Questions and Answers

Questions and Answers

I am a beginner in meditation, and I find that I cannot control my thoughts. How can I have a successful meditation?

If you are a beginner, try to allow only divine thoughts to enter into you, and not undivine thoughts. It is better not to have any thoughts at all during meditation, but it is next to impossible for the beginner to have a mind without thoughts. So you can begin by having good thoughts: "I want to be good, I want to be more spiritual, I want to love God more, I want to exist only for Him." Let these ideas grow within you. Start with one or two divine ideas: "Today I will be absolutely pure. I will not allow any bad thought, but only peace, to enter into me." When you allow one divine thought to grow inside you, you will see that immediately your consciousness changes for the better.

Start with divine ideas: "Today I want to feel that I am really a child of God." This will not be a mere feeling but an actual reality. Feel that the Virgin Mary is holding the child Christ. Feel that the Divine Mother is holding you in her arms like a baby. Then feel: "I really want to have wisdom-light. I want to walk with my Father. Wherever He goes I will go with Him. I will get light from Him."

Some people don't have ideas like this. Creative thoughts and ideas don't come. There is just a vacuum. You may ask which is better—to have many silly messages in the mind or no messages at all. But there is a negative, inconscient way of meditating which has no life in it. This is not the silent mind. It is not productive. In real meditation, the mind is silent but at the same time it is conscious.


Ideally, should one reject all thoughts during meditation?

The best thing is to try not to allow any thought to enter into your mind, whether it is a good thought or a bad thought. It is as though you are in your room, and somebody is knocking at your door. You have no idea whether it is an enemy or a friend. Divine thoughts are your true friends, and undivine thoughts are your enemies. You would like to allow your friends to enter, but you do not know who your friends are. And even if you do know who your friends are, when you open the door for them you may find that your enemies are also there.

Then, before your friends can cross the threshold, your enemies will also enter. You may not even notice any undivine thoughts, but while the divine thoughts are entering, the undivine thoughts, like thieves, will also secretly enter and create tremendous confusion. Once they have entered, it is very difficult to chase them out. For that you need the strength of solid spiritual discipline. For fifteen minutes you may cherish spiritual thoughts and then, in just a fleeting second, an undivine thought will come. So the best thing is not to allow any thoughts at all during your meditation. Just keep the door bolted from inside.

There was a time when I loved you, 0 my thought-world. But now I love the beauty of a silence-mind and the purity of a gratitude-heart.

Your real friends will not go away. They will think, "Something is wrong with him. Usually he is so kind to us. So there must be some special reason why he is not opening the door." They have sympathetic oneness, so they will wait indefinitely. But your enemies will wait just for a few minutes. Then they will lose all patience and say, "It is beneath our dignity to waste our time here." These enemies have their pride. They will say, "Who cares? Who needs him? Let us go and attack somebody else." If you pay no attention to a monkey, the monkey will eventually go away and bite somebody else. But your friends will say, "No, we need him and he needs us. We will wait indefinitely for him." So after a few minutes your enemies will go away. Then you can open the door and your dearest friends will be there waiting for you.

If you meditate regularly and devotedly, after some time you will become inwardly strong. Then you will be able to welcome the divine thoughts and chase away the undivine thoughts. If you are getting a thought of divine love, divine peace or divine power, then you will allow that thought to enter into you and expand. You will let it play and grow in the garden of your mind. While the thought is playing and you are playing with it, you will see that you are growing into it. Each divine thought that you let in will create a new and fulfilling world for you, and will surcharge your entire being with divinity.

After a few years of meditation you will have enough inner strength to let in even the undivine thoughts. When an undivine thought comes into your mind, you will not reject it; you will transform it. When somebody undivine knocks at your door, if you have enough strength to compel him to behave properly once he enters, then you can open the door for him. Eventually you have to accept the challenge and conquer these wrong thoughts; otherwise, they will come back to bother you again and again.

I am so proud of my mind. Why? Because it has started enjoying little things: a simple thought, a pure heart, a humble life.

You have to be a divine potter. If the potter is afraid to touch the clay, then the clay will remain always clay and the potter will not be able to offer anything to the world. But if the potter is not afraid, he can transform the clay into something beautiful and useful. It is your bounden duty to transform undivine thoughts, but only when you are in a position to do so safely.


What is the best way to deal with undivine thoughts that come during meditation?

