We know that effective meditation requires a clear mind. Yet to ‘clear the mind’ is far easier said, than done.
It is not enough simply to sit and hope the mind will empty of its own accord. There are always thoughts, distractions and desires queuing up to enter an unoccupied mind – just as dust will always gather on neglected surfaces and weeds will invade an untended garden. To clear the mind requires concentration. Concentration is not a static state: it is a dynamic momentum, a conscious and continuous act of will.
Thoughts travel at high speed: to elude them, we must simply be faster. Distractions are ever alert to snatch our attention: to overcome them we must be more vigilant than they. Desires are cunning to exploit our every weakness: to transcend them we must be stronger, wiser, more patient and determined.
Here are a few methods, to help maintain flow and momentum in our concentration, to outpace and outsmart our mind’s would-be captors:
a) Listen intently to the sound of your own heartbeat, excluding all else.
b) Imagine your mind is inside a giant powerful vacuum cleaner, sucking out its contents faster than they can appear.
c) You are a rocket soaring ever higher and beyond a vast, radiant blue sky, outpacing all.
d) Conjure the face of the most beautiful, pure, luminous, divine being, losing yourself in wondrous rapture.
d) Breathe in and become the fragrance of the most sublime rose within your heart.
e) You are a thundering mighty waterfall. Your force, power, might, volume and intensity overwhelm all else.
f) You are a ceaseless fountain of light, no speck of shadow in your sight.
g) Dive and immerse yourself in the inner ‘Aum’ that reverberates in the silent heart of all beings.
“If you meditate on a specific divine quality, such as Light, Beauty, Peace, or Bliss in an unshaped form, or if you meditate in an abstract way on Infinity, Eternity or Immortality, then constantly you will feel an express train going forward inside you. You are meditating on Peace, Light or Bliss while the express train is constantly moving. Although your whole mind is calm, vacant and quiet, without thoughts, you will see there a movement towards your goal. Your mind is calm and quiet in the vastness of Infinity, but there is movement: a train is going endlessly toward your goal. In meditation there is a goal. You are envisioning a goal and meditation takes you there.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Because we sit in stillness, there is a common misconception that meditation is a static activity. Not so! – just as silence houses all the dreams of the world, so stillness is the starting point of every step, every journey, every ultimate triumph.
Our universe – inner and outer – lives, breathes and blossoms through rhythm and flow. Like our physical heart, our spiritual heart too has its own pulse, breath and cadence.
We meditate to make progress toward our goals; progress is born of focussed movement and nurtured growth. The enemy of progress is inertia; the foe of meditation is inner complacency.
Imagine your concentration is an arrow, aiming and whizzing directly towards its target; when focus or intensity is lost, your arrow falls lamely to the ground. Imagine that powering your meditation is a mighty river, flowing resolutely, indomitably towards the vast ocean; you are a rocket, surging gloriously beyond earth’s gravity of thoughts and illusion into the ever-expanding sky of freedom-light.
In meditation’s deep stillness, we are the universal dynamo, heartbeat of creation, the ever-blissful cosmic dance.
“You cannot be afraid of anything when you are in your highest meditation. Your mind is all peace, all silence, all oneness. If thoughts or ideas want to come in, you control them with your inner peace, for they will not be able to affect you. Like fish in the sea, they jump and swim but leave no mark on the water. Like birds flying in the sky, they leave no trace behind them. So when you meditate, feel that you are the sea, and all the animals in the sea do not affect you. Feel that you are the sky, and all the birds flying past do not affect you. Feel that your mind is the sky and your heart is the infinite ocean. This is meditation.”
– Sri Chinmoy
While concentrating and meditating, we endeavour to clear our mind of all thoughts. Yet some thoughts continue to arise, for that is their nature – so how to deal with them?
Sri Chinmoy’s suggestion that we identify with the sky, while thoughts are passing birds, is extremely effective. Remain immersed in the sky’s infinitude, and let the birds fly by: the moment we focus on any bird, that bird-thought becomes a disturbance to our meditation.
A variant of this approach is to imagine that I am the lead bird of a V-formation. All I see ahead is the vast, clear sky. When a thought appears, that is another bird overtaking me and obscuring my clear vision of the infinite. My task now is to increase my speed, and resume my rightful place in the lead.
Never be upset or disturbed by the appearance of any thought: rather take each thought as a summons to redouble our intensity and determination, a reminder urging us onward to our goal.
For most journeys, the further we go, the shorter the distance remaining to the destination: the more we eat of our meal, the less there is to be eaten; the more chapters we read of a novel, the fewer pages remain unread; the more years we study, the closer looms our Ph.D.
