Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
disciples. One of these techniques involved the Sanskrit mantra
neti neti
- literally 'not this, not that' - with which one approaches
truth by listing what it is not. This is something like blotting out
the information all your five senses give you and then seeing what
is left of you and the world.
Such meditation practices require tremendous powers of patience
and concentration. Scoffers should attempt these themselves before
dismissing them. Most of us cannot focus the mind on a single
thought for more than a few seconds at a stretch. Jnana yoga requires
you to hold the mind steady for periods of twelve hours or more.
You must devote many years of practice to it too, before you can
hope to make any progress or realisation or transformation.
Popular misconception - even by Indians themselves - considers
meditation a blanking out of the mind, a sort of waking sleep. This
is not true. It is impossible to blank out the mind, even in sleep.
One's babbling brooks and streams and rivers of thought vanish
into the One Thought, the divine ocean that underlies the final
truth. True meditation is preceded by years of learning just how to
concentrate correctly, so it may be better described as a form of
superconcentration. A more accurate analogy compares the mind
to a lake, with thoughts the ripples disturbing its surface. When the
lake is calm, its surface becomes like a mirror, reflecting perfectly
the heavens above it, no different from the heavens. Meditation is
the process by which you calm those ripples.
Techniques vary - attending to each thought as it arises without
pursuing any one of them, following the stream of thoughts back to
its source, or supplanting all thoughts by supreme efforts of
concentration on one single thought. Breathing and thought are
intimately connected in this. Other methods can involve artificially
controlling one's breathing, or focusing on the elusive point where
inhalation and exhalation meet, like dwelling on that moment when
the future becomes the past. Like eternity, the present exists outside
time. So the eternal is the present. To live completely in the present
is the sole object of meditation, the calming of the ripples, the one
great mystical goal, the resolution of opposites, attainment of
enlightenment, union with God, truth, love, nirvana, heaven,
