Meditation – Its Theory & Practice

 

Our teacher often began these lectures by recommending that we should make our mind one pointed. The Gita says, “Many-branched and endless, are the thoughts of the irresolute”. The yogi must make his mind one pointed. One of the means of doing this is to touch the point between the eyebrows, put the fingernail there, pinch or pat, and then use the after-sensation to bring your mind to this one point; throwing away, as he said, the minister of the exterior – the external thoughts, thoughts of the exterior – and the minister of the interior – thoughts about the interior, mental life – throwing them both away, bringing the thought and the attention to this one point.

Now, if you would like to try for three minutes, I will say ‘Om’, and if you would like just to touch here, or if you don’t need it just bring the attention here. ‘Om’.

One of the themes of the lecture this evening was about force: physical force, mental force and spiritual force, and these are mentioned and discussed a little in the meditation handbook (Meditation – its Theory and Practice), which we will follow.

The physical force – the passionate, forceful actions are described in the 18th, the last chapter of the Gita, as, “Done by man who is eager to achieve the fruit of action at any cost, who is greedy for the fruit. He can’t wait. He must force the outcome. It is done with tiring endeavour”.

Our teacher comments on this because unnatural ways are employed. Because he is so eager and determined to get the results and fruits quickly, he can’t wait for the natural course of events. He wants to, as we say, force it through. These are people who use unnecessary force. Those who bang the keys of a typewriter, who chop wood across the grain, and who try to conquer other people physically. They subdue them physically, but not in their inner being. They are hated by their slaves. The Roman proverb, is that ‘as many slaves as you have, you have that number of enemies’. That applied even to good masters, like Pliny. But this is forceful, tiring and ultimately misapplied action, because it goes against the nature of the thing.

When there is spiritual inspiration, this physical action changes. Then it becomes adapted to the object. Some force has to be used in typing, but to use just so much as is necessary. Not to bang the key, not to press them so lightly that they won’t register, but so much.
There is a love of the instrument which is being used, and you sometimes see a good workman with the wood. With his fingers, he will stroke the wood, and he will use the grain of the wood in his work. There is a fruitful cooperation between the actor who does the action, who uses the force, and the thing he is working on.

Then the mental force. Well, the comparison has been made, that mostly we think in boxing gloves. It is as though we are doing everything with our hands in boxing gloves. Imagine trying to write or cook or mend something with your hands in boxing gloves. In the same way, we have wads of like and dislike and fear and anticipation and greed and hate over our instrument. So what we do is clumsy and ill-adapted, and our very thoughts are in boxing gloves so the illustration goes.

How many people say, “Oh, yes, I was getting on well at maths at school, and then a change of class and then I didn’t like the new teacher, and then I didn’t make any more progress”? “Was he a good teacher?” “Yes, I believe so, yes, but I didn’t like him.”

In one country I heard someone say, “Well, I am from the East, you see, and the teacher was from the West. He used to occasionally make little comments about our Eastern friends. There was a comment on my Eastern accent, which wasn’t liked so much in the West, and I didn’t make progress in his class.” Well, this is a boxing glove, it is meaningless; but we can’t take it off. So the idea is to be able to take off the meaningless accretion that we have over our thoughts and our actions, and simply to be able to do the thing for its own sake. Not because I want to get something out of it, not because I am afraid of what will happen if it goes wrong, not because I want to show off – but to do the thing for its own sake.

The Gita has a very revealing verse on this, “When people perform the actions they should be performing, without desire and hate, then the actions give a sort of delight.” The actions become pure and they give a delight, and the word used is very strong. So our lives can become a delight in the action itself; not looking for the result, but in the very action itself. Our teacher used to say that to be able to do things and do them effectively, the Gita says to do them firmly and to do them vigorously; but to do them without these masses of feelings and prejudices and instinctive fears and hopes. Then it will give a delight.

