नाद योग क्या है ?

Preliminary Preparations Necessary for the Practice of Meditation?

Meditation is the subtlest of human activities. Success is commensurate with the initial preparation and subsequent equanimity of the mind. The mind and intellect have to be properly tuned before they can be successfully employed in meditation. To ignore the preliminary preparation and attempt meditation would prove to be futile, even detrimental, for the unprepared practitioner. This caution is not intended to turn one away from the practice of meditation. It is only meant to emphasize that the necessary preparation has to be done to achieve success in meditation.

The first stage of preparation is to withdraw the mind from its preoccupation with the enchantments of the world.

Due to worldly activities throughout the day one’s mind become agitated and an agitated mind can never be fit for meditation and an agitated mind seeking sense pleasures in the external world has the following three fundamental imperfections:

(1) The quantity of thoughts entertained by such a mind is excessive.

(2) The quality of its thoughts is poor and degrading.

(3) The direction of the thoughts is set towards the lower material values of life

These faults in the mind have to be rectified if one desires to practice meditation effectively. The quantity of thoughts must be reduced, the quality improved, and the direction changed to a higher Ideal. If such reduction, improvement, and direction of thoughts are achieved, an individual gains relative equanimity of the mind. An equanimous state of mind is an essential prerequisite for the practice of meditation. However, the general practitioners of religion do not realize how necessary this preparation is and plunge directly into meditation only to reap disappointment in spiritual evolution.

The spiritual discipline advised for producing a reduction of the quantity of thoughts in the mind is the path of action (karma-yoga). This discipline is directed to one’s physical personality.

The path of devotion (bhakti-yoga) is prescribed for one’s mental or emotional personality. It improves the quality of thoughts. Devotion is developed by prayer, by mental prostration, and surrender of the ego or, in other words, by dedicating all action to the Lord or the Guru. When this is practiced regularly the quality and the texture of thoughts necessarily improve.

One can change the direction of the thoughts by practicing the path of knowledge (Gyana-yoga). This path deals with the human intellect through the study of, and reflection upon, the spiritual truths and helps in developing discrimination between the Real and the unreal, the Transcendental and the ephemeral. When a seeker constantly studies and reflects upon the sacred truths, the attention automatically recedes from the fields of sense objects and gets more and more established in the higher and nobler aspects of life.

A constant and sincere practice of these paths makes meditation rewarding and such meditation practiced regularly in turn develops the capacity to concentrate and pursue the chosen paths. The two aspects— preparation and meditation—are thus complementary to each other.

Another important sadhana (spiritual practice) suggested as a preliminary step in meditation for beginners is introspection or self-observation. Introspection is a process of self-analysis of the activities performed during the day. It is usually practiced at night, by carefully recollecting and observing all the activities—physical, mental, and intellectual—that one has performed from the time of waking up until the moment of introspection

Purpose of Human Existence

Purpose of human being starts because of its superior quality equipments of body, mind and intellect. Human being is the roof and crown among all the creations. What makes different a human being from the others creations is intellect.

Of all the living creatures in the world, human beings are blessed with the unique faculty of discrimination. This faculty is either only partially developed or fundamentally lacking in other types of life. In the animate world, plants are the least developed at the physical level, their perceptions are partial, and they practically have no conscious emotion or discrimination. In the case of animals, their perceptions are better than plants—their conscious emotions can be proved by evidence—but there is no conscious discriminative power, if at all there be such a power it is still rudimentary. It is only in human beings that all the three equipments—the body, the mind, and the intellect—are comparatively well developed.

What special a human being can do with this faculty of discrimination; the discriminating faculty in human beings is of a high order; it can operate not only in the province of everyday experiences but can also delve deeper into the subjective realm so as to distinguish the Real from the unreal, the Eternal from the ephemeral, and the Changeless from the changing. This faculty of the intellect, to penetrate into the Transcendental, is the prerogative of human beings, which no other creature possesses.

This faculty of discrimination with the help of which a human being can delve deeper into the subjective realm show the great purpose of human existence. Because no other creators on the earth can penetrate into the transcendental; even they cannot think over the transcendental.

The lower beings, plants and animals, have no choice but to follow their inherent instincts. For instance, the nature of a tiger is to strike, kill, and eat; it cannot be otherwise. The best among tigers have not been, and shall never be, peace loving and content to live on vegetation. Animals tread a beaten path and exhaust their desires in the realm of their own activities for which they are designed. While doing so, there is neither devolution nor evolution in their lives. But human beings, the roof and crown of creation, have the capacity to live intelligently and to regulate life in such a way so as to alter the texture and quality of their inherent tendencies. By an intelligent application of the techniques prescribed in the scriptures, human beings—within their limited span of existence—can overcome all their innate tendencies which are responsible for the present embodiment.

