Meditation opens the door to our soul’s infinite peace, capacities and potentialities. Within each of us is a realm vast and fulfilling, beyond anything that we can imagine. Throughout the millenia of human experience, there have been individuals who have discovered this rich and radiant inner treasure and sought to show others the way to enlightenment or “God-realization”. Across all the many spiritual traditions, the recurring method in all is meditation.
Meditation is a personal journey of self-discovery, inner harmony and joy. By making the mind calm and quiet we can go deep within and discover who we truly are and learn effectively how to solve all our life’s problems and realize our highest aspirations and goals.
Question: Why do we meditate?
Sri Chinmoy: “We meditate because this world of ours has not been able to fulfil us. Take peace, for example. The so-called peace that we feel in our day-to-day life is five minutes of peace after ten hours of worry, anxiety and frustration. All the time we are at the mercy of the negative forces that are all around us – jealousy, fear, doubt, worry, anxiety and despair. These forces are like monkeys. When they get tired of biting us and take rest for a few minutes, then we say that we are enjoying peace. But this is no peace at all, and the next moment they will attack us again.
It is only through meditation that we can get lasting peace, divine peace. In the morning if we have meditated soulfully and have received peace for only one minute, that one minute of peace will permeate our whole day. And when we have a meditation of the highest order, then we get really abiding peace, light and delight. We need meditation because we want to grow in light and fulfil ourselves in light. If this is our aspiration, if this is our thirst, then meditation is the only way.
If we feel that we are satisfied with what we have and what we are, then there is no need for us to enter into the field of meditation. The reason we enter into meditation is because we have an inner hunger. We feel that within us there is something luminous, something vast, something divine. We feel that we need this thing very badly; only right now we do not have access to it. So our hunger comes from our spiritual need.”