With meditation and the spiritual life, the further we go, the further we discover there is yet to go…
Imagine growing up in a little village in a valley surrounded by hills. One day you set out to climb to the highest point in your world – a nearby ridge. Upon reaching the crest of the ridge, your view opens up and voilà, there is another, higher range of hills beyond the next valley – hills you never knew existed. And so on it goes: only when you reach each new summit does the next level reveal itself.
In the spiritual realm, everything is constantly transcending. As we soar in silence within, beyond our limited and limiting mental conceptions, not only do our capacities, our world-view and self-understanding continually transcend, so too our goals and aspirations. Whatever goals we set out to reach at the commencement of our journey, are continually replaced by ever higher, vaster and fuller goals, goals we previously could never have imagined.
We would be disheartened to know that an outer goal we have been striving for is actually a false ending; that the novel we are reading has infinite pages, our Ph.D. is an eternity away, or this marathon has no finish line.
Yet in our spiritual journey, the further we go and the more we discover there is yet to go, the better, richer, sweeter and brighter everything perpetually becomes, as we grow ever younger in intensifying thrill of oneness-wonder.
In pure meditation, there is only one moment to experience: the Eternal Now. There may be many approaches, many avenues to this moment, it may have many names and attributes, yet once we are there, it can only ever be One.
When sunlight shines through a prism, we see it refracted and represented as many colours. Yet when we trace all these various colours to their source, we find just one ray of pure light. So are there a multitude of spiritual Paths, meditation techniques, theories and teachings – when we trace each to its source, when we get beyond the theory and even the practise to the actual experience, we find ourselves alone, peerless, one and complete with the inmost pure thrill of existence, universal and transcendental.
Of course if there is only one moment, the Eternal Now, we must already be in this moment. And so we are – yet we are looking the other way. We are focussed outward, from the one to the many, from creator to creation, from silence to sound, from the heart to the heartbeat. Instead of looking at the sun, the source, we are enthralled with its myriad varied reflections in each droplet of dew on each blade of grass in each field and fairway.
The phenomena of time and space exist only here in the relative realms. They are the magician’s illusion, which work only as long as the magician has our rapt attention. As we dive deeper into our meditation, its all-encompassing light, peace and bliss distract us from the illusion; the bonds of thought and desire are loosened, and the magician himself fades into oblivion. Time and space dissolve in the Eternal Infinite.
Once we are one with the Eternal Now, the real game can start in earnest…
When we get a strong feeling that we should make a particular choice or pursue a particular direction, how can we know where the message is coming from? How can we know whether it is a genuine message from our heart or soul, or is just our mind or vital yet again trying to deceive and lead us astray?
The mind and vital are extremely tricky and will do anything in their power to persuade us to take their side. They will even impersonate the heart, presenting their case in the guise of a high and selfless motive.
We know that our body, vital and mind are all limited in their perspective, bound as they are by desire, pride, insecurity and ignorance. Following their urgings, we have surrendered our inner freedom in exchange for bewilderment, frustration and unhappiness.
We long to receive and heed the messages from our heart and soul. How are we able to discriminate? How can we know if a message or feeling is an effusion of the heart or an illusion cast by our mind or vital?
The vital’s promptings cause immediate excitement that goes up and then dies down – like a burst of fireworks. The mind’s messages are characterised by self-righteousness, with an undertow of nagging self-doubt. Both appeal to our ego, to our sense of separativity parading as superiority or inferiority. They reduce us, whereas our heart and soul expand, illumine and elevate us. Messages from our heart and soul open the floodgates to peace, joy, satisfaction and certainty.
As a counterfeit coin is exposed when held up to the light, so in our deep meditation, a message from our mind or vital will fade and disappear, while a message from our heart or soul will shine ever more brightly and beautifully.
It is said that meditation will answer all our life’s questions and reveal to us our life’s mission.
All of us have made bad choices in life: choices that led to unnecessary suffering, choices that diminished us, denied our potential and delayed our spiritual progress.
We are constantly faced with important questions, and it would be wonderful to have a way to find the best answers in accordance with our soul’s wishes, guiding us to the best possible outcome, expediting our growth in deepening peace, revealing light, expanding love and blossoming joy.
If meditation is all about silence though, how are we supposed to ask the questions, and how to receive their answers?
Counter-intuitively, when seeking an answer from our meditation, the first thing we must strive for, is to dismiss the question from our mind. Offer the question itself, along with all of the mind’s contents, into the silence of the heart.
Then dive fully into the peace, light and bliss of your silence-heart. Envelop yourself in your ever-expanding, illumining meditation-sky, soaring free of ego, far above and beyond the confinements of finite thoughts, desires and concepts. Surrender eagerly and wholeheartedly to the flight, light and delight of your soul as your all-embracing, all-encompassing, all-fulfilling glory-reality.
