BENGALURU : Religious life, beauty and meditation go together. They are not states to be compartmentalised and kept separate.What is meditation?
Is it possible to have a brain that only records that which is absolutely necessary and not record anything else?There is no exercise of will at all in meditation.There is a silence which is entirely different, the silence ofa brain that has no movement of thought. In that silence alone there can be that which is sacred.
The meaning of meditation is to gather all our energy which is now being dissipated, so that our consciousness is totally empty of its content. Where there is this emptiness and space, there is vast energy. That energy is sacred.
Surely, in considering meditation, effort and the maker of effort must be understood. Good effort leads to one thing, and bad to another, but both are binding, are they not? “It is said that you have not read the Upanishads or any of the sacred literature, but you sound like one who has read and knows.”
It is true that I have read none of those things, but that is not important. Good effort and wrong effort are both binding, and it is this bondage that must be understood and broken.
Meditation is the breaking of all bondage; it is a state of freedom, but not from anything. Freedom from something is only the cultivation of resistance. To be conscious of being free is not freedom. Consciousness is the experiencing of freedom or of bondage, and that consciousness is the experiencer, the maker of effort. Meditation is the breaking down of the experiencer, which cannot be done consciously. If the experiencer is broken down consciously, then there is a strengthening of the will, which is also a part of consciousness. Our problem, then, is concerned with the whole process of consciousness, and not with one part of it, small or great, dominant or subservient.
It is true that I have read none of those things, but that is not important. Good effort and wrong effort are both binding, and it is this bondage that must be understood and broken. Meditation is the breaking of all bondage; it is a state of freedom, but not from anything. Freedom from something is only the cultivation of resistance. To be conscious of being free is not freedom.
Consciousness is the experiencing of freedom or of bondage, and that consciousness is the experiencer, the maker of effort. Meditation is the breaking down of the experiencer, which cannot be done consciously. If the experiencer is broken down consciously, then there is a strengthening of the will, which is also a part of consciousness. Our problem, then, is concerned with the whole process of consciousness, and not with one part of it, small or great, dominant or subservient.