Meditation Matters

Our atmosphere is a very thin, delicate film blanketing the surface of our planet. And from this thin, fragile film of atmosphere not only all the people, but all the animals, the birds, plants and trees, all are breathing their breaths, all are drawing their oxygen, their life-force.
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Our breath represents our life. Our breath connects us with the cosmic energy, the universal force which sustains all life. And something more: our breath carries with it a profound spiritual message – the message of oneness.
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Who is this Mr Brown?

His young children call him Daddy, knowing him as the benevolent giver of gifts and indulgences. His grown-up children from his first marriage call him Dad or Pops, while their own children call him Grandad, or Ompee.
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Running and meditation are the simplest, most natural of activities. We are born with everything needed: other than running shoes and a mat, neither require any equipment, talent, cost, travel, study, qualifications or rules. Both can be done alone, virtually anywhere and anytime.
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Just as one doesn’t need to read any books or attend any class or seminar, or believe in anything or anyone or pay any fee in order to pray or meditate effectively – for prayer and meditation come most naturally, perfectly and spontaneously from within – so also, running connects us most effectively with our innate spirituality through its own simple, pure and spontaneous expression.
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Running is the simplest self-expression, the purest revelation, the most natural manifestation in the physical realm of our very essence, an eternal, unquenchable yearning for progress through self-transcendence.
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In their essence, running and meditation are one, inseparable. They are parallel and identical quests: for truth, meaning, peace, happiness, satisfaction, self-discovery and transcendence.
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We do not have to go to a temple, to a church, to a monastery, we do not have to climb a mountain, go into the forest or ascend to the Himalayas, to find the sacred and the divine, for there is nothing more sacred in this universe than the miracle of our breath.
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Some people express themselves through painting, poetry or music: you are an artist of the breath.
Each breath is a new poem, a new song, a new painting; into each breath, pour all your heart’s love, your joy, your creative ingenuity.
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While you’re practising your breathing and counting, any other thoughts or distractions that want or dare to approach you, are uninvited guests. Simply do not let them in. They’re not allowed. Put a sign on the door: DO NOT DISTURB.
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Our breath is the most essential reality in our lives: stop breathing, and we’re dead, so it’s very, very important. Yet how often do we give our breath any attention? Almost never. We take it for granted, the same way we take for granted that the sun shines, or the light comes on when we flick the switch.
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Love is the most powerful magnetic force, drawing all our being towards the object of our love. Think of anything that you love to do. If you love an activity, you are eagerly thinking about that activity and ready to dive into it, and once you are engaged in it, you don’t want to stop.
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We all thought Uncle Jack a bit peculiar. He would spend most of his days in the dense scrub behind the house, getting up to nothing in particular. Or so we thought.
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Like gratitude, our power of imagination is a gift from the spiritual realm, which in turn, guides us back to our inner reality, from whence it has come. When imagination arises from our heart’s cry, and not our confused mind or restless vital, imagination first shows us our possibility, blossoming into our future inevitability.
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Just as we have constructed a grid for electrical power, so all forms of physical, vital, mental, psychic and spiritual energy and power are each conveyed and accessed by their own form of grid. Like the electricity grid, these grids are within, all around and beyond us. The more subtle the energy, the more subtle is its grid, and the more finely we must tune ourselves to receive and utilise it.
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Every thorny thicket was once upon a time a clear space. And can become so again. Just as time and neglect conspired to allow the bushes and brambles to proliferate and entrench themselves, so time and dedicated effort can slowly untangle and eradicate them and return the space to its former beauty.
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Just as a misshapen mirror will offer us a grotesque or distorted image of ourselves, so a mind contorted by dogma, fear, pride or prejudice, will show us a bizarre caricature of the real. Whoever harbours strong beliefs and opinions, perceives and projects a confronting world, as though walking through a hall of weirdly distorting mirrors.
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Just as cataracts scatter and block light as it passes through the lens of the eye, so our opinions, prejudices and even innocuous beliefs, obscure and distort reality, preventing our mind from perceiving the clear light of truth.
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There is nothing more beautiful, simple, elegant, pure, powerful and perfect than a still, motionless flame. To focus on a still candle flame is one of the best, most effective and rewarding concentration exercises, for it can bring forward all these essential qualities from our own heart and usher us almost effortlessly into the light and serenity of meditation.
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An archer must still their arm, if they are to have any hope of hitting their target. All the training and preparation in the world, will amount to nought if at the critical moment, the bow arm dips or sways.
