The Library
The longest book on yoga can teach you nothing more about the practical aim of yoga than this: still your thoughts.
4.4.3.1Listen One of the causes of the failure to get any results from meditation is that the meditator has not practised long enough. In fact, the wastage of much time in unprofitable, distracted, rambling thinking seems to be the general experience. Yet this is the prelude to the actual work of meditation in itself. It is a necessary excavation before the building can be erected. The fact is unpleasant but must be accepted. If this experience of the first period is frustrating and disappointing, the experience of the second period is happy and rewarding…
4.4.3.2,Listen If the turning wheel of thoughts can be brought to a perfect standstill without paying the penalty of sleep, the results will be that the Thinker will come to know himself instead of his thoughts.
4.4.3.3Listen If meditation were to stop with ruminating intently over one's own best ideas or over some inspired man's recorded ideas, the result would certainly be helpful and the time spent worthwhile. It would be helpful and constructive, but it would not be more than that. Such communion with thoughts is not the real aim of meditation. That aim is to open a door to the Overself. To achieve this, it casts out all ideas and throws away all thoughts. Where thinking still keeps us within the little ego, the deliberate silence of thinking lifts us out of the ego altogether.
4.4.3.15If the wandering characteristic of all thoughts diverts attention and defeats the effort to meditate, try another way. Question the thoughts themselves, seek out their origin, trace them to their beginning and reduce their number more and more. Find out what particular interest or impulse emotion or desire in the ego causes them to arise and push this cause back nearer to the void. In this way, you tend to separate yourself from the thoughts themselves, refuse to identify with them, and get back nearer to your higher identity.
4.4.3.20Listen The first part of the exercise requires him to banish all thoughts, feelings, images, and energies which do not belong to the subject, prayer, ideal, or problem he chooses as a theme. Nothing else may be allowed to intrude into consciousness or, having intruded by the mind's old restlessness, it is to be blotted out immediately. Such expulsion is always to be accompanied by an exhaling of the breath. Each return of attention to the selected theme is to be accompanied by an inhaling of the breath.
4.4.3.21Listen When thoughts are restless and hard to control, there is always something in us which is aware of this restlessness. This knowledge belongs to the hidden I which stands as an unruffled witness of all our efforts. We must seek therefore to feel for and identify ourself with it. If we succeed, then the restlessness passes away of itself…
4.4.3.22,Listen The aim is to work, little by little, toward slowing down the action of thinking first and stilling it altogether later.
4.4.3.36Listen Animals live in the herd instinct. They do not possess self-consciousness as individualized human beings possess it, nor have they the capacity of aspiring to what is above their own level. But they are subject to evolution and will ultimately arrive at our level …
4.4.3.58,Listen Each exercise in meditation must start with a focal point if it is to be effective. It must work upon a particular idea or theme, even though it need not end with it.
4.4.3.77Listen The first thing which he has to do is to re-educate attention. It has to be turned in a new direction, directed towards a new object. It has to be brought inside himself, and brought with deep feeling and much love to the quest of the Soul that hides there.
4.4.3.83Listen If any light flash or form is seen, he should instantly concentrate his whole mind upon it and sustain this concentration as long as he is able to. The active thoughts can be brought to their end by this means.
4.4.3.98Listen This power to sustain concentrated attention upon a single line or objective for a long time--a power so greatly admired by Napoleon--comes in the end to those who persevere in these practices.
4.4.3.126Listen How can a man unify his consciousness with the Overself without first putting his mind under some sort of a training to strengthen it, so that he will not let go but will be able to hold on when a Glimpse comes?
4.4.3.148Listen The secret of concentration is ... practise concentration! Only by arduous effort and persistent, diligent endeavours to master his attention will he finally succeed in doing so. No effort in this direction is wasted and it may be done at any time of the day.
4.4.3.160Listen The aim is to sit there totally absorbed in his thought or, at a more advanced level, rigidly concentrated in his lack of it.
4.4.3.168Listen To achieve this kind of concentration where attention is withdrawn from the outer world and held tightly in itself, a determined attitude is needed of not stopping until this sharply pointed state is reached. All other thoughts are rejected in the very moment that they arise. If at the start there is aspiration and devotion toward the Overself, and in the course of the effort too, then eventually the stress falls away and the Stillness replaces it.
4.4.3.188Listen The more he internalizes his attention, and the less he responds to the sense-impressions, the nearer he draws to the spiritual presence in his heart.
4.4.3.207Listen None of the elementary methods of yoga such as breath control and mantram lead to a permanent control of the mind, but they prepare the way and make it easier to take up those practices which do lead to such a result.
4.4.3.221Listen
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