It is easier said than done. In my personal interaction I have met meditation teachers who went into quite a depression and needed help. There are stories of Rishis who lost control over anger or sexual impulse. What is important is to realise that the mind, even at its best is a limited instrument with limited powers. When a particular movement is brought in the field of mental awareness, then the movements not getting sanction from the mind that has entered a witness state may become weakened. But that is not due to mere awareness but because the mental will is no more supporting the movement anymore. But more often than not the mind justifies certain movements (as for example anger being needed for safeguarding oneself) or else the movement hides in the subconscient while one is meditating (as for example sexual impulses and desires). But one can’t be meditating whole day unless the mind is absorbed in a deeper state of samadhi, far from the fields of nature. When one gets back to life, even when a background state is built up due to meditation (not so common either) then one is often worse off. All that was held back rushes with a leap, often in an unguarded moment. Even a strictly imposed mental will cannot achieve the claimed feat, the glowing example being of Yudhisthira.
All in all we need to understand the limitations of the mind even at its highest. It is only the intervention of a consciousness higher than the mind that can free us of the clutch of thoughts and desires, habits and tendencies. That is why Sri Krishna says
“Supreme, they say,” B.G.3.42 beyond their objects “are the senses, supreme over the senses the mind, supreme over the mind the intelligent will: that which is supreme over the intelligent will, is he”….
“It is possible, paraṁ dṛṣṭvā, by the vision of the supreme,—parma, the Soul, the Purusha,—and by living in the Yoga, in union or oneness of the whole subjective being with that, through the Yoga of the intelligence; for the one Soul is calm, satisfied in its own delight, and that delight free from duality can take, once we see this supreme thing in us and fix the mind and will on that, the place of the sensuous object-ridden pleasures and repulsions of the mind. This is the true way of liberation.
Certainly self-discipline, self-control is never easy. All intelligent human beings know that they must exercise some control over themselves and nothing is more common than this advice to control the senses; but ordinarily it is only advised imperfectly and practised imperfectly in the most limited and insufficient fashion. Even, however, the sage, the man of clear, B.G.2.60 wise and discerning soul who really labours to acquire complete self-mastery finds himself hurried and carried away by the senses. That is because the mind naturally lends itself to the senses; it observes the objects of sense with an inner interest, B.G.2.62 | B.G.2.63 settles upon them and makes them the object of absorbing thought for the intelligence and of strong interest for the will. By that attachment comes, by attachment desire, by desire distress, passion and anger when the desire is not satisfied or is thwarted or opposed, and by passion the soul is obscured, the intelligence and will forget to see and be seated in the calm observing soul; there is a fall from the memory of one’s true self, and by that lapse the intelligent will is also obscured, destroyed even. For, for the time being, it no longer exists to our memory of ourselves, it disappears in a cloud of passion; we become passion, wrath, grief and cease to be self and intelligence and B.G.2.61 will. This then must be prevented and all the senses brought utterly under control; for only by an absolute control of the senses can the wise and calm intelligence be firmly established in its proper seat.
This cannot be done perfectly by the act of the intelligence itself, by a merely mental self-discipline; it can only be done by Yoga with something which is higher than itself and in which calm and self-mastery are inherent. And this Yoga can only arrive at its success by devoting, by consecrating, by giving up the whole self to the Divine, “to Me”, says Krishna; for the Liberator is within us, but it is not our mind, nor our intelligence, nor our personal will,—they are only instruments. It is the Lord in whom, as we are told in the end, we have utterly to take refuge. And for that we must at first make him the object of our whole being and keep in soul-contact with him. This is the sense of the phrase “he must sit firm in Yoga, wholly given up to Me”; but as yet it is the merest passing hint after the manner of the Gita, three words only which contain in seed the whole gist of the highest secret yet to be developed. Yukta āsīta matparāḥ.
