Bhagawan Sri Ramana Maharshi

[Guest guest]

MEDITATION

 

Q: All teachers advise to meditate. What is the

purpose of meditation?

 

M: We know the outer world of sensation and actions,

but our inner world of thoughts and feeling we know very

little. The primary purpose of meditation is to become conscious of,

and familiar with, our inner life. The ultimate purpose is to reach

the source of life and consciousness.

 

Incidentally, practice of meditation deeply affects our

character. We are slaves to what we do not know; of what we know we

are masters. Whatever vice of weakness in ourselves

we discover and understand its causes and its working, we

overcome it by the very knowing; the unconscious dissolves

when brought into the conscious. The dissolution of the

unconscious releases energy; the mind feels adequate and

becomes quiet.

 

Q: What is the use of a quiet mind?

 

M: When the mind is quiet, we come to know ourselves as the pure

witness.

We withdraw from the experience and its

experiencer and stand apart in pure awareness, which is between and

beyond the two. The personality, based on self-identification, on

imagining oneself to be something: " I am this, I am that', continues,

but only as a part of the objective world. Its identification with the

witness snaps.

 

Q: As I can make out, I live on many levels and life on each level

requires energy. The Self by its very nature delights in everything

and its energies flow outwards. Is not the purpose of meditation to

dam up the energies on the higher levels, or to push them back and up,

so as to enable the higher levels to prosper also?

 

M: It is not so much the matter of levels as of gunas (qualities).

Meditation is a sattvic activity and aims at complete elimination of

tamas (inertia) and rajas (motivity). Pure sattva (harmony), is

perfect freedom from sloth and restlessness.

 

Q: How to strengthen and purify the sattva?

 

M: The sattva is pure and strong always. It is like the sun. It may

seem obscured by clouds and dust, but only from the point of view of

the perceiver. Deal with the causes of obscuration, not with the sun.

 

Q: What is the use of sattva?

 

M: What is the use of truth, goodness, harmony, beauty? They are

their own goal. They manifest spontaneously and effortlessly, when

things are left to themselves, are not interfered with, not shunned ,

or wanted, or conceptualized, but just experienced in full awareness.

Such awareness itself is sattva. It does not make use of things and

people - it fulfils them.

 

Q: Since I cannot improve sattva, am I to deal with tamas and Rajas

only? How do I deal with them?

 

M: By watching their influence in you and on you. Be aware of them in

operation, watch their expression in your thoughts, words and deeds,

and gradually their grip on you will lessen and the clear light of

sattva will emerge, It is nether a difficult, not protracted process;

earnestness is the only condition of Success.