Concentration and developing single-pointedness are just steps along the way that help prepare the mind for meditation. But choosing an activity we enjoy and throwing ourselves into it wholeheartedly is a good place to begin. The higher and nobler that activity, the more our minds are purified.
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Meditation on the whole is perceived as a means of relieving stress. Rarely is it understood to be not a process but an effortless awareness of one’s true nature – the Self.
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The some temperaments, morning hours are the best for meditation, while for others, due to the very program of their life’s duties, late evenings are perhaps most suitable. Some consider caves to be the best place for them to quieten their minds. To others, out in the field, under the open sky, seems to be the most conducive place to meditate.
In fact, these external factors of time and place have really nothing to do with the practice of meditation – but students in their initial attempts receive a false psychological help from these factors. The scriptures too, encourage them. Soon the seeker will come to realize that any prejudice and taboos of his earlier days were but his own idle phobia.
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Ultimately through meditation alone, prophets and saints became immortal men of wisdom, power and glory. If one saint or sage of the past could thus raise himself above the average in his own generation, everyone of us, as human beings, has the right to claim this privilege as our sacred heritage. Meditate and grow! There is no end to possibilities.
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A smart young man has to pour out his best at all times in order to build up his life, and later on he has to maintain the very life that has been raised by him. This can be exhausting and weakening unless he regularly replenishes the brain-drain and replaces the mental wastage.
Therefore, for a few, but sweet moments, cheerfully and joyously learn to halt the mind from all its wanderings in the usual realms of objects, emotions and thoughts. Under such a balmy quiet, the lacerated mind recovers and refills itself with a strange light a new power. At such moments of inner tranquility, the mind can reach out to thoughts profound, which are ordinarily too high for us to readily clasp in the sweep of our personal understanding. When we are still and our mind is quiet, then alone the infinite resources of the total-mind will flow down to flood our within.
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Anyone in the world who invests in his personality, which is thus grown rich in concentration, intellectual poise, mental peace and integrity of character, must surely succeed and reach the realms beyond the ordinary purview of the average man.
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Let us systematically pursue the significant practice of listening to the silence of the mind, or hearing the dynamic hush of the silent bosom. Let us rest therein peacefully for ten to fifteen minutes, let us learn to relax and retire from all our worries and fears, anxieties and lusts, passions and pains. Let us persuade ourselves to be relaxed, happy, confident and gay as an innocent child playing at the feet of its mother.
Source – Chinmayam Magazine September 2008 Issue