Our problem in meditation and in spiritual practice :

Our problem in meditation and in spiritual practice in general is that we cannot escape this old grandmother’s habit of externalising the centre and interpreting it in a sensory fashion. Though we may say that God is everywhere, for us He is a sense object only. However much we may think otherwise, it would be impossible to comprehend in any other manner. This is the influence of sensory perception on our life – so deep and so hard to overcome that whatever be our effort at the recognition of truth, we give it a colour of untruth. The character of an object is foisted on the universal subject, and that is why the mind hankers after pleasure in spite of trying to seek the centre in meditation. We have not been able to overcome our weaknesses yet because of the fact that the senses have not left us fully; we are still under their clutches. The readings that we make of life are only sensory readings, empirical appreciations which disturb our meditation and our effort at spiritual practice.



So we have to learn again. Every day we have to humiliate ourselves and come to the simple conclusion that we have not yet reached even the boundary or the fringe of the recognition of what the truth is. God and the soul are supposed to be one ultimately. The universal is in all the particulars. The ocean is in every drop of it, as we know very well. In every drop there is the ocean. Likewise, the supreme Brahman is in every Atman – so much in the Atman that we cannot know which is the Atman and which is Brahman, just as when we touch the waters of the ocean we cannot say whether we are touching the drop or the ocean. They are indistinguishable. They are different only from the point of view of interpretation and envisionment; they are really one and the same thing.


Continues..