A fixed time is important

Whether you meditate in the morning or the evening, it is of paramount importance to have a fixed time for your meditation. Even an infant will cry for his mother's milk at a fixed hour. If you own a store, if you always open the door at nine o'clock, then others will have confidence that they can come at nine o'clock and you will really be open. Everything has its own hour. Your inner being and your Inner Pilot, the Supreme, always observe. If you stick to a particular hour, then the Supreme has confidence in you. The Supreme says, "At this hour he is not loitering around; he is meditating. If I offer him something at this hour, he will definitely be there to receive it."

You and God should agree to a certain hour for your daily meeting. When He comes at that hour, if you are fast asleep, He will forgive you. If you are not there tomorrow, again you will be forgiven. But you will not be able to excuse yourself. Your oneness with God will not allow you to forgive yourself. Your soul will cause you such pangs that you will feel miserable. Your soul's love for the Highest is very important to you. When your Eternal Friend is coming, the host wants to be ready. The human mind is a very treacherous thing. Left to itself, the ignorant, obscure mind will try to prevent you from doing the spiritually correct thing. It will find many excuses to keep you from fulfilling your soul's wish. But if your aspiration is sincere and intense, the discipline of having a set time to meditate will help you fight against the lethargy and waywardness of the mind.

When you don't give countless outer things your attention, you will see that truth is looking right at you and giving you the strength to discipline your life.

Suppose you want to meditate at six-thirty. This is your chosen hour. If you get up at seven, your own lethargy and idleness will take away all your inspiration. On the one hand, your lethargy will try to justify itself. It will enter into your conscious mind and say, "Oh, I came home very late; that is why I could not get up." Or, "For the last six days I got up at six-thirty. Since God is all kindness, today He will forgive me." There are so many ways your mind can justify getting up late. But even if you came home late, that doesn't mean that you won't do first things first. The first thing is meditation; the first thing is God.

Once you start your journey, if you do not keep moving toward your goal, then you are lost. You may think, "Today I am tired, so I will stop here and rest. Tomorrow again I will go on." But you have to know that ignorance is more alert than your own aspiration. Once you start justifying yourself, there is no end to it. Regularity will tell you that the goal is real. But if you are punctual, immediately a kind of dynamism and movement is there. Your regularity is like a motor. Because you have a motor, you know that at any time you can drive. Punctuality is when you actually turn the key and start the motor. With regularity you get only a vague idea that you will do it. But with punctuality, you actually do it.

If you are regular and punctual in your meditation, you will notice your own progress. If you can meditate sincerely and soulfully at a fixed hour every day, a time will come when you will become an expert. At that time, you will be able to meditate while doing anything, and you won't need a fixed hour. Eventually you will be able to meditate twenty-four hours a day even though you are talking to people and doing your multifarious daily activities. But for that you need many years-perhaps many lifetimes-of practice.

No path can be too hard for you if you have one God-gift: faith in yourself.