Concentration and meditation

Sri Chinmoy: The life of the ego and material success will eventually fail. The life that disciplines itself, the life that has a higher call, an inner call, can serve mankind most fruitfully. Devoted service to God is the real life. So I tell my students to live a life of spiritual discipline, a life of inner oneness. When we have no sense of separativity, at that time the inner life can flow.

You are twenty-three, and so you are on the ascendant. You can go high, higher, highest. There is no end to the inner experiences and inner progress you can have. Life is the teacher, and the more experiences you are supplied with, the more you will grow.

Ian Cairns: When I'm surfing, obviously I'm competing against other people or trying to improve my approach in certain ways. There's a lot of energy outflow, a lot of building up of a mental strength to try and perform your best on the waves. It is like meditation in the matter of concentration.

Sri Chinmoy: We feel that concentration and meditation are two different things. When you concentrate on a particular subject or object, you focus all your attention on that person or thing. If you know how to meditate, then you will make your mind calm, quiet and tranquil. When you see a huge wave, if you have the power of meditation, then you will not be scared to death. If you have peace of mind, then certainly you will have no fear of the waves of the sea. In fact, inside the waves you will feel tranquillity precisely because you have calmed your own mind. It is in the mind that fear exists because the mind enjoys a sense of separativity. You are an Australian and I am an Indian. This is what the mind says. But the heart will say that you and I are one. We came from God, we are in God and we shall one day become God.

How do you meditate? You meditate with an inner cry. There should be an inner cry here, in the heart. The outer cry is ego-centred; it wants name and fame. But in your case, what you want is the life of divine reality, so you must have an inner cry to serve God in man. While you are feeling this inner cry, you try to make the mind absolutely calm and quiet. If a thought enters your mind, you try to reject it. Consider this thought as a fly. When a fly comes to land on your arm, you don't allow the fly to remain; you just wave your hand and it goes away. It comes again and we chase it away again. Then there comes a time when the fly will not come and bother you; it goes to somebody else. So when thoughts come into your mind, you try to chase them away. You say, "I do not welcome you. You are an intruder." How many times will a thought be able to come when you are rejecting it again and again and again? When the thought is allowed to come into the mind, at that time you are in meditation. Your whole mind becomes calm, quiet and tranquil and you become a sea of Peace and Light and Bliss. First you face the sea and then you yourself become the sea of Peace and Light and Bliss.