When we can’t do this, we try to force things because our thoughts are not free, and then we become what our teacher called ‘shouters’. “You have got to give way to me or I will destroy everything.” No, this is basically the attitude of the terrorist. But the spiritual aspect of the mental action is calm, decisive; and then it is dropped afterwards. When the thing has been done, then it is dropped. The memory of it is dropped and is not always thinking, “What am I going to get out of it?” and, “How shall I make something?” or, “How shall I avoid something if it goes wrong, won’t it be awful if it goes wrong?”

The last form of force is inspired force; and our teacher gave the example of the Manchu emperor, Kangxi, who was confronted with, as had been before him, the Mongols, who were still furiously aggressive – although they couldn’t easily get together, they were constantly quarrelling among themselves. But he introduced Buddhism there by building monasteries, with really learned and pious monks; and they converted the Mongols to Buddhism, and the Buddhist tradition in Mongolia was very strong. It ended with the last living Buddha, whom our teacher, in fact, made a pilgrimage to go to see.

We say, “Well, what would be an example of spiritual inspiration, spiritual force in our own day?” Well, in one of the not very advanced states in India, near the beginning of the century, they wanted to introduce cholera injections, but the conservatives vigorously opposed this. They said, “No, this has never been done.” Now, to force this would have meant to impose it, by law, against the opposition of most of the people and against the opposition of the intellectual and Brahmin class. It would have run on against this opposition for a long, long time. It would have created great trouble. But the prime minister, Panikkar, was himself a scholar of Vedanta and a religious man; and he practised meditation, he meditated, and he came up with a solution. “We have never done this before, we have never done this before”, that was the nature of the conservative opposition.

So he collected a team of young pundits and he said to them, “Now, I want you to go through the very ancient medical texts, Charaka, Sushruta and others, and find out whether there is anything at all like this idea of a cholera inoculation.” So they busily scoured the texts; and they found that, in fact, in very early times, Hindu medicine had practised smallpox inoculation, breaking the surface of the skin. So then he organised a great debate with the orthodox pundits and his team of young pundits, and they produced these texts.

As he said, “Fortunately, the Indian intellectuals, Brahmins, are logical people. When I showed them that, far from never having done this before, we had done this long before the West thought of it, and that now we would be reviving something we had done before, they withdrew all their opposition and they joined vigorously in the campaign to have everybody inoculated.”

Well, this is a parallel to the Kangxi example which our teacher gives of spiritual force. Through the meditation practices, the spiritual inspiration, we begin to see clearly. When we begin to see clearly, most of the difficulties in our life begin to disappear. For instance, one teacher used to say, “There is no need to practise humility. Just look at the facts”, and the facts are that the triumph with which people can become so conceited are, in fact, minute things when we look round and see what others have done.

Now, this is a little bit of an introduction on force. So it is to spiritualise physical force and make mental force independent of the boxing gloves, to be able to think clearly and simply and purely and then to forget. Then there is spiritual inspiration – the example given of searching in the ancient texts in order to checkmate and, in fact, to bring into cooperation the conservative opposition. Now, as we are working through the meditation handbook, I have given these examples of force, because Dr Shastri discusses it in his handbook in connection with meditation.

Now, the next thing, we are moving onto section two of the meditations. It is assumed that the meditations in section one have been done for at least a fortnight, and we are now changing to a new one. The text says, ‘when you have some facility in the meditations in part one’, so we are assuming it and now moving to the second one: the breathing practice which purifies and steadies the mind. Both, those two things, purifies and steadies the mind – it’s the same. We take twenty-one breaths.

Now, our teacher, in introducing this breathing practice at the beginning of the passage in the handbook, had this to say: “Man is a replica of the Universe. As there are solar systems and galactic and other systems in the Universe, so are they represented in man. Not only that, but there is a direct correspondence between man and all the centres of the Universe… When you have taken the twenty-one breaths in relaxation and have opened up your physiological and mental structures to the whole Universe, with which they are connected, you will feel a kind of peace, a kind of delight, which is not created by contact of the senses with any object.”

