Question: What is the best technique for a beginner to use in meditation?

Sri Chinmoy: A beginner should feel that he has a few friends and a few enemies. Unless and until you have become one with God’s Consciousness, you must feel that you have some undivine forces in you which do not want to allow you to make progress. When you stand at your heart’s door, you are bound to hear some people knocking there. If you open the door, you will see that there are quite a few people outside — both friends and enemies. Your enemies are fear, doubt, anxiety and many others, while your friends are faith, courage, love, inner determination and so on. Since it is your door, you will allow only your friends to come in. Then you will bolt the door from the inside and start conversing with your friends.

Each time you listen to a friend of yours when he speaks to you, immediately the capacity of your friend increases. When your love-friend speaks and you listen, immediately your love for God increases. When your courage-friend speaks and you listen, immediately your own inner courage comes to the fore. When your surrender-friend speaks and you listen, you will see that surrender becomes quite easy.

Previously you thought that surrender meant self-extinction, but when this friend of yours tells you what surrender is, immediately you will be eager to throw yourself into the sea of surrender. Previously you were afraid of losing your individuality, but when your surrender-friend explains to you what divine surrender is, you will be eager to make that surrender. In divine surrender you do not lose anything. On the contrary, you become the vast infinite.

When you allow these friends to enter into you and tell you what their qualities actually represent on earth, undoubtedly you will make the fastest progress. But if you allow fear, doubt, anxiety and jealousy to enter, they will come into your room most gladly, only to destroy all the beautiful things that you have there. They are eagerly waiting for you to allow them in.

When doubt assails you, it will try to make you feel that it is good to doubt. It will say, “Doubt as much as you can. Only then can you discover the reality.” Doubt will send its best friend, the reasoning mind, to live with you. The reasoning mind will come and tell you that it can offer you the greatest satisfaction and fulfilment. But you have to know that in the spiritual life the reasoning mind is useless and doubt is worse than useless. You should not doubt or reason; just give yourself wholeheartedly and unreservedly to the divine Father. A beginner should always act like a child in his approach to his divine Father. He should run toward the Supreme with no hesitation and give Him everything that he has. When he becomes advanced, the undivine forces will realise that they are knocking at the wrong door when they come to him.

A beginner’s progress entirely depends on the friendships he makes in the inner world. The easiest and the most effective way for a beginner to make the fastest progress is to choose only divine friends. Each time he allows a divine force to enter into him and operate in him, he gains that divine quality in his inner being. Gradually, as all the divine qualities enter into him, he blossoms like a flower, petal by petal.

From:Sri Chinmoy,Canada aspires, Canada receives, Canada achieves, part 1, Agni Press, 1974
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/ca_1