Stilling the Mind

During my deep meditation,

I lose all my mind’s differences

The way a river loses

All its differences in the sea.

Chase away the monkey. The mind is like a monkey. If you are attacked by a monkey which constantly bites and pinches you, you have to threaten the monkey. Then each time it comes, if you strike it vehemently, eventually the monkey will feel that it is hopeless to try to bother you. You must always remain as vigilant as possible. When an undivine thought enters into your mind, immediately you will chase it away. If you are constantly vigilant, eventually these thoughts will give up and no longer come to disturb you.

The most important thing is practice. Today your mind acts like a monkey. It is knocking all the time at your heart’s door and disturbing the poise of the heart. But as many times as the mind comes to you, just chase it away or deliberately place your conscious awareness on something else. If you allow it to distract you, it will only gain strength. You have to know that in this world, everybody has pride, vanity and self-esteem. So if you keep your heart’s door closed each time the mind comes, if you pay no attention to the mind, then after some time the mind will find it beneath its dignity to bother you.

Grab the mind. Feel that inside the heart there is something which is infinitely more powerful than the mind. Feel the soul, and bring the soul forward from the heart. Feel that there is intense power inside the soul. You may not see the soul, but bring forward your inner strength and then grab the mind. Say to the mind, “You allowed me to remain quiet for a few minutes, and I am grateful. But I am still praying and meditating, still crying for peace, light and bliss, and now you are not allowing me to continue.”

Put the mind into the heart. Just grab the mind and put it into the flood of the heart. As long as it allows you to meditate, you do not have to worry. But when it starts bothering you, when it starts creating pain, that means it is resisting. It is not allowing you to receive more peace and light from Above.

Treat the mind like a naughty child. Just grab the mind and feel that it is like a naughty child. Before, it was asleep and allowed the mother to remain silent or pray to God. But now the child is up and it wants to cause mischief. It does not want to allow the mother to aspire any further, to achieve more peace, light and bliss. So what will the mother do? The mother will threaten the child and say, “I am still praying, I am meditating. You must not bother me, you must not disturb me, or I will punish you.”

Cut the thought to pieces. To make your mind vacant, you should not allow any thought to enter into your mind and take shape. Suppose a name comes. As soon as the first letter of the name appears, you kill the name. You have to make your mind vacant, as empty as possible, with your power of concentration.

Suppose a thought, or a vibration, or something else is coming. Immediately, shoot an arrow and pierce it into pieces. An idea comes, somebody’s name comes, or some thought comes. Immediately, just throw it out. It must not come and enter into your mind. Before it touches your mind you have to cut it into pieces.

Inside the ocean. But if you already have thoughts and ideas within you, within your body, within your mind, then you have to meditate like this: be as relaxed as possible. Feel as if you are inside the ocean. Then absorb those thoughts and ideas so that they do not have a separate existence. They are lost in the sea. If they are already within you, throw them into the sea. If they are coming from outside, then do not allow them to enter into you. After doing this your meditation is bound to be successful.

Racing with a train, flying with a bird. If you have a good thought, feel that you are an express train racing on and on, or a bird flying up. If you have a divine idea, just run with it to your destination. But if wrong, false, undivine thoughts come, do not stay with them. Please discard them immediately.

Use a superior power. The reason that you are constantly bothered by thoughts is because you are trying to meditate inside your mind. The very nature of the mind is to welcome thoughts—good thoughts, bad thoughts, divine thoughts, undivine thoughts. If you want to control the mind with your human will, then it will be like asking a monkey or a fly not to bother you. The very nature of a monkey is to bite and pinch; the very nature of a fly is to bother people.

The mind needs a superior power to keep it quiet. This superior power is the power of the soul. You have to bring to the fore the light of the soul from inside your heart. You are the possessor of two rooms: the heart-room and the mind-room. Right now the mind-room is obscure, unlit and impure; it is unwilling to open to the light. But the heart-room is always open to the light, for that is where the soul abides. Instead of concentrating on the mind proper, if you can concentrate and meditate on the reality that is inside the heart, then this reality will come forward. Then, when you are well-established in the heart, when you are surcharged with the soul’s light, at that time you can enter into the mind-room to illumine the mind.

Before meditation

Pray to God to give you

A silence-mind.

