Vedanta

Nowadays every mother's son and daughter is the bemused intimate of the amoeba and the crab-nebula. With uncanny mechanical eyes we now peer outward at the wheeled forms of untold billions of galaxies, and inward at the dizzying choreography of subatomic particles hurtling through the void. In a matter of decades we have decoded the coiled DNA templates of ourselves, and we have caught fugitive glimpses of that place east of Hercules where space curves in upon itself and time collapses.

From time to time, it's good to ask basic questions: Where exactly am I going? Why? Is this conveyance really going to get me there? Had I rather be doing something else?

"In order to promote the kingdom," writes Paul Knitter—former Divine Word missionary and current professor of theology at an American Catholic university—"Christians must witness to Christ. All peoples, all religions, must know of him in order to grasp the full content of God's presence in history.…But in the new ecclesiology and in the new model for truth, one admits also that all peoples should know of Buddha, of Muhammad, of Krishna."

Harmony is a precondition for peace, and peace opens the door to joy. All of us know this from our own experience. In matters of health or study, work or worship, harmony is what we strive to achieve. When harmony is lost, the result is stress and anxiety, pain and sorrow.

Concentration can be practiced on any object. In fact, in our daily life we are concentrating on something or other most of the time. This kind of concentration is more or less unconscious and is done under the compulsion of desires. True meditation differs from it in being a conscious process involving the detachment of the will from lower desires and its focussing at a higher center of consciousness.

Before we begin the study of different types of meditation it is necessary to keep in mind two important points. One is that meditation is not just ordinary concentration but a special type of internal concentration.

Knowledge originates in two ways. One is direct perception in which the senses receive energy from the external world. The other is memory, which is the result of the sprouting of samskaras or latent impressions of past experience lying buried in the mind. Just as a tape-recorder when played back reproduces the original sounds, so also latent impressions in the mind when activated recreate the original experience.

Meditation is the bridge that connects the lower mind with the higher mind. Through that the aspirant crosses over from the din and distractions of the sense-bound world to the world of stillness and silence, from the world of darkness to the world of everlasting light. All preliminary spiritual disciplines end in meditative awareness.

When you sit for meditation and close your eyes, almost the first thing you notice is that your awareness is not continuous. It does not consist of a single, homogenous stream but flows as different, sometimes disconnected, streams of thought. Psychologists call this phenomenon "dissociation." By dissociation is meant not the appearance of various pictures in the mind, but the emotional sectioning of the mind and the identification of the self with each division.

Dhyana or meditation is the conscious maintenance of a steady stream of the same thought about an object at a higher center of consciousness.¹ What we call thinking is the manipulation of a series of thought-waves called vrittis.