Total Thought and Meditation

Divine Life Society Publication: Chapter4: Your Questions Answered by Swami Krishnananda

What is meditation?

Meditation is an integration of consciousness. It is not a routine or a ritual and has no connection with any scripture. It is not a religious exercise belonging to some religion. It is an opening of yourself to the final realities of life. It is an impersonal act on the part of yourself, wherein you lift up your consciousness to recognition of the fact that you are a temporary sojourning entity into eternity.

You have come from a larger realm, and will enter into the same realm after some time, which will indicate gradually that your existence has a kind of cosmic sweep. From plane to plane you have journeyed in your millions of incarnations. This is only a temporary form that the cosmic form has taken due to some karma, some pressure of circumstance. We are ultimately, in what we call a spiritual sense, only forces of Nature which have concentrated themselves in certain space-time points, looking like individuals. This is how self-analysis has to be carried on. When you think along these lines, you will find that your mind becomes "total" instead of fragmentary.

You always think of something other than yourself. It is taken for granted by the mind that what you are thinking is something different from yourself. So, every thought of every person is directed towards something which is assumed to be totally different from the process of thinking. This is a mistake.

You cannot even think unless all the atmospheric conditions of the cosmic condition are involved in the very process of thinking. When you think, it looks as if you are thinking like a cosmic being, because your mind is connected to all the circumstances through which you have passed in all your various incarnations.

Everyone is related to you in some way or other through the circumstance of some incarnation, some birth or other. This is why they say that the world is a single family. Like the various branches of a tree coming forth from the root, all these manifestations and forms of existence have come out from One Root.

We don't do meditation merely for doing it. There can be benefit only if your thoughts are harmonious with reality. If you dichotomise your thought from the reality of the world and consider it as an external object, then it will be finite thinking, and finite thinking will produce only finite results. So, total thinking, is called meditation. All the thoughts of everyone and of everything will be comprehended within the total grasp of your mind in this act.

How to Meditate

Your mind has to consciously, vitally, involve in itself the object which it is thinking; otherwise, you cannot even be conscious of the object. The very fact that you are conscious of some object outside you implies that it has already entered the mind. It has become part and parcel of your consciousness. Now, here is the technique of total thinking. You cannot think the object unless you accept that it is a part of your thought itself. Thus, the thinker is not an individual. It is something in between the object and the so-called subject. It is a connecting link, transcendent.

Adhyatma, Adhibhuta, Adhidaiva

In our ancient scriptures we use words like adhyatma, adhibhuta, adhidaiva, etc. Adhyatma is the thinking subject; adhibhuta is the object, but we don't know anything else. We think only two things. I am here and I am seeing and thinking something else. But you cannot think something else unless there is a connecting link of consciousness between you and the other object. The thinker is actually that connecting link. That is called adhidaiva, the superintending divinity. So, who is the meditator?

You are not meditating, because if you consider yourself as the meditator, you cut yourself off from the object. But I mentioned to you that you cannot cut off your consciousness from any object, inasmuch as, unless it is involved in that object, thinking is not possible. So this involvement-consciousness is a transcendent consciousness which is above both you and the object. It is a very subtle thing, and very difficult to catch that little crux of the matter.

You transfer your consciousness, as it were, to the middle connection, transfer your consciousness to the center where you contemplate both sides, as if the body is thinking of two hands. This is the subject and this is the object, but the thinker of both is the body; so you are not one person thinking of another thing. Meditation does not mean thinking of an object; it is transference of consciousness from the subjectivity of yours and from the objectivity of the object to a central point which is transcendent to both. That is the divinity which is called Ishtadevata. You contemplate like this. This is what they call total thinking, and this is the essence of meditation.

Difference between total thought and meditation

They are the same thing. Total thought means a perfect form of thought, and meditation means the same thing. It is a total thought, not little bits of thinking, one thing at a time. Generally, we think little things, but that is not correct thinking because when you think something, you exclude something else. You should exclude nothing and include all things in your thought; then it becomes a total thought. It is something like God-thought. That is the perfect form of thinking. Then you will have no troubles from the mind afterwards. There will be cooperative forces working together. If you exclude something, that something which you exclude will not cooperate with you. That is why troubles arise.

Excerpts from:

Total Thought and Meditation - Your Questions Answered by Swami Krishnananda

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