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Imagine you have a blind friend. Sightless, your friend’s sense of smell is intensely sensitive and appreciative of fine fragrances. As a favour, your friend asks you to please visit the flower shop and select the best-smelling flowers.
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Imagine that you are in a theatre watching a play, which is the story of your life, weaving around the narrative of happenings and events, revealing the unfolding of your purpose and mission. The acting and directing is superb; everyone in the play apparently knows you better than you know yourself. You watch with rapt attention. The play reaches the present day; it is about to reveal what will happen next and how your soul’s purpose is to be fulfilled.
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Imagine you are an architect, who has struggled with some details of a particular design project for many months. The right shapes, contours and alignment of elements are proving elusive. Suddenly, it comes to you: the perfect, elegant solution. You feel compelled to draw your design this moment, or else you fear the inspiration may fly away and not return.
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Finally, God has granted you an interview. You have been looking forward to this moment for as long as the sky has been blue. You have imagined what you might say and ask for, the way God will speak to you, how everything will look and feel and what it will mean for your future life.
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As you reach for your jacket and boots, your dog knows this means it is time to go out for a walk, and immediately becomes a frenzy of excitement at the prospect, spinning, twisting, jumping and scurrying in all directions.
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The sun is ceaselessly shining, radiating, beaming forth all its light, power, energy, heat, inspiration and illumination, freely and unreservedly for all. And yet, very often, we not only do not receive the light of the sun, perversely we even imagine the sun is not there at all. We look outside and see clouds, rain, gloom and sometimes complete darkness. We do not see the sun directly and so we surmise it is not there.
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This spinning wheel is our mind. To even perceive that there is a message, we must first considerably slow the spinning of the wheel; then to read the message, the wheel must halt. This secret message of life and our soul’s purpose is clearly inscribed in the depths of our hearts: to see it there, and then to read it, we first must slow, then cease the spinning of the mind.
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Our mind is a boat, adrift on a sea of confusion. When a wave comes, the boat is swept ashore; when the tide turns, the boat is carried out to sea; a strong current pushes the boat along the coast; and when the wind blows, the boat is blown according to the wind’s whim.
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Effective concentration is to meditation, as weeding is to the garden, eliminating mental activity which disrupts the flow of our meditation and blights the beauty of our heart-garden. A perfect garden has not a single weed: a perfect meditation entertains not a single thought.
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This notion of a hidden portal, bridge or secret passageway to another, usually better, brighter or vaster realm, located within our physical world and yet existing entirely parallel to or beyond it, forms a thread from ancient legends, through folklore, poetry and literature to modern fiction and games.
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Go deep, deep under the sea, to where all is silent, invisible and unreachable from the surface world. Rising from the sea floor a mountainous landscape looms, silent, mythical. Hidden half-way up the side of a steep canyon, the mouth of a cave.
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Whatever we grasp, we can drop; whatever we learn, we can forget; whatever we make, can be broken; whatever we find, can be lost. Whatever we have, can be un-had … but what we are, we can never not be.
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The personal embodies the universal. The personal is our window and key, to the universal.
We are the world – collectively, and individually. Everything in the world, is within all, and each of us – all the good and bad, beautiful and ugly, divine and undivine. We are the drops, our world the ocean.
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Just as we contain every poisonous plant – fear, doubt, anxiety, insecurity, pride, jealousy, frustration, hatred, depression – so, we also contain somewhere nearby, each antidote – love, sympathy, faith, hope, gratitude, humility, enthusiasm, patience, cheerfulness.
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Just look at a baby. The greater part of all we ever learn about life, we learn in our first six months. Does the baby learn with words, thoughts, reasoning? No! A baby learns by observation, imitation, assimilation and application. There is no mind involved, because the baby has not yet developed the mind. Ironically, there is no greater barrier to learning in our entire existence, than our mind.
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No matter what outer situation we find ourselves in, there is always a meditation technique that is applicable in the moment. In our spiritual life, every moment is a unique gift to be treasured, a golden opportunity for progress and growth.
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Intuitively, we know our birthdays are special, which is why we celebrate them. If our values are material and social, we celebrate with gifts and indulging in outer pleasures with friends. If our values are spiritual, we will give priority to our source – our soul, and its Source – God, remembering and focusing on the purpose for which our soul took birth in this form at this time.
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It is our soul, with God’s sanction, which chooses the time of our birth, and the environment into which we will be born, including the location, country, culture, and specifically, our parents and family connections.
