BENGALURU: Every student has to walk on the chosen path alone, and the road is “like the edge of a razor,” spiritual guru Sri M said at the launch his latest book, On Meditation, in the city on Friday. The event, held at Landmark bookstore in Forum Mall, Koramangala, included a talk between the founder of the Satsang Foundation (TSF) and children’s author Roopa Pai.
Since the book deals with the adoption and advantages of meditation in our 21st century lives, the conversation focussed on Sri M’s insights on the subject. A beginner, he said, must find at least half an hour a day to practise meditation. However, he added, these 30 minutes shouldn’t be looked at as a chore, but as an experiment.
The book, published by Penguin Books, contains answers to some frequently-asked questions about meditation, as well as basic information such as why should one meditate; the right time, posture, clothing, and food habits for the practice; the various forms of meditation; and obstacles that people may face when they start it.
Pai said she didn’t want to make the conversation too scholarly, and instead tried to approach it from a layperson’s perspective. “The first books I took up while doing research for my latest book, The Vedas and Upanishads for Children, were Sri M’s books, in which he has interpreted and discussed the Upanishads,” Pai told CE. “It was extremely simple and beautiful. On Meditation is also easy to comprehend and is less esoteric, thereby making it easier for us to understand it,” she added.
Delving deeper into the contents of the book, Sri M talked about how the word ‘empty’ has a bad connotation in English, whereas the word ‘shoonya’ in Sanskrit is not considered in a negative way. “Emptiness is beautiful,” said the guru, based in Mandanapalle, Andhra Pradesh. Born in Thiruvananthapuram, Sri M is the author of a memoir titled Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master: A Yogi’s Autobiography, on being a disciple of Sri Maheshwar Nath Babaji, which came out in 2011, besides several other books.