and the feelings that arise immediately when we encounter the world outside, and
the way in which we pass the day. These things will tell us where we stand,
irrespective of our concentrations and meditations, the retention of breath, etc.
These are the guarding cautions that we have to keep in our pocket always as ready
remedies for any kind of illnesses that may present themselves from within. The
great Patanjali tells us that if everything is okay and all goes well, the mind will tend
towards meditation automatically and we need not force it.
We must feel a great joy that we are in a state of meditation. We should not feel
grieved that we are forced to meditate. Nobody forces us; we know it very well. Even
though it is a voluntary undertaking in the beginning, later on it may become a kind
of compulsion, just as the very government that we set up at our own discretion may
afterwards become a harassing factor to us. We may cry over the very thing that we
have created, due to a peculiar shift that it has taken and the way in which it has got
out of our control. The mechanism that we produced may become our own trouble.
This is what they call ‘Frankenstein’s monster’. All the machines that we create are
our doom. Likewise, it could happen that our undertakings, which were once upon a
time very deliberate and voluntary, and were happy processes, may become a
deadweight upon us.
This is very important: I would like you to read a very beautiful book by Sri
Aurobindo known as The Psychology of Social Development, which goes by another
title these days, The Human Cycle. He has given very interesting sidelights on how
the very institutions that we create, socially and psychologically, can become a devil
that is standing before us. We may have to face it and pierce through it. It may look
as if we are attacking our own mother. Well, that may be the case, but that is what is
to be done. Even Sri Ramakrishna had to attack his own mother afterwards, the
Divine Mother, according to the advice of his Guru. Most painful it is! We cannot kill
our own child. How is it possible? But everything that we created is our child. It may
be a social institution; it may be psychological condition; it may be a feeling; it may
be an emotion; it may be prejudice; it may be a love; it may be a kind of dislike—
whatever it is. Everything becomes a painful factor which we cannot get over, which
we cannot face and which we cannot attack. They become so intimately friendly with
us, and these ‘friends’ are our deadly enemies. We will find later on that those
persons and things which we regarded as our dearest friends are our obstacles, and
that we have no other enemies. These are very horrifying observations, no doubt, and
most painful encounters which one has to face, undaunted in vigour, at a time when
we will have no help from anybody. Even the very earth on which we stand may lose
contact with us, and we may be in the winds—literally. At that time it is that the Guru
comes. Again, we come to that point of a guide who is necessary when we are
completely off our feet.
The conditions that follow a proper restraint of the prana by way of retention and
cessation of emotional reaction of the mind are what are known as the tendencies to
concentration and meditation, which is what is indicated by the sutra, dhāraṇāsu ca
yogyatā manasaḥ (II.53). The mind will get naturally inclined towards the processes of
concentration, and it will concentrate on anything which we bring before it. It will
become a crystal—pure in itself, capable of reflecting any object that is brought
before it—and endowed with a capacity to set itself in tune with anything that is
made the object of its observation and concentration. At a stage, we will realise that
any object can be regarded as an object of concentration. The question of choice does