If this is done, then it becomes possible to move among the objects of sense, in contact with them, acting on them, but with the senses entirely under the control of the subjective self,—not at the mercy of the objects and their contacts and reactions,—and that self again obedient to the highest self, the Purusha. B.G.2.64 | B.G.2.65 Then, free from reactions, the senses will be delivered from the affections of liking and disliking, escape the duality of positive and negative desire, and calm, peace, clearness, happy tranquillity, ātmaprasāda, will settle upon the man. That clear tranquillity is the source of the soul’s felicity; all grief begins to lose its power of touching the tranquil soul; the intelligence is rapidly established in the peace of the self; suffering is destroyed. It is this calm, desireless, griefless fixity of the buddhi in self-poise and self-knowledge to which the Gita gives the name of Samadhi.”
Even if we take the example of the Buddha, he did not say that Meditation is enough (presuming one knows what is meditation). Else he would not speak of the Eightfold path of dharma, the Sangha and refuge in Buddha. I don’t think people who make such claims are greater than the Buddha and Sri Krishna. The whole thing sounds like an advertisement to attract clients and customers and sell a feel-good recipe. However all genuine mystics of some repute have always given a greater role to the Will than a mere mental awareness to sort our house in order.
The Mother puts it succinctly.
“Meditation is a purely mental activity, it interests only the mental being. One can concentrate while meditating but this is a mental concentration; one can get a silence but it is a purely mental silence, and the other parts of the being are kept immobile and inactive so as not to disturb the meditation. You may pass twenty hours of the day in meditation and for the remaining four hours you will be an altogether ordinary man because only the mind has been occupied—the rest of the being, the vital and the physical, is kept under pressure so that it may not disturb. In meditation nothing is directly done for the other parts of the being.
Certainly this indirect action can have an effect, but… I have known in my life people whose capacity for mediation was remarkable but who, when not in meditation, were quite ordinary men, even at times ill-natured people, who would become furious if their meditation was disturbed. For they had learnt to master only their mind, not the rest of their being…..
Well, when you make yourself empty within in meditation (this is one form of meditation if you like), this means that you stop this concentration of will: your consciousness becomes neutral for the moment. Its stress is upon this point (it may be on other points, on things more or less concrete or abstract, but the stress is on one point) and when you make yourself empty you withdraw this pressure, this stress, and you remain like a blank page upon which nothing is written. This is what I call “making yourself empty”, not to have any active will concentrated upon one point or another. And so I say the moment you make yourself empty, the stress in effect stops, and yet in your silent aspiration you put yourself in contact with the forces attracted by this stress you usually have, the special point of stress you have normally. That is why I have emphasised the fact that all depends upon the person, because everything depends upon his habitual aspiration, the thing he usually wants to realise, for he is naturally in touch with the forces which will answer his aspiration. So, if for a certain time one stops the activity of this aspiration and remains silently receptive, passive, well, the effect of the habitual aspiration remains and will draw just those forces which ought to answer it….
People who enter into samādhi find out that between their active external consciousness and their consciousness in meditation, there lies a blank. Up there, they are almost necessarily conscious—conscious of the state in which they find themselves—but when coming down again towards their body, on the way they enter into a kind of hole where they lose everything—they are unable to bring back the experience with them….
Don’t the inner realisation and experiences help in the outer change?
Not necessarily. They help only if one wants it; otherwise, on the contrary, one detaches oneself more and more from the outer nature. This is what happens to all those who seek mukti, liberation; they reject their outer nature with its character and habits as something altogether contemptible with which one should not busy oneself; they withdraw all their energies, all forces of consciousness towards the heights, and if they do it with sufficient perfection, generally they leave their body once for all. But in the immense majority of instances, they do it only partially and, when they come out of their meditation, their contemplation, their trance or their samadhi, they are generally worse than others because they have left their outer nature aside without working on it at all. Even ordinary people, when their defects are a little too glaring, try to correct them or control them a little so as not to have too much trouble in life, while these people who think that the right attitude is to leave one’s body and one’s outer consciousness completely and withdraw entirely to the “spiritual heights”, treat that like an old coat one throws aside and does not mend—and when one takes it back it is full of holes and stains.
That does not help. It helps only if one has the sincere will to change; if one sincerely has the will to change, it is a powerful help because it gives you the force to make the change, the fulcrum to make the change. But one must sincerely want to change”
I suppose this can be taken as a final word on the subject.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
