What is meditation?

What is meditation? It is not what this world teaches you. It is not the absence of external sound. It is not a focus on an object. It is not the listening to music, it is not the burning of incense, it is not the idol, it is not a picture. Meditation is you, the incense that you burn and the beautiful sweet smell that is emitted, must teach you to emit that sweetness to the world. But is done when the incense stick is burnt. The smell is not emitted without the burning. Permit yourself to be burnt, knowing that in this burning you emit your sweetness to the world.

The shutting of eyes is not at all essential, unless it points to you that illusion must be blinded to you. Illusion is glamorous, it disguises itself as beauty, yet it is illusion. When you are meditation you blind yourself to all that is illusion. When you are meditation you make yourself deaf to all that which is illusory. When you are meditation you become the idol, you become the picture, you become that energy which to you symbolises divinity.

When you sit in silence that silence is not the absence of noise. That silence is the stilling of the ‘ego’. When every sound that you hear externally means nothing, because the ears are deaf to illusion. When the world around you is bewildered and agitated and means nothing to you because you are blind to illusion.

When you are meditation the flame that you light is your attempt to reach and illuminate your inner core. To let that flame burn so bright that all around will be illuminated. The oil that you put in your small diya has to burn. It must heat and it must evaporate. If the oil is selfish and says, ‘I will not burn, because in this burning I will disappear’, there is no flame. Make yourself the oil that burns, without any thought of your own disappearance. Because you know, that the burning itself is only an illusion. That is meditation.

When you are meditation the flowers that you offer are not mere flowers. They represent that which is in you; Soft and tender, gentle and beautiful, spreading sweetness. And yet the flower knows that ‘in my very beauty lies my death’. The more beautiful the flower, the quicker will someone pluck it and kill it. And the flower is joyous, because it knows that in its death it has spread the sweetness of life to another.

That is meditation!