Meditation Needs Neither Focus Nor Concentration

There are different schools of meditation, different methods and systems. There are systems which say: “Watch the movement of your big toe, watch it, watch it, watch it”.

There are others which advocate sitting in a certain posture, breathing regularly or practising awareness. All this is utterly mechanical.

Another method gives you a certain word and tells you that if you go on repeating it, you will have some extraordinary transcendental experience. It is a form of self-hypnosis. By repeating ‘Amen’, ‘Om’ or ‘Coca-Cola’ indefinitely, you will obviously have a certain experience because by repetition the mind becomes quiet. It is a well-known phenomenon which has been practised for thousands of years in India; it’s called mantra yoga. By repetition you can induce the mind to be gentle and soft, but it is still a petty, shoddy, little mind.

Meditation is not following any system; it is not constant repetition and imitation. Meditation is not concentration. It is one of the favourite gambits of some teachers of meditation to insist on their pupils learning concentration — that is, fixing the mind on one thought and driving out all other thoughts, which any schoolboy can do because he is forced to. (More)

Source: Times of India