The Teachings of the Bhagavadgita - 7.1. Swami Krishnananda

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Monday, February 08, 2021. 07:58. AM.
Chapter 7: Meditation – A Discipline of Self-Integration-1.

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The discipline of yoga culminates in meditation, dhyana, which is the subject of the sixth chapter of the Bhagavadgita. The art of yoga is principally the process of self-integration by degrees through the levels of the constitution of one's personality, such that when we reach the point of meditation proper there is a total concentration of the whole of one's being in the direction of the whole of that which one aspires for through this discipline we call 'yoga'. Last time we noted that essentially this is a technique of communing the lower self with the higher self, and I endeavoured to briefly mention the characteristics of the higher self and the way in which we have to understand what this term means. It means many things, and in every sense of the term it has to be taken into consideration when it becomes an object of meditation – gradually by stages. We can today take up the practical side of it as enunciated in the sixth chapter, since the theoretical side is already known to you, to some extent, through our studies conducted earlier.

Meditation is no doubt the fruit of the enterprise called yoga, but it is a fruit of the tree of an inner development into a state of maturity of personality which is prepared for this last attack, as it were, on the problem of truth – of reality. The scattered particularities of human thinking get gathered in this focusing of attention, and we may bring back to our memories here what we understood of the process of vairagya and abhyasa – the detachment which is a requisite in this practice, and a concentration or habituation of consciousness which is simultaneous with it. This mustering in of the forces of one's self, the focusing of them, and the attention to be paid on the object of meditation – all these processes involve a gathering up of whatever we are, in every sense of whatever we are. I am not going to repeat what we studied earlier, since we have not much time and we are to cover the entire study in a few days.

"Whatever we are" is an important sentence to be underlined, and we have to understand first of all what we are, which is another way of saying what 'self' means. We are to understand the self in every sense – in terms of the definition of it as gaunatman, mithya-atman, and mukhya-atman, to which we made reference earlier. So, our self is not merely the imagined location of our consciousness within the body, as it were, but everything that we are, even in an established relationship of ourself – spatially, temporally, socially and otherwise, together with our consciousness of this psychophysical organism – finally to culminate in the mukhya-atman or the primary Self, which is the universality of our essential being.

For the purpose of meditation, a proper place is necessary – ?ucau de?e prati??h?pya sthiram ?sanam ?tmana? (Gita 6.11). ?ucau de?e: In a purified atmosphere, in a conducive environment we have to place ourselves comfortably in a posture for the purpose of this great adventure called meditation. This is a great spiritual worship that we are performing, an ardent invocation of divinity, a soulful devotion that we manifest within ourselves towards the Creator of the Universe, and an inward communion spiritually established between ourselves and all that God has created and God Himself is. So it is a sanctified, sacred, worshipful attitude. It is not a mechanism that we are operating – it is a spirit that gets unfolded in meditation. There is an organic growth, an advancement of personality in the process of meditation, so that we become richer and richer, wider and wider, deeper and deeper, and grow well beyond in our spirit as we advance in meditation. The place that we select for our meditation should be free from distractions. Some more details concerning this matter is available in the Swetaswatara Upanishad. There again we are told that the location for the purpose of our seatedness in meditation should be conducive in the sense that there should be no other avenue to pull our attention in any other direction than the point of concentration we have chosen; this is an important point to remember. There are loves and hatreds, prejudices and emotional tensions to which man is heir and from which no one is totally free. These are important things that we may bear in mind.

To be continued ..

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