Question: Guru, how can we go deeper and deeper within so we can go beyond the surface mind?

Sri Chinmoy: If you want to dig a well today, first you have to find an instrument to dig with. Then you start digging and continue until you are tired. The next day you will dig again, and the day after you will do the same. In this way you will work every day and make a little progress. That is how you will one day get water. So if you want to dig deep within yourself, if you want to get Immortality-Nectar, then you also have to dig regularly in the same way. But in this case the digging implement is your aspiration. This aspiration is like a magnet. The higher your aspiration goes, the deeper inward the magnet pulls you. Aspiration is the only tool, the only instrument, with which to dig the barren soil within you. As you go deep within the earth with outer implements when you dig for water, so also with aspiration you can dig deep within yourself in order to get Nectar, which is Immortality. It is only a matter of regular daily practice.

You have accepted the spiritual life and you want to make progress. You may meditate once a day or once a week or once a month; or you may say, "No, I wish to meditate three times a day. What is wrong with me? I eat three times a day. Why can't I meditate at least three times a day? And if I spend an hour for my luncheon and an hour for my dinner, then can I not also spend at least two hours in meditation?" But here we have to know that meditation is not like eating earthly food. If your mind is roaming all the time, you can spend hours and hours in meditation but you will make no progress. If you spend two hours in meditation, then out of those two hours perhaps you can meditate well for only five minutes. Again, if you say, "I am selecting five minutes and as soon as I enter into meditation, I will have a most sublime meditation," usually it does not happen, especially in the case of beginners or new seekers.

So what all of you should try to do is this: if you want to meditate well for fifteen minutes, try to keep aside one hour for your meditation. Then during that hour, consider forty-five minutes as being only for your preparation or for allowing your mind to roam in the world of fantasies. Of course, this is not the ideal thing, but you have to feel that right now you are helpless. So you can keep aside forty-five minutes for your own purpose and then meditate well for fifteen minutes.

Again, you may feel that if you sit down for fifteen minutes, you will be able to meditate well and you won't need forty-five minutes extra. You may feel that you don't have to take a few preliminary starts before you run the race. Before a sprinter runs the full distance of one hundred metres, he runs twenty or thirty metres in order to warm up, so that his body can be properly co-ordinated. So the same principle can be applied here. If it is necessary, we shall take a few practice starts. And if it is not necessary, then right away we shall cover the hundred metre distance, that is to say, we shall go deep within.

From:Sri Chinmoy,The hour of meditation, Agni Press, 1977
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/hm