Guard the door. To control your thoughts, feel that there is a room inside your mind, and naturally the room has a door. It is your room, so you can stand outside the door and not allow any thought to come in. You can keep the mind-room under lock and key, and stand at the door. Since it is your room, who can enter without your permission? But if you leave the door open, anybody can come in, and once they are inside it is difficult for you to throw them out. So you have to prevent them from coming in.

Allow only your friends. If you want to learn meditation without going through concentration, you must feel that you are standing at the door of your inner room. When you stand at the door, you allow only your friends to enter into your room. You do not allow strangers or your enemies.

You have to welcome only good thoughts, divine thoughts. These are your true friends. Undivine thoughts, hostile thoughts, must not come into your mind. Your mind is constantly receiving thoughts, and you have to be very careful. You have to welcome only divine thoughts Then, play with these divine thoughts in the garden of your mind. Play with thoughts of divine qualities: divine love, divine power or divine peace. Then a time will come when you will see that there are no thoughts. Your entire being will be surcharged with inner Divinity.

O my ordinary thoughts,

O my undivine, unhealthy

And uncomely thoughts,

During my meditation

If you knock at my mind’s door,

This time I shall not open it,

For I know

That you will only misuse

The power of my meditation

To increase your own power.

Keep out the enemies. There are two kinds of thoughts: good thoughts and bad thoughts. One kind is healthy and one kind is unhealthy. Unhealthy thoughts, undivine thoughts, are our enemies, whereas good thoughts, divine thoughts, are our friends. We are standing at the door to our house and somebody is knocking at the door. We have to see whether it is a friend or enemy. If it is a friend, then we will allow him to enter. If it is an enemy, no, we will not allow him.

But the difficulty is that sometimes when we open the door just a little, immediately the enemies may force their way in. So what do we do? We do not open the door at all. We keep the door bolted from inside. Our real friends will not go away. They will think, “Something is wrong with him. Usually he is so kind to us. So there must be some special reason why he is not opening the door.” They have sympathetic oneness, so they will wait indefinitely.

But our enemies want only to bother us, to torture and destroy us. They will wait just for a few minutes. Then they will lose all patience and say, “It is beneath our dignity to waste our time here.” These enemies have their pride. They will say, “Who cares? Who needs him? Let us go and attack somebody else.” If we pay no attention to a monkey, the monkey will eventually go away and bite somebody else.

But our friends will say, “No, we need him and he needs us. We will wait indefinitely for him.” So after a few minutes our enemies will go away. Then we can open the door, and our dearest friends will be there waiting for us.

Give thoughts a human form. Now let us take a thought. You will say that naturally you concentrate only on good thoughts. But unfortunately, we do unconsciously meditate on bad thoughts. Jealousy, doubt, suspicion—all these we cherish unconsciously. When this kind of bad thought comes, just think of jealousy, fear, doubt and hypocrisy as people, and immediately give them a human form: “This fellow has undivine qualities.” When it is a good thought, also give it form: “This man has all good qualities—humility, sincerity and so on.”

Then what do you do? When you see a good man, feel that he is leading you and try to follow him as long as he wants you to. But if you see a bad man—a man full of fear, anxiety and so forth—feel that he is going to chase you mercilessly and that you have to immediately run away from him. You must never allow him to come near you. When you see someone destructive in front of you, immediately react as though he will destroy you. Feel that your very life is in danger.

Very often in the spiritual life, people do not take bad thoughts seriously enough. We cherish these undivine qualities and feel that they are only insects pinching us. But when you have these undivine qualities, you have to feel that they are worse than dragons, something very dangerous.

You are God’s child. You can begin by having good thoughts: “I want to be good. I want to be more spiritual. I want to love God more, I want to exist only for Him.” Let these ideas grow within you. Start with one or two divine ideas: “Today I want to feel that I am really a child of God.” This is not a mere feeling, but an actual reality. Feel that the Virgin Mary is holding the child Christ. Feel that the Divine Mother is holding you in her arms like a baby. Then feel: “I really want to have wisdom-light. I want to walk with my Father. Wherever He goes, I will go with Him. I will get light from Him.”

