We have all been hearing from childhood of such things as love, peace, charity, equality, and universal brotherhood; but they have become to us mere words without meaning, words which we repeat like parrots, and it has become quite natural for us to do so. We cannot help it.
We hear all around us about practical religion, and analysing all that, we find that it can be brought down to one conception – charity to our fellow beings.
We may convert every house in the country into a charity asylum, we may fill the land with hospitals, but the misery of man will still continue to exist until man’s character changes.
What good being object of charity? Give away, ne’er turn to ask in return, Should there be the wealth treasured in thy heart.
First, meditation should be of a negative nature. Think away everything. Analyse everything that comes in the mind by the sheer action of the will. Next, assert what we really are-existence, knowledge, and bliss-being, knowing, and loving.
Holy meditation helps to burn out all mental impurities.
In real meditation you forget the body. You may be cut to pieces and not feel it at all. You feel such pleasure in it. You become so light. This perfect rest we will get in meditation.
Just as I sit down to meditate, all the vilest subjects in the world come up. The whole thing is nauseating. Why should the mind think thoughts I do not want it to think? I am as it were a slave to the mind.
Meditation is a sort of prayer and prayer is meditation. The highest meditation is to think of nothing. If you can remain one moment without thought, great power will come.
Meditation is the means of unification of the subject and object. Meditate.
Meditation means the mind is turned back upon itself. The mind stops all the thought-waves and the world stops. Your consciousness expands. Every time you meditate you will keep your growth.
Meditation, you know, comes by a process of imagination. You go through all these processes of purification of the elements – making the one melt into the other, that into the next higher, that into mind, that into spirit, and then you are spirit.
Thought ceases in meditation; even the mind’s elements are quite quiet. Blood circulation stops. His breath stops, but he is not dead.
To realize the spirit as spirit is practical religion. Everything else is good so far as it leads to this one grand idea. That realization is to be attained by renunciation, by meditation-renunciation of all the senses, cutting the knots, the chains that bind us down to matter.
Whose meditation is real and effective? Who can really surrender to the will of God? Only the person whose mind has been purified by selfless work.
Our Soul is a spark of the Divine. It is pure and perfect. Evil deeds merely obstruct our vision of the true nature of our Soul. Through good deeds we can become conscious of this perfection again.
A sapling must be hedged about for protection, but when it becomes a tree, a hedge would be a hindrance. So there is no need to criticise and condemn the old forms.
Even the lowest of the Hindus, the Pariah, has less of the brute in him than a Briton in a similar social status. This is the result of an old and excellent religious civilization. This evolution to a higher spiritual state is possible only through discipline and education.
Know this also to be one of the spiritual practices, a discipline for God – realisation. Its aim also is Self – realisation.
Some men, who begin by saying that the world is a hell, often end by saying that it is a heaven when they succeed in the practice of self-control.