Will you practice meditation? Then note the following: keep the body in a restful position. It is a spiritual loss, to be weak or ill. Be not in a hurry. Sit down to meditate when you are not tired. Open the windows of your mind and heart and quietly take in what comes. Hence, the value of silence. Silence is essential to health—spiritual and physical. “The atman (Spirit) is silence,” says an Upanishad.
Spiritual and nervous energy is drained in noise. Every prayer in the ancient books moves in an atmosphere of “Shanti, Shanti, Shanti (peace).” Beautiful thoughts inspired the rishis in the forest—ashramas: they were centres of silence. Place your aspirations and difficulties at the feet of the lord. Your sins, too. Don’t be afraid to take to his presence the darkness within you. Sit at his feet as you are. Sit under his influence. Call up an object, an incident, say, from Krishna’s life or Christ’s or Buddha’s—a symbol, say, the flute or the cross or the circle or the lotus. In such incidents and symbols, you may touch the great ones. They are of his family. Do not think they are dead. The great ones live. Read their lives and sayings. Offer yourself as a sacrifice—every day.
The following disciplines will strengthen the power of meditation. Introspection, this will develop a receptivity to higher influences. Sat-sang, graft a branch into a good stalk. What follows? The branch becomes a part of the living organism. In a similar way, we become spiritually living when “grafted” in the sat-sang: our minds and hearts grow into the spiritual.
Prayer of silence is much neglected in these days. Such prayer is the wireless of the soul.
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