Once surrendered, forget about the question, and don’t look for any answer. Wait patiently and confidently, as the baker waits for the loaf to rise or the farmer waits for the crop to germinate. Time is your servant.
The very appearance of a significant question is a sure indication that its answer awaits us. Our soul knows when we are ready, and plants the question to prepare our mind and open our heart to receive the message-answer our soul has already prepared.
“Each time divine qualities come to the fore, we are bound to feel that we are remembering a forgotten story. This story was written by the seeker in us. This story was not written by somebody else. It is our own creation, but we have forgotten it, and it is meditation that brings it back. When we remember this story we are overjoyed that we have created such a beautiful story and that this is our life story.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Meditation is self-discovery. In meditation we enter into our own higher and highest realms of consciousness. Just as science is forever discovering “new” truths about the universe – truths which are not new at all, for they are eternal – so our meditation gradually uncovers and reveals our own hidden, greater reality. There is nothing and there can never be anything that we experience in meditation that is not already there within us, waiting to be loved, claimed and manifested.
In essence, meditation is remembering: remembering what we are and who we have always been. As we expand into our spiritual dimensions of heart and soul, we rise like a balloon aloft, no longer tethered by illusion to the finite, into the infinite, ever-transcending sky of our true self, re-discovering as we rise all that we had lost through attachment and immersion in our limited, desire-deluded ego-self.
In our highest meditation, we are at once witness and participant, spectator and player. We perceive our life’s mission and purpose, as envisioned and conceived by our soul – glorious, surprising and thrillingly fulfilling; and receive the preview and assurance of our soul’s full manifestation, the playing out of our age-long quest, the ultimate satisfaction of all our inmost longings: known, unknown and unknowable.
Meditate to remember all, but first –
remember to meditate!
“During the day,
Use your imagination-power
To remember your soulful and powerful
Morning meditation.
Imagination is a world of its own,
And this imagination-power
Can save you, illumine you and fulfil you.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Most of us do not meditate to enjoy the blissful experience of meditation for its own sake; we are motivated to meditate to improve our consciousness and hence the quality of our daily lives. We meditate to enter into our inner peace, light, love and joy so that we can embody, utilise and manifest these qualities throughout our busy day.
Yet we have all experienced how difficult it can be to maintain these sweet, pure feelings, this expansive, lofty perspective once we enter into the noise, stress and conflict that characterises our outer life.
Firstly, we must properly assimilate our meditation experience. Just as food needs to be digested before we commence strenuous activity, so we need to “digest” our meditation’s peace, love, light and joy. Remain quiet for a while after meditation – reading, singing, listening to music or writing something meaningful. Don’t rush straight into anything challenging or engaging of the mind or emotions.
If you polish a wooden table in the morning, as dust settles during the day, it will lose its sheen. Yet the table doesn’t have to be re-polished to bring back the shine; it just needs a quick wipe, because the morning’s polish is still there, right below the dust. Similarly, by taking a minute or two to consciously remember our morning meditation, we can easily and quickly revive its clarity and poise, thereby dispelling the accumulated ‘dust’ of stress, tension and confusion, and reinforcing our inner fortress against the world’s negativity and chaos. This way the fragrance of our morning meditation can permeate our entire day.
“Remember your highest meditation,
Then with your determination
And eagerness,
Give life to that imagination.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Sometimes, meditation comes easily and effortlessly. Other times, no matter how hard we try, we can’t escape a maze of thoughts and distractions. We’re like a bird, which despite running and flapping its wings, just can’t get off the ground.
At such times, one of the most effective techniques to launch us into flight, is also the simplest: just remember once when you had a good meditation.
Consciously recall a particular time when you had a deep and satisfying meditation, and make that memory the focus of today’s attempt. Recreate every detail of the scene in your imagination – the sights, sounds, impressions and most importantly, the feelings of that experience. Surrender to the essence of that meditation-moment and absorb yourself fully in the thrill of its expansiveness, soaring beauty, unconditional love, clarity, freedom and all-immersive oneness.
It is very helpful to keep a spiritual diary, in which we record impressions of lofty meditation experiences. Then when the time comes to re-read what we have written, a particular word or phrase might be the trigger to unleash an inner flood of bliss – first in our imagination, and then for real, blossoming in our heart as conscious reality.
Just as remembering traumatic events brings forward negative thoughts and emotions, and recreating happy or funny moments produces an immediate smile, so recalling a good meditation can effectively revive the breath and reignite the flame of that meditation within us.
