|
Impediments to Progress (Cont'd)
(b) Laziness: Many people enjoy meditation. They
just sit in meditation, they get some sort of a relaxation, they are
able to remove the mind from the mundane problems of existence and a
little dipping into this ocean of bliss as we call it or something approximating
to it, gives us the false ideas that we are now in Samadhi. Samadhi
cannot be so easy you see.
So this is a danger inherent in an easy approach to the system. Of course,
it is a simple method, provided we do it! It cannot be so simple that
we need not do anything at all. Otherwise, we don't need a Master, we
don't need a Method and we don't need a Mission! So these are a few
cautionary things you see, because people should not be misled into
thinking that if he has done it, I can also do it. Why should I meditate?
Why should I do cleaning? Some are the patras[deserving] of the
Master's very special favour. But even they are to meditate. Babuji
told me that in Lalaji's time, even He had to meditate, before He became
the Master and the successor to Lalaji. Of course, He told me that He
used to meditate only for a few minutes. But He used to meditate. He
could not avoid meditating. And once I had told Him half in fun and
half seriously, "Why don't you teach me that meditation which you
did?" because He said three minutes, four minutes He used to sit.
I said, "Babuji, why don't you teach me that too?" He said,
"You will become lazy!" You know laziness is something we
all enjoy you see, and many lazy people just lie around late in bed
and they think they are in bliss! So there is a bliss and there is 'no
bliss bliss' you see.
So we have to learn to distinguish and how can we distinguish unless
we sit in meditation and see what is going on? If enjoyment
is the goal of meditation I think we are wasting our time,
because there are so many other avenues of pleasure and enjoyment, more
easily obtained. If Progress is our goal, yes. How are we to judge it?
The Master says, "You shall sit for one hour in meditation."
I asked Him, "Why have you now made it half an hour?"
He said, "People are lazy, people are unwilling to give enough
time. So I have reluctantly reduced it to half an hour."
And that we further reduce to ten minutes or five minutes or three minutes.
It is in some sense a betrayal of the system, you see.
So let us not get into this possibility of a very serious error, that
we are progressing. Who has confirmed it? Has the Master confirmed it?
I would be interested to know that. Has some preceptor confirmed it?
Because, progress is not so easy to evaluate ourselves. As Babuji once
told me when some abhyasi asked Him, "Babuji! Where are you now
in the spiritual ladder of progress?"
He said, "Only my Master can tell me."
She said, "What? You are a Master! Can't you know yourself?"
He said, "It is something which we can never know ourselves. Of
course, we feel the change in ourselves. But where I am, I cannot know",
you see.
It is like, I am moving in a plane. I know the changes are occurring.
I can feel the engine vibrating, I can see the clouds cutting by, I
can see the ground moving underneath me, but where am I? The pilot has
to tell me, "You are now flying over Visakhapatnam, the lights
twinkling on your right is the harbour and we are flying over it. We
are on the course to Calcutta." Otherwise one set of twinkling
lights is very much like another set of twinkling lights. We are not
born navigators, we are not geography experts that, looking from the
air at a set of twinkling lights we know where we are. We need to know
the location on the map, its longitude, its latitude.
|
