Meditation & its Practices – Part 4
A definitive guide to Techniques and Traditions of Meditation in Yoga and
Vedanta
By Swami Adiswarananda

There is a difference between what we perceive as real and what is really real,
because our senses deceive us. What we perceive in the outer world is merely a
reflection of what exists within us. In everyday life, what we know about a
person is only what we think about that person, not what that person really is.

Moral purity requires the conquest of bodily desires such as lust and greed, and
this is never possible without the practice of meditation and its allied
spiritual practices. The Sanskrit word for continence is brahmacharya, which
means dwelling on Brahman. Body and mind do not give up the lower pleasures of
life until they have tasted something higher and better.

Meditation is the only way to attain Self-Knowledge, and only Self-Knowledge can
put an end to all the sorrows and sufferings of life.

The two most widely practiced meditative traditions are Yoga and Vedanta.

Meditation in Yoga:

By Yoga here we mean Patanjali’s eightfold path of Raja Yoga. Yoga describes
the Ultimate Reality as twofold: Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha, the Self, is
distinguished from the body, senses, mind and intellect; it is the immortal Pure
Consciousness in each of us. The Self is not the brain, not the nervous
system, not the aggregate of conscious states, all of which belong to
Prakriti-the world of matter, inert and insentient. The conjunction of Purusha
and Prakriti, of spirit and matter, creates individuality and multiplicity.

Just as a burnt rope may retain the shape of a rope but cannot bind anyone, so
also an illumined soul’s human traits, desires, and impulses are mere semblances
and not real.

Samadhi is divided into two kinds: one is called samprajnata, and the other,
asamprajnata.

The mind-stuff takes in the forces of nature and projects them as thoughts.

A man may attain all the powers and yet fall again. There is no safeguard until
the soul goes beyond nature. The method is to meditate on the mind itself, and
whenever any thought comes, to strike it down, allowing no thought to come into
the mind, thus making it an entire vacuum. When we can really do this, that
very moment we shall attain libration.

[Source: Meditation & its Practices – A definitive guide to Techniques and
Traditions of Meditation in Yoga and Vedanta
By Swami Adiswarananda]