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In all devotional paths, God is approached in a personal form. Any personal form must have all the human attributes, including feet. If God is to be approachable, God has to walk on earth.
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Though loneliness and boredom both arise from the barrenness of the mind, we can take both as cries from our heart, yearning for space and nourishment. The solution for both is the same: quieten the mind, dive into your heart – boredom and loneliness are banished.
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It’s easy to say: “meditate in the heart, don’t meditate in the mind!” – but being in the mind, can be like finding ourselves caught in a high-walled maze of hedges, with no clue how to find our way out.
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All that time we spend practising meditation techniques in the early morning, has to be put to practical use in the challenging moments of our lives: otherwise, what is its utility? The very purpose of practising any skill, is to improve our performance: in this case, our ‘performance’ is the living of our life.
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Like chasing the clouds away to reveal a clear sky, when doubt, fear and sorrow-clouds are banished by cheerfulness, we attain tremendous clarity, purity and certainty, the very qualities which combine to engender and nourish bravery. Cheerfulness clears the negativity-clouds to reveal our heart’s bravery-sky.
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We are God’s arms and legs, eyes, ears and beating heart in this world. God’s need for us encompasses and subsumes our need for God. Through merely giving God our attention, we gain everything God has and God is.
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The village had no water. A government expert advised the villagers to each dig a well in their back yards, to get water for their daily needs. One villager starting digging, but after one hour, when he became hungry, he went in search of a good restaurant. After lunch he continued to the pub and joined some friends for a drink.
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We are eddies swirling in the river, and this river is God – but we are so busy being eddies, we don’t notice God all around us, we don’t notice we are flowing with God, one with God, inseparable from God. We are clouds floating in the God-sky; grains of sand of the God-beach; flowers, fruits and leaves of the God-tree; little fingers of the God-body, utterly absorbed in being this little finger.
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Our breath brings us a profound spiritual message: the message of oneness. All humans, animals, trees and plants are at once breathing the same air, the one earth-atmosphere. Though breathing through countless lungs, we are all sharing one breath – the breath of life. So it is, that our one breath in myriad breaths, connects us directly with every living breathing being on this planet: with every human, each animal, tree and tiniest plant.
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Fasting cannot be considered a spiritual practice in its own right, and will never bring us to enlightenment, though occasional fasting can certainly benefit our meditation by helping to purify our physical system, clarify our mind and brighten our outlook.
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What quality do we need to cultivate, to develop this capacity for identification, and hence, assimilation? Sri Chinmoy speaks of the primary role of gratitude in our hearts…
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Just as there are both inner and outer steps that help us to prepare for meditation, so there are several inner and outer factors which help us assimilate our meditation.
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To do anything well, requires our preparation. Whether climbing a mountain, sitting for an exam, baking a pie, driving to the beach, or even going to bed, we need to make suitable preparations in both our outer environment and inner focus.
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We want to have everything, and we want to be perfect. We sometimes expect that we should be able to have everything and be perfect for the asking. Indeed, many of us take up meditation with the idea that its practice will enable us to attain perfection, while experiencing and possessing everything we fancy.
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Consciousness is expressed in myriad forms and levels. Each level is its own realm of being. From each level of consciousness to the next is a progression, an evolution. From stone to plant consciousness, from plant to animal, from animal to human, each level is a preparation, containing within itself the seeds or precursor of the next, just as the caterpillar embodies the future butterfly.
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This final part of our series on “The Inner Cry”, comprises Sri Chinmoy’s answers to two questions, and two poems. Both questions concern the process and requirements to progress from our present ignorance to our future perfection.
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In our outer lives, prosperity is associated with material wealth and riches, popularity and power, comfort and luxury, abundance, wellbeing, winning, high achievement and success in any field. Yet outer prosperity is fleeting, meaningless, unsustainable and unfulfilling if it does not flow from a sincere inner cry.
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We can develop the inner cry by giving more importance to what we really need in our life. When we give importance to our true necessity, then automatically our inner cry, our inner sincerity, is bound to increase.
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Crying and smiling are generally considered to be opposites, and mutually exclusive – we cry when we are sad; we smile when we are happy. And some might consider that an emphasis on the inner cry in our spiritual life, might be reflected in a seriousness or sternness, if not sadness, in our outer expression.
