Simple but an Impossible Exercise

March 5, 2002

• To acquire higher consciousness one can start from any one of our temperamental tether ends. Speech is one.
• High consciousness is to be centred at an inner height.
• One way of consciousness expressing is it becomes thought and speech.
• The lower consciousness is loud, speaks non stop, enjoys speaking, is incoherent, and touches the climax when the speech it generates in the vital bypasses the mind and increases in fluency till speech becomes sound and noise.
• Let us start at the point where it is well-formed speech.
• Man speaking more to enjoy listening to his own voice is the best speaker whose audience is spell bound.
• What the speaker enjoys, the audience too enjoys as the speaker is vitally identified with the listeners.
• Coming to personal conversation from public speaking, one who realises that he should stop speaking to others will find himself explaining that idea endlessly to so many people.
• This is one of the many ways man employs a method by which he effectively cancels his intention while satisfying himself that he is implementing his ideas.
• Man is resourceful in creating an illusion. It is this ability of Man that conceived the theory of Maya.
• Self-awareness is the beginning of any inner achievement.
• He stops speaking, realising the importance of Silence.
• But his method will continue. What stopped outside will continue inside.
• He will talk in his mind.
• This will defeat the purpose, especially because it is a delusion.
• One would see the inner talking now is more forceful than before.
• So, the mind should stop talking.
• Some may feel, "I am not talking, nor am I thinking." This can be a higher faculty or a state where thought is still not born.
• A higher faculty can be used better in the sense one can continue the exercise from there.
• For a dull person, starting to speak will be progress.
• It is easy to see that when the inner talk falls quiet, which is yogic progress, the desire to talk will be there.
• The desire to talk is the vital urge behind the thought formation of the mind.
• As you stop thinking, your observation will compensate the loss of speech by observing more intelligently.
• Again the ‘Method' continues.
• The eye should refuse to observe. It is better they are downcast, if they cannot cease to observe.
• This is far more difficult than stopping the speech.
• Success here will again change itself into an inner intensity of more active inner thinking, another inner explosion.
• Complete success here will ensure complete inner calm on the surface of the mind, while the depth is not.
• Mind should accept the truth of this discipline in its spirit and submit to its achievement.
• Then mind will be seen to converge inside and the calm will grow in the depths not only on the surface.
• This is the first requirement of any yoga of the mind and is considered a simple one by those who have practised it successfully, though they would not have found it simple in the beginning.
• All this will be achieved either gradually in one sitting of meditation or in a trice, if after making a true decision one calls Mother in for Her to convert our decision into Her own true yogic achievement.