PRACTICING MEDITATION..

Sit down, relax your body, feelings and thoughts by whatever methods you know. A few minutes of calm deep rhythmical breaths will make you more relaxed. When advanced on the path you will not need all these preliminaries. Now try to look at your thoughts, as if from the outside, as if they are not yours. Watch your thoughts calmly, without using force, and without being carried away by them or being emotionally involved with them. Whenever you find yourself deviating from the meditation and thinking about something else, gently bring your mind back to the task. Do this at least 10 minutes each day and then gradually lengthen the time up to 20-25 minutes.

The next step is to think about the body, the feelings and thoughts and then reject them as not your 'I'. When looking at some object and thinking about it, you cannot be that object, you are separate from it. If you think about your body, it means that something separate from it is thinking about it. This also applies to your thoughts, feelings, beliefs and ego. Keep thinking in this way and you will come to the conclusion that you are not all these components.

Thoughts, feelings and beliefs change, sometimes radically, but yet you still exist as yourself, you retain the same awareness or consciousness of your being. The body's cells change too, but you, the essential you, remain the same. The I is eternal, and all else is not. Everything comes and go, but your 'I', your feeling of being alive and existing, when not identified or mixed with anything such as body, thought, or feeling, is always the same, never changing. This I is your real Self. One minute you may be thinking or feeling something, the next minute another thought or feeling pops up. But who is aware of the thoughts and the feelings? Think about it, and then just try to be aware of the answer with no words or thoughts.

Then ask yourself "who am I?" and wait for the answer. The answer is not verbal. It is just a realization with no words or thoughts. No inner discussion is necessary. It is an intuitive knowledge, with absolute certainty, in a direct and experimental way, of who you really are. Then you feel the Bliss of the Eternal. This state is called by many names by different tradition, Cosmic Consciousness, Samadhi, Nirvana Self-realization, to quote a few. The question "Who am I", as a trigger to come to Self-knowledge, was the path advocated by Sri Ramana Maharshi the great Sage of India.

The human mind has learnt to think in complicated ways and expect complicated solutions and theories about life and its meaning. All these ideas have to be rejected if we want to succeed in our endeavor. It is the mind that is creating many theories, worlds, powers and entities. It creates problems and then looks for solutions. We have to get beyond the mind in order to control it and its creations. Freedom from thoughts and a realization of our true eternal One identity, free us from the mind's games.

Meditation has to be practiced with a spirit of detachment and without tension. In time, you will become more aware of your Consciousness, your Real I and act and do everything from its viewpoint, not the ego's point of view. It is really inaccurate to say, " to be aware of your Consciousness" as you are it, you do not experience it as something separate from you, you are It. If you say, I am observing my consciousness, ask yourself who is this observer. You can observe your mind, but not yourself. The mind observes what is happening around, but when you observe your mind, it is actually you, the consciousness that is observing the mind. Please do not regard what I have said as a game of words, because it isn't.

What is to be done is to stop thinking and just Be. 'Be' means, feel your real being, with no identification with your thoughts or personality. This has to be practiced; otherwise whatever you read here will remain as useless and meaningless words. If you are able to stop all your thinking and still remain conscious, forgoing any false identification with what you call your personality and its attachments, and just experience what is left, which is certainly not a vacuum, then that's it. You have what people call 'found yourself'. All what you have to do next is to stabilize in this state, always and under all circumstances.

It is hoped that this short, and rather general article, may be of some help. It is not claimed that this is the only way, not at all. This way may appeal to some. Other paths appeal to others.

At first, meditation is to be performed at special times during the day. At a certain point in your progress you will be able to meditate it at all available moments, when you are not busy with something that needs special attention. Then the moments of blissful silence will start coming, increasing in length, and the breaks between them will get shorter and shorter. One day you may find that you are always in a state of meditation, even while doing other things. This becomes the natural state of your Awareness. No thoughts, only silent mind carried into each task and deed throughout the day, every day.