Meditation According to the Upanishads - 9. Swami Krishnananda.

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Saturday, April  10, 2021. 10:09. AM.
(Spoken on January 14th, 1973)
Post-9.
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The vairagya that is described by Sankaracharya in one of his works is pertinent. What is vairagya? What is the kind of vairagya that we require in order to study the Upanishads and meditate according to them? Sankaracharya says that we must be as indifferent even to the bliss of Brahmaloka as we are indifferent to a clod of dirt. But what is the bliss of Brahmaloka? We do not know what it is. We will become unconscious and swoon if we know what it is, such is the joy of it. We will swoon by the joy itself. We know the characterisation and the calculus given in the Taittiriya Upanishad, how the joys go on increasing in intensity as we go higher and higher. If our bliss is one, multiply it by a hundred, and then multiply it by a hundred eleven more times—a hundred into a hundred into a hundred, eleven times. That is the bliss of Brahmaloka, and this bliss we must reject, Sankaracharya says, as if it is dirt. Is it humanly possible? We will not reject the bliss of even a cup of tea, so Brahmaloka is out of the question. We are unfit for the study of the Upanishads; that is the conclusion. We cannot study the Upanishads, and we cannot meditate like this, but we can keep it as an ideal that it may come to us at least in the next birth, if not in this birth.

This is the glory of the Upanishads: meditation on Vaishvanara, meditation on Hiranyagarbha, meditation on Ishvara, meditation on Pranava or Omkara as a cosmic vibration in its connection with Reality, all for the single purpose of Brahma sakshatkara, or the realisation of the Supreme Being.

We have gathered for a discussion of the nature of meditation, the various ways that we can employ in order to concentrate and harmonise the mind for the purpose of purifying it so that it may become more and more free in its operation. The practice of meditation is, therefore, a very vast and elaborate technique of dealing with aspects of our consciousness in various ways and freeing consciousness from its relationship with objects, because the thought of objects is bondage. One of the minor Upanishads tells us that poison is not poison; thinking of objects is poison because if we drink poison, only one life is destroyed, but if we think of objects, we may destroy several lives. That means to say, we may have to pass through various series of births.

Thus, the meditation process is a gradual method of freeing consciousness from its entanglement in objects, and later on it is an acquisition of control over objects. We first get freed from its clutches, and then acquire mastery over them. In the beginning there is a withdrawal, and then there is a return to the very same object from which we withdrew ourselves so that we may possess it in reality, not possess it artificially as we tried earlier through mere sensory perception. Possession of a thing is artificial in sensory perception, whereas it is real in Realisation.

Thus, we conclude a survey of various methods of meditation. From these, the essentials have to be culled and brought into operation according to the convenience and temperament of each person’s mind. It is not that everyone can think in the same fashion. This is a wide dish that is served before you, from which you can take whatever you like, but put each item properly in harmony so that they may become fit instruments for the mental operation in your meditation.

END.

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