Enlarge the good thoughts. At every moment we are assailed by bad thoughts or we are inspired by good thoughts. Each thought can act like an atom bomb in our life. When we are assailed by a bad thought, we will try to discard it. When we are assailed by a good thought, we will try to develop and enlarge it. When we start meditating early in the morning, if one good thought comes, let us enlarge it. Let us say it is a thought of divine Love—not the human, emotional love but divine, universal Love: “I love God, I love God’s entire Creation.”

Invoke purity. You can meditate and tell your mind, “I shall not allow you to go in your own way. Now I want to think of God.” Repeat the Name of God inwardly or aloud. The next moment say, “I want to have purity in my whole existence.” Then repeat ‘purity, purity, purity’. At that time you are not allowing your mind to think of impurity or of some other person or thing. Do not give your mind a chance to wander: simply utilise your mind for your own purpose. You have millions of things to accomplish in and through the mind. But the mind is so naughty and mischievous that if you do not utilise it, it will utilise you.

Strangle your thoughts. Another way is this: when a thought comes that is not pure, good or divine, immediately repeat the word ‘Supreme’ very fast. The Supreme is my Guru, your Guru, everybody’s Guru. So repeat ‘Supreme’ very fast, and each time you use the word ‘Supreme’, please feel that you are creating a snake that will coil around the undivine thought and strangle it. If jealousy comes, say ‘Supreme’ very fast, and you will see that around the jealous thought is a coil which will strangle the jealousy.

Slow down the thought-current. Every thought or idea that enters into your mind you have to silence. If you cannot silence it, then try to slow down its speed. If some current of thought is entering into you very rapidly and you cannot stop it altogether, then try at least to slow it down. And eventually you will try to silence it.

Imagine the sky or the sea. To make the mind more silent, it is good if you can imagine something very peaceful, such as the vast sky early in the morning or the setting sun in the evening. Or you can try to feel that you are at the bottom of the sea, or on the top of a mountain in the Himalayas.

Throw the mind far away. One has to see the mind as a material object. We can take a material object and put it anywhere we want to, or we can throw it the farthest possible distance, according to our strength. So either we can grab the mind like a material object and throw it into the distance, or we can put the mind wherever we want to.

Put the child in the corner. If a mischievous child is bothering us, we can take the mischievous child into a corner and threaten him and keep him there. One can do that to the mind also.

Feel you are the heart. Totally forget about the existence of the mind. Ignore the mind and feel oneself only as the heart. It is not enough to say, “I have a heart.” One must say, “I am the heart, I am the heart.” Then the qualities of the heart will permeate the entire being, and automatically the mind will stop.

Put a shield in front of your forehead. Here, right in front of your forehead, you have to feel that you have a shield, right in front of you. It is a protection. Instead of taking it as a part of your body, as a limb or an organ, you have to feel that right on your forehead is a coating, a protection. Try to feel that you are constantly on the lookout, here in your mind, to see if an attack is coming, if a thought is going to attack you. At the same time, try to feel that here, in the same place, is a shield, a solid wall. This is for the thoughts that are coming from the outside.

Extend the body like an elastic belt. Now what about the thoughts that are already inside us, creating problems? It is very difficult, in comparison, to throw them out. But we can do it! How? Again it is through the extension of our consciousness. We have a body; inside this body are these wrong forces that have taken the form of ugly, damaging thoughts. If we can extend our physical consciousness as we extend an elastic belt, we will feel that we are extending our whole body through the mind’s conscious effort, through aspiration. We are extending, extending, extending the whole body to the Infinite. We are extending a sheet of white consciousness. The moment we feel the Infinite extending like a sheet of white consciousness, we will see that it is all purity.

Concentrate on the third eye. We have seven chakras or spiritual centres in the body. If you want to control your thoughts, you should concentrate on the centre between the eyebrows. If you become very stiff and your concentration is intense, then you should not concentrate here for more than two minutes. Otherwise, you will become exhausted in the beginning.

Concentrate on the soundless sound. If you concentrate on the heart centre, you will get peace, love and joy. Try to hear the cosmic sound, the soundless sound, when you enter into the heart. If you bring love, joy, peace and bliss up from the heart to the centre between the eyebrows, then you will see that there will be no thoughts.

The heart is the safest place for you to concentrate and meditate on.

Two meditation-secrets:

Safest

Is the heart centre,

Fastest

Is the crown centre.