Every individual in the world is born with a set of fructified vasanas, which are the innate tendencies or inclinations ready to manifest themselves. The kind hand of nature provides human beings both a conducive environment and the appropriate circumstances to enable them to exhaust their vasanas and thereby reach the state of God-Realization. The mind and the intellect are the equipments which help to accomplish this.

What is faith? Why is faith necessary for one’s spiritual quest of Truth?

What is Faith?

“Faith is like a bird which feels the light and sings while the dawn is yet dark.” (Rabindranath Tagore)

Faith has been defined as: “A belief in something which one does not know so that one may come to know what one believes in.” Faith is often misunderstood to be a blind belief which kills one’s initiative, progress, and growth. True faith is not so; it is a positive quality that revives and vitalizes one’s endeavors in life. It is a vital factor in all great undertakings.

Why is faith necessary for one’s spiritual quest of Truth?

Because we are on the journey of ‘unknown’. The supreme Reality, ‘known’ to the Person of Realization, is ‘unknown’ to us. An ‘unknown’ factor can be communicated to another only in terms of what is ‘known’. In other words, a thing ‘unknown’ cannot be understood if it is described in terms of other unknown factors. Knowledge has to proceed from the known to the unknown. But the difficulty experienced by the Masters in communicating the nature of the Reality is that all the factors known to human beings—whom relate to the terrestrial world—are not directly helpful to describe or explain this unknown Reality.

Consequently, their descriptions and explanations, being circumscribed by the student’s own limited knowledge, cannot define the ultimate Reality for the student. Hence, they had to make use of the students’ faith to complete the spiritual pursuit so that they could realize the Truth.

There is a philosophical saying: “One can walk consciously only a part of the way towards the goal and then must leap in the dark to one’s success.” Perhaps this is the origin of the phrase ‘leap of faith’. Faith, therefore, becomes an inevitable and integral part of one’s spiritual quest for the Truth.

The strength of faith of a seeker rests on his or her confidence in the Truth of the repeated unanimous declarations of all realized sages and saints that there exists for every person’s personal experience a transcendental Reality beyond the scope and purview of the material equipments. The seeker has also to believe the Masters’ assurance that every one possesses the capacity to strive for and reach this Truth. Faith, therefore, may be considered to be a blend of trust, confidence, and conviction born out of an intellectual quest rather than an emotional acceptance.

Meditation must proceed with true faith in the existence of an ultimate Reality. In the absence of such faith that is reinforced with understanding, there can be neither sincere application nor an honest seeking of the Truth. However, if the foundation of faith is strong and firm, meditation takes deeper roots and the meditator reaps the golden harvest of Self-Realization—which is the culmination of human evolution and all human endeavors.

What is covetousness?

Covetousness happens due to uncontrolled sense and greed. Desire and carving arise in us in the presence of sense objects is called covetousness. This happens even if one sees picture or advertisement of an object. Smells of food also trigger the senses and desire for particular food get arose.

      To overcome the covetousness one first need to understand the process of formation of        desire,  that how desires arise by interaction of object and senses in presence of mind.            One should learn that desire is an outcome of a mechanical process. Desire is main                  obstacle in process of spiritual evolution.

What is modesty?

Today whole world is suffering due to lack of ethics. Powerful society throughout the world trying to implement their ideas through ethics. They want ethics as external force and implement them as an external virtue. But they forget ethics when they are alone due to lack of modesty. Modesty is practice of virtues. These virtues cannot be developed externally but can be developed internally through practice of certain psychological yogic exercise. Modesty is worldly practice of these virtues in life. 

Scriptures are the manual to right living.”

A manual is a user guide which provide step by step guide to a particular topic for both beginners and practitioners. Scriptures are the manuals happy life. They gave detailed information on how to live a healthy life. They provide all technical information on body-mind-intellect system and tell how to maximize the use of these three and live in harmony with others. They are manual for complete life as they provide full guidance on every stage of life – Student life, married life, social life, retired life, spiritual life. They give instruction that what, why, when, where and how to conduct ourselves. They make aware us that what is right and what is wrong. They are valid means of knowledge because they are experienced and revealed by some divine souls in deep stages of meditation.