Guidelines for Meditation

• First, the practice of meditation has to proceed with some one object before the mind. I used to concentrate my mind on some black point. Ultimately during those days, I could not see the point any more, nor notice that the point was before me at all -- the mind used to be no more -- no wave of functioning would arise, as if it were all an ocean without any breath of air. In that state I used to experience glimpses of supersensuous truth.

• ...it is true that the mind very easily attains calmness when one practises meditation with anything on which one's mind is most apt to settle down. This is the reason why we have in this country so much worship of the images of gods and goddesses. And what wonderful art developed from such worship!...

• ...the fact however is that the objects of meditation can never be the same in the case of all men. People have proclaimed and preached to others only those external objects to which they held on to become perfected in meditation. Oblivious of the fact, later on, that these objects were aids to the attainment of perfect mental calmness, men have extolled them beyond everything else.

• You must keep the mind fixed on one object, like an unbroken stream of oil. The ordinary man's mind is scattered on different objcts, and at the time of meditation, too, the mind is at first apt to wander. But let any desire whatever arise in the mind, you must sit calmly and watch what sort of ideas are coming. By continuing to watch in that way, the mind becomes calm, and there are no thought waves in it. These waves represent the thought-activity of the mind. Those things that you have thought too deeply, have transformed themselves into a subconscious current, and therefore these come up in the mind in meditation. The rise of these waves, or thoughts, during meditation is an evidence that your mind is tending towards concentration. Sometimes the mind is concentrated on a set of ideas -- this is called meditation with Vikalpa or oscillation. But when the mind becomes almost free from all activities, it melts in the inner Self, which is the essence of infinite Knowledge, One and Itself Its own support.

• Think and meditate that you are the omnipresent Atman. "I am neither the body, nor the mind, nor the Buddhi (determining faculty), neither the gross nor the subtle body," -- by this process of elimination, immerse your mind in the transcendant knowledge which is your real nature. Kill the mind by thus plunging it repeatedly in this. Then only you will realise the Essence of Inelligence, or be established in your real nature. Knower and known, meditator and object meditated upon, will then become one, and the cessation of all phenomenal superimpositions will follow....There is no relative or conditioned knowledge in this state. When the Atman is the only knower, by what means can you possibly know it? The Atman is knowledge, the Atman is Intelligence, the Atman is Sachchidananda.

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