Holistic Meditation

Ramana Maharshi

-Staff

By Staff

Tuesday, September 2, 2008, 14:15

No meditation on an object is helpful. You must learn to realize that the subject and object are one. In meditating on an object, whether concrete or abstract, you are destroying the sense of oneness and creating duality.

1 Ramana Maharshi, Conscious Immortality, pp. 53-54

In the rainy season the sun plays hide and seek. This is more noticeable in a coastal place. The sun would be shining brightly. Suddenly dark clouds would form and there would be a heavy downpour. Again the sun would come out in dazzling brilliance. This goes on day in and day out during the monsoon months. When one looks sensitively at one's spiritual practice, one can clearly discern this light and shadow, the success and failure of it not only generally but also each day within a span of hours. There is the meditative mood, the lazy languish, and hectic activity. This is only natural for each mood corresponds to the prevalent mental mode.

So long as we remain within the confines of the mind, so long as one's spiritual practice is mind-oriented, the progress towards Self-awareness is bound to be tardy and slow. It would be a losing battle in the daily war one wages against the intruding thoughts which keep flooding out the chosen single thought. Meditation remains as a flickering flame, exposed to the winds of thought.

Ramana traces this malaise to our divisive approach to meditation. The Self is one. The moment you introduce the division of a separate subject, the individual, then your attention is also divided. The duality of subject, object, the pairs of opposites automatically come in. The unity of a holistic approach alone can be the medicine, the cure for this.

While making this position clear, Ramana does not discourage those who prefer to do so, by natural inclination or long habit, from continuing to pursue the sadhana they are used to. It may be mantra japa, yoga or ritualistic practice. He would remark that 'When a car is traveling at great speed applying the brake suddenly would not do'. The accident of loss of faith in one's practice without switching over to the direct path could take place. The problem is really that of exposing one to the truth without treading on one's corns, pet ideas and predilections.