The moment a negative or unaspiring thought enters your mind, you should try to use your aspiration to reject it, because during meditation everything is very intense. While you are talking or engaging in ordinary activities, you can have any kind of thought, for your thoughts are not intense at those times. But if any undivine thought comes during meditation, the power of your meditation enlarges and intensifies it. Your spiritual life grows weaker the moment you allow your mind to indulge in unaspiring thoughts during meditation. If a good thought comes, you can try to enlarge it, or you can try to lift it up to a higher level. But if you have a bad thought, try to cut it off Immediately.

How will you do this? If the thought that is attacking you is coming from the outer world, try to muster your soul's will from your heart and bring it right in front of your forehead. The moment your soul's will is seen by the thought which is trying to enter into you, that thought is bound to disappear.

But if you do not have the inner capacity to do this, do not become upset. Sometimes when wrong thoughts come during meditation, the seeker feels that the strength of the wrong thought is so powerful that even if he has meditated for two or three hours, it is all useless. One ordinary thought or wrong thought comes in and he feels that he has lost everything. This is foolish. As long as you do not allow your mind to dwell on them, you should not give any importance to wrong thoughts at that particular moment.

If emotional thoughts, lower vital thoughts or sex thoughts enter into you during meditation, and you are not able to keep them out or throw them out, try to feel that these thoughts are as insignificant as ants. Just pay no attention to them. If you can feel that the spiritual power that you have received from your meditation is infinitely stronger than the power of the wrong thoughts, then these wrong thoughts cannot utilise your meditative power for their own purpose. But what often happens is that you become terribly afraid of these thoughts and dwell on them. By thinking about them and being afraid of them, you give them power.

It is true that wrong thoughts can become intense during meditation. But you can easily bring to the fore good thoughts that are infinitely more powerful. During meditation when wrong thoughts come to you, immediately try to recollect one of your sweetest or highest divine experiences. Enter into your own experience which you had a few days ago or a few years ago, and try to bring it into your mental consciousness. You will see that while you are fully immersed in your own experience, the thought from the lower vital plane is bound to leave you because the highest, deepest, purest joy is in your consciousness. Divine joy is infinitely more powerful than pleasure. The nectar-delight of your own spiritual experience is infinitely stronger than your lower vital forces. In this way you can solve the problem without leaving your meditation.

Wrong thoughts come to attack you and take away your divine feelings, divine thoughts and divine power, But when you pay all attention to divine thoughts and encourage and cherish only divine feelings, in many cases the wrong thoughts just go away. They say, "He does not care for us. We have no place here." Wrong thoughts also have their pride, and they are terribly jealous of divine thoughts. They do not care for you if you do not care for them.

So far I have been talking about thoughts that come from outside. But sometimes undivine thoughts arise from within. In the beginning it is difficult to distinguish between thoughts that are coming from outside and those that come from within. But gradually you will be able to feel the difference. The thoughts that are coming from outside can be driven back faster than the thoughts that attack you from within. But if impure and unlit thoughts arise from inside you, then you can do one of two things. You can try to feel that there is a hole right at the top of your head. Then make the thoughts flow out like a river which goes only in one direction and does not come back. They are then gone, and you are freed from them. The other method is to feel that you are the boundless ocean, all calm and quiet, and that the thoughts are like fish on the surface. The ocean pays no attention to the ripples of the fish.


Why is it that I am constantly bothered by thoughts?

You are constantly bothered by thoughts because you are trying to meditate inside your mind. The very nature of the mind is to welcome thoughts—good thoughts, bad thoughts, divine thoughts, undivine thoughts. If you want to control the mind with your human will, then it will be like asking a monkey or a fly not to bother you. The very nature of a monkey is to bite and pinch; the very nature of a fly is to bother people.

The mind needs a superior power to keep it quiet. This superior power is the power of the soul. You have to bring to the fore the light of the soul from inside your heart. You are the possessor of two rooms: the heart-room and the mind-room. Right now the mind-room is obscure, unlit and impure; it is unwilling to open to the light. But the heart-room is always open to the light, for that is where the soul abides. Instead of concentrating on the mind, if you can concentrate and meditate on the reality that is inside the heart, then this reality will come forward.

