Total Thought and Meditation
What is meditation?
Meditation is an integration
of consciousness. It is not a routine or a ritual and has no connection with
any scripture. It is not a religious exercise belonging to some religion. It is
an opening of yourself to the final realities of life. It is an impersonal act
on the part of yourself, wherein you lift up your consciousness to recognition
of the fact that you are a temporary sojourning entity into eternity.
You have come from a larger
realm, and will enter into the same realm after some time, which will indicate
gradually that your existence has a kind of cosmic sweep. From plane to plane
you have journeyed in your millions of incarnations. This is only a temporary
form that the cosmic form has taken due to some karma, some pressure of
circumstance. We are ultimately, in what we call a spiritual sense, only forces
of Nature which have concentrated themselves in certain space-time points, looking
like individuals. This is how self-analysis has to be carried on. When you
think along these lines, you will find that your mind becomes "total"
instead of fragmentary.
You always think of something
other than yourself. It is taken for granted by the mind that what you are
thinking is something different from yourself. So, every thought of every
person is directed towards something which is assumed to be totally different
from the process of thinking. This is a mistake.
You cannot even think unless
all the atmospheric conditions of the cosmic condition are involved in the very
process of thinking. When you think, it looks as if you are thinking like a
cosmic being, because your mind is connected to all the circumstances through
which you have passed in all your various incarnations.
Everyone is related to you in
some way or other through the circumstance of some incarnation, some birth or
other. This is why they say that the world is a single family. Like the various
branches of a tree coming forth from the root, all these manifestations and
forms of existence have come out from One Root.
We don't do meditation merely
for doing it. There can be benefit only if your thoughts are harmonious with
reality. If you dichotomise your thought from the reality of the world and
consider it as an external object, then it will be finite thinking, and finite
thinking will produce only finite results. So, total thinking, is called
meditation. All the thoughts of everyone and of everything will be comprehended
within the total grasp of your mind in this act.
How to Meditate
Your mind has to consciously,
vitally, involve in itself the object which it is thinking; otherwise, you
cannot even be conscious of the object. The very fact that you are conscious of
some object outside you implies that it has already entered the mind. It has
become part and parcel of your consciousness. Now, here is the technique of
total thinking. You cannot think the object unless you accept that it is a part
of your thought itself. Thus, the thinker is not an individual. It is something
in between the object and the so-called subject. It is a connecting link,
transcendent.
Adhyatma, Adhibhuta, Adhidaiva
In our ancient scriptures we
use words like adhyatma, adhibhuta, adhidaiva, etc. Adhyatma is the thinking subject; adhibhuta is the object, but we
don't know anything else. We think only two things. I am here and I am seeing
and thinking something else. But you cannot think something else unless there
is a connecting link of consciousness between you and the other object. The
thinker is actually that connecting link. That is called adhidaiva, the superintending
divinity. So, who is the meditator?
You
are not meditating, because if you consider yourself as the meditator, you cut
yourself off from the object. But I mentioned to you that you cannot cut off
your consciousness from any object, inasmuch as, unless it is involved in that
object, thinking is not possible. So this involvement-consciousness is a
transcendent consciousness which is above both you and the object. It is a very
subtle thing, and very difficult to catch that little crux of the matter.
You transfer your
consciousness, as it were, to the middle connection, transfer your
consciousness to the center where you contemplate both sides, as if the body is
thinking of two hands. This is the subject and this is the object, but the
thinker of both is the body; so you are not one person thinking of another
thing. Meditation does not mean thinking of an object; it is transference of
consciousness from the subjectivity of yours and from the objectivity of the
object to a central point which is transcendent to both. That is the divinity
which is called Ishtadevata. You contemplate like
this. This is what they call total thinking, and this is the essence of
meditation.
Difference between total thought and
meditation
They are the same thing. Total
thought means a perfect form of thought, and meditation means the same thing.
It is a total thought, not little bits of thinking, one thing at a time.
Generally, we think little things, but that is not correct thinking because
when you think something, you exclude something else. You should exclude
nothing and include all things in your thought; then it becomes a total
thought. It is something like God-thought. That is the perfect form of
thinking. Then you will have no troubles from the mind afterwards. There will
be cooperative forces working together. If you exclude something, that
something which you exclude will not cooperate with you. That is why troubles
arise.
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