Total Thought and Meditation
Meditation is an integration
of consciousness. It is not a routine or a ritual. It is not a religious
exercise belonging to some religion. It is an opening of yourself to the final
realities of life. It has nothing to do with Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, or
any religion. It has no connection with any scripture, also. It is an
impersonal act on the part of yourself, wherein you lift up your consciousness
to a 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. Neither do you belong to Jaipur, India, nor to anything. You are
a travelling cosmic force, like a meteor, coming from one plane and moving to
another. Your thoughts have to be oriented along this fashion. Don't think like
a man or woman thinking. We are ultimately, in what we call a spiritual sense,
neither human beings, nor males nor females, but 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.
Generally, nobody thinks in a
total fashion. 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. If it is not different from you, there is no need of thinking it. You
don't go on thinking 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.
From this little introduction
about your being a sojourning individual in a cosmic setup, you will appreciate
that 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.
I was just telling you about
meditating, in my own way. We don't do meditation merely for doing it; we want
to get some benefit out of 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, I am again
coming to the point of total thinking, which is called meditation.
All the thoughts of everyone
and of everything will be comprehended within the total grasp of your mind in
this act. When you sit for meditation, what should you do? I am thinking of
some object, person, situation. 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.
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?
Now I am coming to another
more advanced step. 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.
You transfer your
consciousness, as it were, to the middle connection, the centre 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 a 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.
Continue to read:
Total Thought and Meditation – Your
Questions answered by Swami Krishnananda
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