Now, the practice which he gives is, first of all to focus the mind on the navel. We can bunch the fingers to help the focus, and press in just below the navel, about half-an-inch below the navel, and push the muscles against the fingers. Then there is a little after-sensation there. Now, if we just do that and bring the mind to this point – bunch the fingers, press in just below the navel, and then keep the attention on this point for about a minute. ‘Om’.

Then, to sit reasonably upright, in a balanced position. Make a long breath in, not unreasonably long. Take the breath in, and feel that there is a current coming in with the breath at the navel point, coming up to this point between the eyebrows we concentrated on before. The breath doesn’t actually enter there;, but there is a current; and by feeling the breath, feeling with the breath, we can most easily come to feel that.

Now, if you would like to just try. Touch the navel, and now take an inbreath, and feel that the breath is coming up like a column at the centre of the body up to here; at the end of the full breath, to here. Then no visualisation; the breath is released easily. One breath, then again, another breath, and so we do twenty-one in this way. If you get out of breath, just stop for a moment and breathe in a natural rhythm for two or three breaths, then begin again. If you find you pass twenty-one, just go on past twenty-one. When you are doing it at home, you will do it for exactly twenty-one, but obviously people have different rhythms. ‘Om’.

Our teacher said this practice opens up the mental structures to the whole Universe. We can say, “Oh, I can’t be expected to believe that”, but we are not asked to believe that. We are given an experiment by which we can confirm at first small things; and then it seems reasonable to us that if small things are confirmed, greater things can be confirmed also.
You can say, “Well, if they are going to be confirmed, why put it in at the beginning?” Because if they are not put in, if we do these practices and some small result happens, and we haven’t been told of anything like this, they will begin to think, “Oh, something is happening which isn’t known about.” Then they may become confused or they may feel that they are on a path which is not known. On this path, everything, all the stages, are known, and hints are given so that when there is some small confirmation, we can recognise it and we shall not be confused.

The ancients do not concentrate on learning principles of nature which they could conquer to make life more comfortable and longer. They thought of life as a school in which we were to learn purity, straightforwardness, a cooperation and, finally, an enlightenment which would show us that this world is not absolutely real, but is a magic show put on by the Lord. They concentrated on those things.

In about 600 BC a king, [Vashvapatti], who feels he must justify some criticisms of his kingdom, he says, “Well, there are no thieves in my kingdom”; and one can feel, “Well, anybody could say that”, but we know that in 300 BC, the Greek ambassador to the Court of King, Emperor Chandragupta, was there for five years. He was Greek and he reports that he never saw or heard of a single case of theft, in all the time he was there. He also says there were no records of contracts. People kept their word. If a man didn’t keep his word, there was no penalty; but everybody knew that this was one who didn’t keep his word, and people would not do business with him or make any agreements with him at all. So in those ways, they did concentrate on those qualities. We can say the standard was perhaps a little bit advanced with what we have today.

Now, the main meditation after this breathing practice, which gives steadiness and a clearness to the mind – the main meditation practice is: the Self, myself, my real Self, is a blazing fire; and thoughts, emotions, all feelings, they are like sparks thrown out by the fire. Nothing is coming to me; it is all thrown up into the sky. Sparks remain brilliant for a moment, and then they vanish. So there is a spirit within us, like a blazing fire throwing out sparks, and as we meditate on it, it becomes steadier.

Now, he suggests that in the beginning we should just form this picture. If you like, for about a minute, form this picture of a Self, the true Self, as a flame with a blazing flame or fire within. ‘Om’.

Then he says when this picture has been made, for a few breaths, feel, as the breath comes in, that it is fanning the flame and it becomes bright. The next inbreath fans the flame again and it becomes bright. We do this for three or four breaths, and then sit – the flame is burning steadily in freedom, complete freedom.

If you would like to try again – three or four breaths, feel the breath is fanning the flame, brighter and brighter. Then it is burning brightly in space and freedom. ‘Om’.

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