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Sometimes, despite our efforts in meditation, we feel a sense of barrenness in our life; a lack of excitement, joy, purpose, colour, light, interest, motivation, inspiration and even hope. This feeling can be fleeting, or it can set in and permeate our consciousness; it may lead to us becoming lethargic, irritable, sarcastic, careless, callous or depressed.
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Our Beloved Supreme, our Lord Absolute, our highest Self: by whatever words, Names, qualities or attributes we imagine, conceive of, or relate to God; whatever we believe, feel, know, or know that we do not know about God; whether we pray to, concentrate, meditate or contemplate on God – there is one need, one constant, one truth, one necessity – to answer our questions, fulfill our need, reveal and lead us to our goal…
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The spiritual life is not a life of compromise. Either you accept God on His own terms or you accept the outer life on its terms; there is no in-between. You cannot be fifty per cent for God and fifty per cent for the ordinary, unaspiring world. If you try to compromise in that way, you are neither here nor there; you are finished.
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Living in a mind bound by time and space, we assume everything must age, must have a beginning and an end. How then, might we transcend the mind, how might we step beyond the progression of time into the eternal, where the very concept of age disappears?
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As a central pillar of our spiritual life, we must surely place intensity very high on our spiritual wish list. Where and how can we find intensity, cultivate and maintain it? How do we intensify intensity, how keep our intensity intense?
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The “smile of silence” is the goal of our meditation. This is not the outer silence, the absence of sounds, noises and distractions. This is the inner silence, the silent mind and tranquil vital – which we discover in the absence of thoughts, disturbing emotions, desires and attachments.
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Our inner wealth is limitless, unfathomable, unimaginable. We know we have inner capacities, qualities and experiences that are beyond our conscious reach, but we have no way of claiming or grasping them as long as we remain bound by our mind’s limited capacity to perceive, to understand and to know.
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Once we have reached a certain level of consciousness in our meditation, we have to feel that this is not our ultimate goal. Our goal is not stationary; all the time we have to go beyond, beyond, beyond.
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Our inner cry cannot be something static or fixed, nor a ritual, nor routine habit; it must constantly flow, grow, learn, evolve, adapt to the nature of the hour, the challenge of the present and need of the moment, seeking the best way to surmount each obstacle and to raise our consciousness through continual transcendence.
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Once our inner cry is well established, it generates its own forward and upward momentum. Then, we are able to operate effectively in the outer world without our inner cry being affected.
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Our inner cry is the ticket to our destination; the passageway to our soul; our lifeline to God; our protection against ignorance and spiritual regression; our passport to happiness, progress, fulfilment, perfection, illumination and ultimate satisfaction.
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We are crying to please God by offering everything we have and everything we are to God, but God is also crying to please us by offering everything He has and is to us. The problem is, we do not fully accept God’s offering.
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How can we have inner peace? We can have it just by crying, crying for inner peace. Now, how can we cry for the inner peace? It is not easy to cry sincerely.
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Our inner cry is most sincere and effective when we feel we are completely lost, clueless and helpless, when we are crying out to God or our soul to save us, protect us, forgive us, guide us, illumine us and take charge of our life.
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Older than the universe, the inner cry is always new, ever fresh. The inner cry does not form any conception or expectation of how or when it will be fulfilled; it does not need to.
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The vital and the heart are very close to one another. So we sometimes mistake the heart for the vital or the vital for the heart.
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Just as water will always eventually find its way to the sea, so our inner cry will eventually find its way around and beyond any restriction, control, language, beliefs or understanding we seek to clothe it in.
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Everything depends on the heart’s cries and tears. If we really want to become a good person or do something for the world, we have to feel not the tears of the eyes, but the tears of the heart.
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Once our inner cry is engaged, naturally it longs to increase and intensify itself, for our cry knows there is no end to its work, no ceiling to its sky. The higher our aspiration, the more our inner cry is fed, the more powerful it becomes.
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If we feel inwardly the value of God-realisation in our life, then the so-called hardship that we go through is nothing. If we value the goal, then we are bound to walk along the path.
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People cry for name, fame, earthly achievement, success and progress and so many things. They are right in their own way. But you should start crying inwardly from this moment on for joy, peace of mind and the awakening of your inner consciousness.
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Change is the greatest challenge we all face. Always there is something within us which resists change, no matter how eagerly we yearn for it. According to Sri Chinmoy, there is only one agent capable of changing us and transforming our nature.
