Re-Educating the Mind : 5.

It is possible to concentrate the mind on an object merely on the surface level, though at the bottom there may be a feeling of irreconcilability. That will not lead to success. We may be praying to God through an image in a temple, and yet have a suspicion in the mind that we are praying only to an idol made of stone. This suspicion will spoil all our devotion. "After all, I am praying to a small wooden image. How will this bring fulfilment of my wish or the satisfaction of my desires? I want to be a king, an emperor, and for that purpose I am praying to an idol which is unconscious, which cannot listen to anything that I say." This suspicion will shake the very foundation of devotion, and religion will become merely a pharisaical ritual.



This is what is happening, mostly – our religion, our practice, our devotion becomes a kind of dead routine which has no life in it, and all the efforts of life seem then to bring nothing fruitful. We are neither scientific in our attitude, nor logical, nor really religious. There is, basically, a kind of hypocritical attitude which is covered under a camouflage of a necessity of practical life, which takes all our time, and we may spend our entire life in this attitude to things, ending in nothing, finally. But the inward tendency to repel things, on account of an intense egoism of nature, subsides by a proper understanding of the nature of things and by a forced imposition of universality upon the particular object upon which we are concentrating. In the beginning, it may be merely by power of will; later on, understanding will come and make it more alive. It is better to always couple understanding with the power of will, so that it may be a pleasant process rather than a hard discipline of an unpleasant character. Whatever it be, we cannot say which is more important and which comes first. Understanding and will should go together, and do go together.



Any particular object can be taken for the purpose of concentration, because any particular has the elements of the universal present in it. For instance, we can approach the government through any officer. He may be an officer from Madras, or from Punjab, it makes no difference. He is an officer of the government of India. So to touch the government we need not run about from place to place in search of it, because a government is like the universal – it is pervading everything, and it is everywhere. We can contact this universal, called the government, through an individual or a particular that is the officer – he may be any officer. Through him we can find our way to that universal principle called the government. When that officer expresses a view, is it the officer's view or is it the government's view? It is not his individual view, but it is the expression of the universal that is behind him. It is the force of the government that works through the individual, and at that time he is not an individual – he is a representation of the universal. Likewise, even an idol, or an image, or a picture, or a concept can become a representation of the universal characters behind it, provided we are able to visualise these characters with sincerity of purpose.

Swami Krishnananda

To be continued  ..