesis. This state of affairs continues endlessly, endlessly, until, if I remember well, I told you that you reach a state of ultimate position and opposition, God and the world, in a synthesis which is the Absolute, towards which the mind rises. You must be a little bit of a philosopher also, apart from a psychologist. I don't want to go deep into this subject now because time is short, and we have not too many days here to discuss these things.

You are all devotees of some principle of divinity; you believe in God, that's what I have to take for granted. Your concept of God, whatever it is, should be the object of your meditation. In the beginning, what you should do – I am speaking to you as if you are small children and not knowing anything about things. I take it that you don't know anything about meditation. In the beginning what you should do is, the desired divinity should be in front of you. The divinity cannot be in front of you because it is not in this world; so you prepare a portrait of this divinity – a picture you keep. That picture may be actually a conceptual form presented by an artist as the Creative Almighty, as Jesus Christ, as Rama or Krishna, or Devi, or whatever is your concept of God. That portrait, whatever be the divinity that you are thinking in your mind, should be in front of you. When you look at a thing, the mind also concentrates on that thing. When you close your eyes, it will just run about in other directions. Now when I open my eyes and see one of you, I am thinking of you. I am not thinking of other persons at that time. This is the advantage of opening the eyes and seeing things.

You open the eyes and look at this divinity. This is the mighty divine that is in front of me. From that divinity, forces are rising and touching me. I am feeling that I am energized by the balming emanation of divine forces. Now it is only in the form of a portrait. It may be a diagram, it may be a mandala, as they call it, it may be a symbol, it may be an idol, it may be a lingam; it may be any blessed thing which will remind you of the Supreme Being. It may be even a japa mala, it may be a mini Bhagavadgita, or Bible, or whatever be the scripture, or Dhammapada, or whatever it is which will remind you. The divinity on which you are concentrating with open eyes is symbolic of what you are actually aspiring for in your mind. The divine itself cannot be seen or conceived, but symbols will take you to that true reality.

The next stage would be to feel that this form that is presented through the portrait is not only in one place. It is to my right, it is to my left, it is behind, it is in front, it is on the top, it is below. When you turn your eyes like this, you find that everywhere. Everywhere it is – everywhere; this form is everywhere I am seeing. When you gaze at the sun for a long time and then close your eyes, you will see sun everywhere. Everywhere the orb will be visible because of the impact of the sun on your eyes by gazing like that. That on which you have been concentrating with open eyes will produce such an impact upon your mind that afterwards you cannot see anything else anywhere. Wherever you cast your eyes, you will see only that. But, still, that would be a multitude of the forms that you are seeing. Everywhere I am seeing that thing in a multiplicity of manifestation. It is like seeing one person everywhere; the same person is here, here – everywhere the same person. Like seeing a tree - everywhere you see the same tree. This is the third stage, where that which you beheld with your open eyes became an all-pervading individual filling the whole space, and nothing is there except that. It is planted in every tree and every bush and every mountain and every river and the sun and the moon and the stars – everywhere you find the whole world is peopled by this form. This is the third stage.

In the fourth stage, bring these forms into one form. Let all these forms melt into one form – a mighty cosmic form. This is practically the idea of God that we have in our minds. The person that is the God, the Supreme Person who we speak of in all the religions, God Almighty, Father in heaven – this is all divinity commingled, merging into one being, beyond every manifestation, every form, in every direction. So what are you looking at now? You are not actually looking at a visible, conceptual picture, but a meditative form, a mighty submerging ideal – you may call it God Almighty. You will feel a tremor in your body at that time; you have to concentrate deeply in order to feel that tremor. Your whole being should be immersed in that concept of the total, integrated, Supreme Person which religions call God Almighty. You will shudder by the very thought of such a being. Visvarupa is the name that we give to this form. In the scriptures, especially in India, we have various descriptions of Visvarupa. One such instance is the elaborate details we have in this connection in the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavadgita, "Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere."

So this concept of Almighty Being as inclusive being – the whole universe is inside this great being. That would be another stage of meditation, but still you are there outside it in spite of your having raised your consciousness to the level of concentrating your whole consciousness on that total identity of cosmic personality – you will be feeling simultaneously that you are beholding it. So it is still a cosmic object, and you are an individual subject. This is the penultimate stage in meditation, where you see God everywhere but you are outside it. According to the descriptions we have in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, this is equal to savikalpa samadhi, a merger into the being of God with a simultaneous feeling of independence maintained by oneself. That kind of independence cannot be permitted finally, because the same position, opposition and synthesis principles will come in and tell you that this will not work. If you have beheld the Almighty as a mighty, creative person and yet you are outside it and looking at it, there must be something that causes this perception. You are on one side, that which you behold is on the other side - the two have to be connected in order that perception is possible. No perception of an object is possible unless there is a link between the perceiver and the perceived.

Here, taking for granted that the mighty Supreme Being is your object of meditation, and you are the beholder and the perceiver of this form, you cannot achieve this concentration in that manner unless there is an element which connects both together. The impossibility of perceiving anything as an external object without the intervention of a third principle in between – that principle operates here also, in God perception. So the externality of God is obviated completely by the necessity of there being a connecting link between yourself as the beholding principle, and God Almighty as the beheld. You transcend even that personality concept. You enter into it – God beholds Himself. When you have reached that stage, you have attained the pinnacle of meditation.