A NATURAL PROCESS OF THE MIND

 
Meditation has often been misunderstood as being a mechanical process of forcing the mind upon some idea or object. It is therefore only natural that most people should find great difficulty in their attempts to coerce the mind in a particular direction or to pin it down to one particular thing. Any purely mechanical handling of the mind is not only irksome but is ultimately bound to be unsuccessful.

The first principle which the aspirant should therefore remember is that the mind can be controlled and directed in meditation only according to the laws inherent in the make-up of the mind itself, and not by the application of any feats of simple will power.

Many people who do not technically "meditate" are often found to be deeply and intensely engrossed in systematic and clear thinking about some practical problem or theoretical subject. In a sense, their mental process is very much like meditation, inasmuch as the mind is engrossed in intense thinking about a particular subject matter to the exclusion of all irrelevant things. The reason meditation is often easy and spontaneous in such a mental process is that the mind is dwelling upon a subject in which it is interested and which it increasingly understands.

But the spiritual tragedy about ordinary trains of thought is that they are not directed towards things that really matter. The subject matter of meditation must therefore always be carefully chosen and it must be spiritually important. In order to attain success in meditation we must not only get the mind interested in the divine subjects or truth, but we must also begin by trying to understand and appreciate them.

Intelligent meditation is a natural process of the mind, which avoids the monotonous rigidity and regularity of mechanical meditation. It therefore becomes not only spontaneous and inspiring, but easy and successful.