If you stay in the mind-room all the time with the hope of illumining it from within, you will waste your time. If I want to light a candle, I must use a flame that is already burning, already illumined. The heart-room, fortunately, is already illumined. Once you are well-established in the heart, when you are surcharged with the soul's light, at that time you can enter into the mind-room to illumine the mind. But first you have to bring to the fore the soul's light, which is available most powerfully in the heart. The light of the soul will not torture or punish the mind. On the contrary, it will act like a most affectionate mother who feels that the imperfections other child are her own imperfections. The heart will offer its light to the mind in order to transform the nature of the mind.


I try to keep my mind from wandering during meditation, but I have very little success.

You are not exercising the capacity of your heart; you are only exercising the mind's power. Very often when I am concentrating on you, I see that your mind is rotating like a wheel. When the mind rotates, it is very difficult for the Supreme to act in your mind. But when your heart aspires even for a second, the Supreme opens the door and enters.

From now on, please try to feel that you do not have a mind at all. This does not mean that you will be like a brute or an animal. No! The human mind is not necessary because you have a superior instrument called the heart. If you can stay in your heart for five minutes, even if you do not pray or meditate, your consciousness will be raised.

The heart is like a fountain of peace, joy and love. You can sit at the base of the fountain and just enjoy. There is no need to pray to the Supreme to give you this or that, for you will get all the things that you want—and infinitely more—from this fountain. But you will get them in the Supreme's own way. If you can please the Supreme by staying always in the presence of your heart-fountain, your desires will be fulfilled most luminously. They may be the same desires that you have always had, but they will be touched on a very high level with luminosity. Before He fulfils these, the Supreme will transform each desire into aspiration with His light.

During a meditation, if there is a noise or disturbance, is it better to include it in the meditation or try to shut it out and pursue the meditation?

Each seeker has to know his own standard of meditation. If you are a beginner, you should feel that anything that is not part of the meditation is like an intruder, and you should not allow an intruder to enter and disturb you. But if you are very advanced, and there is a disturbing sound or noise during your meditation, you can go deep into the sound itself and try to assimilate it. If you have the capacity, then in your own consciousness you can transform the attack of a powerful and challenging foreign element into an inner music, which will add to your meditation.


If I get creative ideas while I am meditating, should I follow them or should I just try to feel with my heart?

As soon as you get a positive idea, you should I consider it as a blessing from the Supreme. But s you have to know what kind of inspiration it is. If it is an illumining inspiration, then you should follow it. If it is a creative inspiration to do something really good, then follow it. Any creative thought, anything that gives you a higher goal, should be followed. If a particular inspiration brings something new into your life and is able to transform your life, then that inspiration you should follow.

You may feel that inspiration is only in the mind whereas aspiration is only in the heart. But aspiration can be in the mind and inspiration can be in the heart. Inspiration can come to aspiration and vice versa. But inspiration must be of a very high type. Otherwise it B cannot help you in your meditation at all. During meditation if you are inspired to make most delicious cookies, this kind of inspiration is a waste of time.

If it is an illumining inspiration, then please take these ail creative ideas as your own progress. When you get creative ideas, you have to know that they are creations from another world which want to manifest on the physical plane. When your meditation is over, you should write down the ideas. Afterwards you can elaborate on them.

Is it bad to expect some particular thing when we meditate?

During your meditation just try to throw your inner and outer existence into the Supreme. You do not have to think of anything; just throw yourself into the sea of light, peace, bliss and power. But do not expect any particular divine quality or result, because then you are binding yourself and binding God. That is because human expectation is very limited. When you expect, immediately the mind acts, and then your receptivity becomes very limited. But if you do not expect, then the problem of receptivity becomes God's problem. At that time He is bound to give you everything in boundless measure, and at the same time to create the receptivity in you to receive what He has to offer.

The highest type of meditation is done in silence, with one objective: to please God in His own way. When you meditate, if you can feel that you are pleasing God in God's own way, then that is the best type of meditation. Otherwise, if you start meditating in order to get joy, you will get joy; but you will not get boundless joy, precisely because you have not pleased your Eternal Beloved, God, in His own way. What the Saviour Christ said is absolutely the highest truth: "Let Thy Will be done." Before you meditate, if you can offer the result of your meditation to the Source and say, "I wish to become Your perfect instrument so You can fulfil Yourself in and through me in Your own way," this is the highest, absolutely the highest, type of meditation.

Your mind has a flood of questions. There is but one teacher who can answer them. Who is the teacher? Your silence-loving heart.