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As our inner cry eclipses our mind, the portals of our heart open and we find ourselves basking in our inner sunshine, flowing and growing into our perfection-potential. Our inner cries not only make our spiritual progress possible, but inevitable; they are the spark plug, fuel, engine and accelerator of our progress-life.
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Sri Chinmoy was once asked, if there is a specific way to accelerate the attainment of our God-realisation. His reply encapsulates the entire purpose and function of the inner cry.
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The inner cry is God’s secret mechanism for our illumination and perfection.
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The home of our inner cry is our soul, God’s representative within us: trace our inner cry to its source, its home, to find ourselves face to face with our soul, resonant with God’s Bliss. We have only to keep our inner cry always alive, always active: then by feeling it, loving it, treasuring and embracing our inner cry, we return with it to its home, God’s Home in us, our soul.
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Our inner cry is the engine that invokes inspiration, engages our aspiration, activates our hidden capacities and qualities, gives voice to our deepest yearnings, disciplines our vital energies, clarifies and focuses our mind, continually expands our heart, and drives us ever onward to self-discovery and fulfillment.
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Our conscious inner cry is our instrument, inspired and directed by our aspiring will. Our super-conscious, inmost cry is the executing voice of the Supreme’s Will, shaping and employing us as God’s instrument in His cosmic Game.
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If our heart is devoid of an inner cry, we cannot pretend we are leading a spiritual life. The inner cry is the beating heart of spirituality: arising from the Infinite and the Eternal, and reaching ever towards the Infinite and the Eternal. The inner cry is at once our most sacred gift from God, our most precious offering to God.
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We cannot know how good a mango tastes by hearing others’ descriptions of it, no matter how vivid and evocative their words: we have to take the mango and eat it for ourselves. So, we cannot know or experience the inner cry by reading or theorising about it.
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Problems are inextricably linked with our thought process; our thinking mind is a problem factory. Problems arise from, are nourished and perpetuated by thoughts. When we are successful in clearing our mind of thoughts, so-called problems magically evaporate.
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The inner cry is an alarm siren from the spiritual realm signifying its neglect, demanding our attention and action. It is the announcement and growing claim of our heart, a piercing ray intruding into our thought-clouded mental consciousness to summon forth our blazing higher self.
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Our inner cry does not so much calm our mind, as overwhelm it, flooding extraneous thoughts, distractions, mental and emotional flotsam and jetsam in its sheer imperative urgency. Whatever card the mind plays to hold us captive – its brilliant ideas, its doubts and fears – the compelling authenticity and urgency of the inner cry trumps it every time.
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Our inner cry is the access key not only to today’s meditation, but to every meditation and all spiritual progress from this moment forward. Our meditation paves the way for our unfolding self-discovery and ultimate Self-realisation.
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Just as light and darkness cannot coexist in the same space, even so the sleep of ignorance cannot persist when we are consumed with an inner cry for illumination. Rather than worry about our ignorance, we need only to treasure and nurture our inner cry.
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Gratitude is the most precious attainment in our spiritual life. Gratitude keeps our spiritual heart open, fresh and pure, a natural home for our higher self to grow, play and flourish.
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The best way to raise your consciousness is through inner cry. Then, in order to maintain your consciousness there on the highest level, you have to establish considerable purity in the vital.
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A disciplined life can come from only one thing, and that is aspiration, our inner cry. At any hour, that inner cry reaches God, and God is bound to fulfil that inner cry.
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Our inner cry is the agency of peace, light and bliss; the gateway to happiness, guardian of truth and guarantor of perfection. It at once fills and fulfills, uplifts and enlightens, justifies and glorifies our existence.
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The inner cry is not only the spark which ignites our aspiration, stirs our inner yearning and prompts our self-search; it is the very flaming of aspiration itself; and the spreading, all-illumining light which answers the very questions it posed, and fulfills the very longing it voiced forth.
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Sincerity and the inner cry are interdependent. Each has the other’s back: they protect, nurture and depend on each other. An inner cry is sincerity’s choice; sincerity, the inner cry’s voice.
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Our inner cry impels us always forward, inward and upward. The moment our inner cry recedes, our progress stalls and we start to fall backwards, slide outwards, slip downwards. Our inner cry envelopes us with energy and dynamism; when it ceases, we lapse into lethargy and stagnation.

The inner cry is our visa to pass beyond the mind, into the realms of meditation, spiritual progress and self-transcendence. Yet this visa must constantly be renewed with inner purity, sincerity and intensity, or else it lapses as the inner cry fades.
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