The practice of concentration can most effectively be undertaken and efficiently continued only when three necessary conditions are fulfilled by the meditator. These are narrated here in the verses in the sequence they have to be practised.
CONTROLLING ALL THE SENSES — Each sense-organ is an aperture in the physical body. The porous skin, the ear, the nose, the eyes, and the taste-buds are the five main gates through which the external stimuli reach the mental zone to agitate it. To shut these five doors through discrimination and detachment is the first process, before the meditator can ever hope to enter the field of meditation. These are the five inlets through which not only the external world storms in and agitates the mind, but our mind also runs out to wander among its sensuous ditches. When once these tunnels-of-disturbance are blockaded, the new flow of disturbances is shut out.
CONFINING THE MIND IN THE HEART — Even though the mind is not now directly open for any onslaught by fresh contingents of sense stimuli, it is capable of getting disturbed due to the previous impressions that it might have gathered in its past experiences in the finite world of change and pleasure. Therefore the mind, the instrument of emotion and feeling, it is advised, is to be confined in the ‘heart.’
The term ‘heart’in Vedanta is not the pumping-organ that maintains the circulatory system in a physical structure. In the field of literature and philosophy, heart is a conceptual centre in the mind from where all positive and noble thoughts of love and tenderness, kindness and charity, devotion and surrender, constantly spring up. When once the gross stimuli are held back from entering the mind, the seeker is advised not to choke his faculty of emotion and feeling but to DIVINISE IT. Let the mind function only in the dignity and status of the heart. It has already been discussed how positive thinking brings into the mind the least amount of disturbance. Negative thoughts are those that bring into the mind stormy conditions of agitation and restlessness.
WITHDRAWING ALL THE PRANAS, “THE VITAL MANIFESTATIONS OF LIFE THROUGH THE DIFFERENT EQUIPMENTS,” INTO THE INTELLECT means the total withdrawal of the intellect from all its identifications with the lower, gained by dissociating ourselves from all our perceptions, etc. This is accomplished through a process of totally engaging the mind-intellect in the contemplation of the Self. When the meditator’s mind, drawn away from the sense-disturbances, is purified in the realm of the diviner thoughts, and when such a mind is perfectly controlled and held steady by an intellect gushing out towards the contemplation of the Self, as explained earlier, (Ibid.
-9, 10) the existing mental condition is said to be “occupied in the practice of concentration” (Yoga-dharanam).
Every meditator who can make an attempt at forgetting his immediate sensual surroundings, and, surcharged with joy and contentment, can bring his mind under the total control of his discriminative intellect, can mentally chant OM with ease and enthusiasm, and observe the rising OM-waves in this otherwise silenced mind… is the student fit for the worship of OM. The following line in its amplitude of significance clearly brings out the same view-point.
HE WHO DEPARTS, LEAVING THE BODY — While chanting and contemplating upon the significance of OM, the seeker becomes so detached from all his delusory identifications with the false matter-envelopments that the ego is sublimated; this is the true death “LEAVING THE BODY.” In his single-pointed, all-out, self-forgetting contemplation upon the significance of OM — as the Substratum on which is played the drama of life and death, projected by the mischievous mind — the seeker, in Krishna’s own words, “ATTAINS THE SUPREME GOAL.”
IS SELF RE-DISCOVERY SO DIFFICULT EQUALLY FOR ALL PEOPLE WHO ARE WALKING THE PATH OF MEDITATION?