As meditation is self-discovery, every profound meditation is a glimpse of the spiritual treasure we house. This treasure never goes away, though it sometimes hides or is covered over. The act of remembering removes that veil, and lo! – we are inhaling sublime meditation.
“Seek truth in meditation, not in mouldy books. Look in the sky to find the moon, not in the pond.”
– Persian proverb
Wouldn’t we all like to know the truth? Not just the relative truth about who pulled the trigger, what causes hay fever, or is the earth really flat – but the absolute Truth of all existence.
We have looked around all our lives and drunk deep of outer world experiences. We have joined with science in its admirable struggle to discover truth in the material universe, and while making wonderful progress in our understanding of how cicadas ‘sing’ and what induces magnetic polarity to switch, still we are no closer to knowing who we are, where we have come from, or where we are ultimately headed.
We all somehow sense that there is such a thing as Absolute Truth, this Absolute Truth is attainable, we must be part of it, and it must be within us. So to find it, the only truly reliable place to seek must be within our own consciousness, beyond the boundaries of our present knowledge and the mechanisms of our present way of knowing.
Indeed, the quenchless thirst for Truth is one of the oldest, most compelling motivating forces drawing us into meditation and the spiritual life.
We – and the Truth we embody – are infinite. The Infinite can never be grasped by our limited, limiting and ever-changeable minds. While our mind lunges at truth, our heart embraces and reveals truth. While our mind’s speculative theories constantly change, our heart’s oneness with peace, love and joy ever deepens, expands and radiates.
Sri Chinmoy answers our eternal question perfectly and poetically:
“O Lord, where is the Truth?
‘Where your Beloved is.’
Who is my Beloved, Who?
‘In Whom your life is Peace.’”
“Each time you enter a new year,
Be determined not to bring
Your old self with you.”
– Sri Chinmoy
“Unfortunately, we do not pay enough attention to the new year which takes place every second in our lives. The new year is not just twelve months or 365 days. It is something that begins at every second in our life of aspiration.”
– Sri Chinmoy
Each New Year we make resolutions. Sadly, like turtle hatchlings emerging by the thousands, precious few of our resolutions make it across life’s perilous beach to the ocean of fulfilment. Year on year, the same story…
Why do so few resolutions survive? Because our human nature is stronger than our human will. For our resolutions to bear fruit, we must access our divine will and divine nature, which are one and the same.
So the only resolution worth making, is the one that can bring forward our divine nature: self-transformation. Transformation can never be forced or mandated: it can only grow and blossom naturally, from the fertile soil of meditation and spiritual discipline.
The New Year is certainly significant: yet in the spiritual life, every second, every moment is significant, for inside each moment, Eternity breathes; inside each breath, Infinity sings; inside each heartbeat, Immortality dances.
The old to be torn down and replaced is not around us: it is within our thinking, criticising, dividing, suspecting and limiting mind. The new – yearning eagerly to be fulfilled – is even now blossoming within our heart, nurtured by our all-loving, all-illumining, ever-expanding and ever-liberating soul.
To be sure your New Year’s resolutions translate hope and promise into action and fulfilment, before making any resolution, resolve to meditate. Your meditation will reveal the resolutions you need, along with all the guidance, means and assurance of their fulfilment.
Meditation is the best gift anyone can ever give us – a gift we can only give, and receive, ourselves. Our meditation is also the best gift we can ever give to the world – for inside our meditation is all the treasure and answers to the world’s every longing.
The practise and discipline of meditation is the gift we must continually give to ourselves: the experience and enjoyment of meditation is the gift we must continually receive ourselves: the embodiment of meditation is the gift we automatically share continually with the world. Giving, receiving and sharing are equally indispensable.
Practise, the gift we give, is the aspiration-seed: enjoyment, the gift we receive, is the realisation-plant: transformation, the gift we share, is the manifestation-fruit we offer for the world’s nourishment.
Meditation is also the greatest bestower of gifts to us, in us and through us. Every quality we most need and yearn for in ourselves – peace, love, light, freedom, joy, gratitude, devotion, surrender – the most precious gifts any human can receive, are all nurtured, nourished, increased and strengthened though meditation. In turn, as these qualities are cultivated and grow as our meditation practise matures and deepens, their beauty and fragrance inevitably spread as gifts to all around us.
Yet for all that meditation gives, it also takes away. While meditation is blessing us with so many positive, divine qualities, its further gifts lie in what it removes from our consciousness, stealthily and steadily – everything we don’t like or wish could be improved in ourselves. All our fears, doubts, insecurities, depression, illusions, desires and attachments are uprooted; while prejudices, false beliefs, pride, anger and ego are gradually transformed through meditation.
Meditation gives us a daily fresh start; an ever-new goal; our clear mission and Path to self-discovery and God-fulfilment.
