Sri Swami Sivananda, The Path Beyond Sorrow Chapter 3: Meditation, 2. How to Start the Current of Meditation

We being embodied beings and our mind being what it is, our everyday life does have a certain impact upon our soul consciousness, the innermost awareness, and the senses again and again cloud the radiance of the inner consciousness. Therefore, when you sit for meditation, instead of starting the process immediately, you should allow a certain time for the movement or the momentum of the external life to calm down. Give a little time. Let the thoughts subside, and then, after the mind has ceased its whirl of objectification, and is settling down, then gently lift it up out of the self-awareness, out of the consciousness of its union with its immediate surroundings and with the body. And to that end, the chanting of the Divine Name, of Divine Mantras, produce wonderful spiritual vibrations, divine in their potency, which help to lift the mind up into a state of subtle awareness of the Divine. In the state of calmness and upliftment generated by the quietness in the withdrawal of the mind, the Divine Name evokes your concept of the Supreme, your idea of the Great Reality. The whole body, the entire mind and the senses quieten; and the mind is elevated. It is ready to contemplate upon the higher ideas. Gently, the clinging of the mind to lower ideas gets loosened. You should, therefore, prepare your mind for meditation by filling it with Divine Bhav—a feeling or attitude of spiritual affection—spiritual Bhav. It is somewhat like this: after having travelled through a vast area of mountains and valleys and jungles and variegated scenery, you suddenly come to the ocean-shore and all these multifarious names and forms and ever-changing objects cease and you see just a vast expanse. Your gaze is absolutely undisturbed by any object. You gaze only upon vastness, only upon stillness. From the many, you arrive at the vision of the One.

These processes of stilling the mind, of withdrawing yourself, of calming yourself, of lifting up your consciousness through Mantras, through chants, brings you to a state where the mind is rid of all multifarious objects and is just centred on the God within—on Brahman or the Atman or the Reality, the one Absolute Truth, the Supreme Being, the Changeless Infinite. And even as from the far horizon of the eastern ocean the orb of the sun rises up into that indescribable vastness, your concept of that Being rises in the vastness of the ocean of Pure Being. It may be in the nature of a sound, a Divine Personality, a formless concept, a special idea or a set of ideas you have of the Divine. And, as though the ocean itself has turned into a wave, no different from itself, not separate from it, being the same, and yet appearing for the time being as a wave pattern, you invoke upon this ocean of Pure Being, gently, the appearance of your particular concept of God in the form of your idea or set of ideas and then slowly, gently, flow forth to that idea, that set of ideas or that personality. Let your entire being melt and flow in a continuous stream of love and adoration, reverence, worshipfulness, prayerfulness and faith until your entire being just seems to be a continuous stream of such divine sentiments calmly flowing towards your concept of God.

This pattern should be kept up—a continuous and unbroken flow of loving God-thought. This is the very essence of meditation. It is a state of mind when the entire mind is filled with God and God alone, nothing else besides God. It is very necessary to recognize the process of meditation as such, for there are various wrong conceptions, wrong ideas about meditation, one of them being that it is an attempt to make the mind empty. When this concept is presented to me, I always remember the good old saying that an empty mind is the devil’s workshop. Anything can come into the mind when it is empty. It is a very difficult concept to break away from the minds of people, because it contains a grain of truth. If there is a complete falsehood, you can contradict it, but if there is a part that has a grain of truth, it becomes very difficult to contradict. Uttering a half-truth is more dangerous than a hundred percent falsehood. So, to these people who seem to have grasped the meaning of a part of the process of meditation and who completely ignore the true process, I repeat: “Meditation is filling the mind with God-thought” and, therefore, it means emptying the mind of all thought other than that of God. This emptying the mind of all that is non-Atman or non-Self or non-Divine is only a part of the process; it is only a thing that is implied by the true process. The actual process is to fill the mind with God. The awareness is always there. If you empty the mind, a blank is not created, a void is not created, but God fills it. The Supreme, the Ideal, the Truth, the Reality, the Light of Pure Being—That floods the entire field of your consciousness. God fills it, and where He is, the world cannot be. It is said, “Where there is the Supreme, there is no desire for the world”. So, where God is to come, there should be no desire for the world; for, where the world is, He cannot be. God says, “I am a jealous Master. I will not tolerate the presence of anyone else in that place which is meant for Me. It is Mine”. The heart of the individual is the royal throne of God, and if there are other things there, He looks in and says, “No, it is not ready for Me to come”.

So, meditation is emptying ourselves of all that is not-God and filling the mind with God. The particular conception of God or the Divine does not at all matter, and the greatest curse are those who advocate and inflict upon the human race one certain religion and one certain concept of the Divine and insist that God or the Divine is such-and-such and only such-and-such and insist that all think of Him only in a particular way, with a particular book. For, that is the very destruction of the pure idea of God, the destruction of the very spiritual core within. God cannot be defined. He cannot be comprehended. We cannot conceive of Him, but He is everything which one can conceive of in love. He allows Himself to be known in any way. Just as, when a child pulls the hair of the mother, twists her nose, slaps her, twists and pushes her face, or sticks its finger into her eye, or does anything, the mother loves the child and bends when it pulls her hair, and allows her face to be pushed whichever way the child wishes. Why? On account of love—love of the mother for the child, and love of the child for the mother, also. In the same way, if the loving heart conceives of God in whatever way it can, then that is God. Lord Krishna said, “In whatever way the sincere one seeketh Me, I reveal Myself to the seeking soul in that very way”. And if you try to confine Him rigidly to your set conception, you destroy the very conception of God as the Infinite, as the Omnipresent, as the Omnipotent. What can He not do? What is He not? He is everything. There is nothing which He is not. Therefore, even though we know that He is absolute, that He is transcendent, that He is beyond all name and form, beyond the reach of mind and thought, yet He is everything. He is all.

The Vedanta is the grand culmination of all the attempts at giving the Supreme some sort of recognizable form. It says, “You, of countless names and countless forms, are infinite. You are everything”. So, conceive of Him in any way. Do not be disturbed. Do not have any anxiety, for He knows when you are sitting for meditation. He knows. He can see even where you are sitting. When you start the thought in meditation, He knows even the thought.

Take, for instance, the father of a family, a good man, loved by all, and just imagine how differently he is conceived of by everyone in the family. The son and the daughter look upon him as the father, someone gracious, someone elderly, protecting them, looking after them, an ideal to follow. His brother looks upon him, not as a father, but as a gracious brother. The wife looks upon him as her master and lord and loving husband. And his own parents look upon him as a son, the father of their grandchildren. And his neighbour will think of him in a way entirely different from all these. These conceptions—in the parents’ minds, in the children’s minds, in the brother’s mind, in the wife’s mind, and in the neighbour’s mind—all differ. So they all have different conceptions in their minds of this one being and all these are valid and right.

Sivananda

THE PATH BEYOND SORROW

Chapter 3: Meditation