CHENNAI: Meditation is not an escape from the world; it is not an isolating self-enclosing activity, but rather the comprehension of the world and its ways. The world has little to offer apart from food, clothes and shelter, and pleasure with its great sorrows.
Meditation is wandering away from this world; one has to be a total outsider. Then the world has a meaning, and the beauty of the heavens and the earth is constant. Then love is not pleasure. From this all action begins that is not the outcome of tension, contradiction, the search for self-fulfilment or the conceit of power. The penetration into and the understanding of this structure is meditation. Then you will see that the world is not an illusion but a terrible reality which man, in his relationship with his fellow man, has constructed.
It is this which has to be understood and not your theories of Vedanta, with the rituals and all the paraphernalia of organized religion.When man is free, without any motive of fear, of envy or of sorrow, then only is the mind naturally peaceful and still. Then it can see not only the truth in daily life from moment to moment but also go beyond all perception; and therefore there is the ending of the observer and the observed, and duality ceases.
But beyond all this, and not related to this struggle, this vanity and despair, there is — and this is not a theory - a stream that has no beginning and no end; a measureless movement that the mind can never capture.
Meditation is seeing the constant touching the ever-changing movement of life. The man who has progressed through being a sinner to being a saint has progressed from one illusion to another. This whole movement is an illusion. When the mind sees this illusion it is no longer creating any illusion, it is no longer measuring. Therefore thought has come to an end with regard to becoming better. Out of this comes a state of liberation — and this is very sacred.