About Meditation
Meditation is the highest method of the mystical practice in various religious trends.
It is meditation as a method that allows one to cognize Living God and — at the very end — to come to Mergence with Him.
Meditation is the work of consciousness, not the work of mind. In meditation the mind has to be silent, and there are special techniques, which help one to learn stopping the work of the mind for the time needed for meditation. This is called mastering the mental pause. [26]
A consciousness (in the fundamental psychology) is the energy aware of itself. This is man itself, who can be in the embodied or unembodied state.
As for the mind, it is a function of the consciousness, thus a person who parted with the body due to its death still possesses the mind and the memory.
But the mind of an incarnate individual works in connection with the brain.
A consciousness can be developed from tiny sizes up to the cosmic sizes. The process of such development of consciousness is called crystallization. It is meditation and crystallization that Jesus talked about when saying “God is Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). That is, one must perceive oneself not as the body but as a spiritual substance — a consciousness — and as a developed consciousness to aspire to the Consciousness of God.
One can go through the initial stages of the development in raja yoga or in any other analogous system of self-perfection. The further advancement is realized on the stage called by Krishna buddhi yoga — the yoga of consciousness.
In the classic scheme of advancement through the stages of spiritual self-perfection outlined by Patanjali, meditation (dhyana) is on the seventh place. It is preceded by learning the ethical principles, the rules of hygiene, bringing the body into a healthy state with the help of special complexes of physical exercises, cleansing and development of chakras and bioenergy channels, learning to control the mind and many other thins. In the Patanjali’s scheme, meditation leads to Samadhi, where large work in the framework of buddhi yoga takes place.
On the stage of Samadhi one cognizes — through personal mergence with Him — “the Holy Spirit living in us” (1 Cor 3:16). The further self-perfection in love to the Creator and in meditative techniques leads to Merging of one’s individual consciousness with the Consciousness of the Creator.
Sathya Sai Baba says about the highest stage of mastering meditation the following: “The correct meditation is merging of all thoughts and senses with God, … when all actions originate from the God’s Consciousness and not from the mind of man” [25,69].
There are three aspects of the Perfection: Love, Wisdom, and Power.
The three corresponding directions of the spiritual work, which help one to master these aspects, are ethical, intellectual, and psycho-energetic directions. The priority should be given to the two first directions. Meditation is the main method of the third direction. It is in this way that all best spiritual Schools work.
