Vedantham : ( 07/11/2012. )

23/11/2017 Chapter 9: Yoga Meditation -17. It is possible to find leisure even in the midst of intense activity. We may wonder how it is possible, because they are contradictions. Leisure and intensity of any activity are not to be equated with some particular thing. But the engagement of a person in a diversity of pursuits need not necessarily mean the absence on the part of the mind to feel a sort of attunement with these diverse pressures. This is a very subtle psychological point. A pressure is not necessarily something with which we are unconnected. It is something with which we are connected – otherwise, we would not feel its presence. But we may wonder that if we are really connected with it, how does it come upon us like a pressure? It comes upon us like a pressure or a pain because we have not been able to understand the voice with which it speaks, the language which it utters, or its own demands. This pressure called the activity of life which we consider as the ca...

17/11/2017 Chapter 9: Yoga Meditation -16. Mediation, whatever be the way it pursues, aims at a particular uniform goal or aim. We can climb the top of a hill from many points at the base of the mountain. We can climb to the peak of that mountain or hill from any side, but when we climb up to the peak, we will find that we are in the same place which anyone may have reached through any other way. So, meditation is the peak of yoga, which is attainable through any way, by any road which one can follow according to the direction which one takes or the location in life in which one is placed. Yoga meditation is, therefore, a simple technique and not a difficult art, but it requires a little bit of leisure of the mind to think by itself. What most people lack is the leisure to think. We are preoccupied with pressures which call our attention in different directions, and find little rests for the mind to feel the need to place itself in this condition of attunement. Actually, ...

10/11/2017 Chapter 9: Yoga Meditation -15. Thus, the thing that we are trying to achieve in meditation is not merely the inward association in a literal sense, to be achieved by the subject in relation to the object. It is inward in a different sense altogether, namely, the transcendent meaning implied in the relationship between the contemplating consciousness and the object is inward to both the two terms of the relation we call the subject and the object – consciousness, and its content. This is something I tried to explain on an earlier occasion. In an act of deep meditation, the consciousness neither thinks of itself nor of the object as an outsider. It is trying to overcome the limit set by its own localised existence and the apparent localised existence of its outwardness in the sense of an object. There is a larger being which includes the meditative subject as well as the object meditated upon. This association of consciousness with that transcendent something lyin...

06/11/2017 Chapter 9: Yoga Meditation -14. So, the meditation in which the consciousness engages itself during yoga is an inwardisation in a very, very special sense. The contemplative process of consciousness is inward because it has no outward object to think at that time. The outwardness, or externality, or the position of a thing as if it is there in front, ceases to be operative because of the consciousness contemplating the basic relationship of itself with that object in such a way that it has already become a limb of a larger body of consciousness. I come back to the analogy of the parliament house. A really dispassionate and unselfish sacrificing member of the parliament will not consider other members as outside objects. He will consider them as limbs of his own larger body. The parliament is only a body of which the so-called person is a member and, therefore, one member cannot consider another as an object, if he is a true patriot and a real statesman. It is one ...