The Synthesis of Yoga - Super school Auroville - The Synthesis of Yoga 703

When you have meditated for years and years in this fashion then in a second you can walk with God with that love in the paradise. You don’t need to make an effort. It has become a part of your being. You can converse with Him. You can receive commands from Him with great joy. Your whole being is constantly tuned to the Divine Will. You know when Mother says that to live in Auroville “One must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.” It means that already you should arrive at that point when you want to do what the Divine wants whatever may be the consequences. Willing servitor. I want to be a servant of the Divine, servant of servants. If anybody else is serving the Divine I want to be servant of that person who is serving the Divine. It is such an experience that you cannot do but this. That is the dharma of your being. You become so much tuned to it that again and again you ask the divine, “I have done this, what more? I still want to pour myself at Your feet. Again and again, endlessly.” This is meditation.

Now we come to contemplation. The result of contemplation also is the same as the result of meditation but contemplation is a more strenuous method. Sri Aurobindo says: “This is the process of concentrated meditation; but a more strenuous method is the fixing of the whole mind in concentration on the essence of the idea only, so as to reach not the thought-knowledge or the psychological experience of the subject, but the very essence of the thing behind the idea.” There is a difference between the essence of the idea and the essence of the thing. In the case of meditation we were told of the essence of the idea, the essential idea and then we were allowed by the help of the essential idea to dwell upon various manifestations of the experience corresponding to that idea. There was as it were a successive movement -- in meditation there is successive movement, every time you get one manifestation of the experience of Divine as Love. Now, here, in the contemplation there is not an attempt to reach the given psychological experience but the very essence of the thing itself. You enter into the heart of God Himself -- not manifestations of God as Love.

“In this process thought ceases and passes into the absorbed or ecstatic contemplation of the object or by a merging into it in an inner Samadhi.” In the ordinary life, you often have this experience of contemplation.

Have you heard the story of Shakuntala?

Shakuntala was the daughter of the famous Rishi called Vishwamitra. But brought up by another Rishi called Kanva. Kanva was a Rishi who had a very big ashram -- like Auroville. So many students were studying, boys and girls.

Once upon a time, when Shakuntala had already grown into a maiden, a beautiful woman, the king of the domain, who was in the process of hunting, missing the deer whom he was hunting, exhausted, entered into the ashram. And he was thirsty he wanted to drink water. Three girls were moving about in the garden of the ashram and one of them was Shakuntala. The moment Shakuntala saw Dushyanta, and the moment he saw her there was love at first sight between the two. And thereafter she could not live without the presence of Dushyanta.

Kanva Rishi was at that time absent from the hermitage and Dushyanta and Shakuntala married by one of the processes of marriage (Gandharva vivaha), which was a simple ceremony of marriage. Then, Dushyanta was called away by his mother for an urgent work and he promised Shakuntala that he would return or send his great chariot to take her back as queen to his kingdom. Shakuntala was now left alone.

In that state she fell into contemplation of the Dushyanta. It was not merely thinking of Dushyanta, not merely experiencing what she had experienced, but holding Dushyanta himself in her heart -- the thing itself. And it was such an absorption that when a guest -- another rishi -- came and called out to Shakuntala to receive him she did not hear him at all, the call of a great rishi! This is the mark of a deep contemplation which happens even in ordinary human life.

There are intense states of consciousness in which the object, the essence of the object is dwelt upon by the mind and you are one with the object. You don’t need to make any kind of thinking. You go straight into the heart, the essence of the thing itself. This happens also in our ordinary process of pursuit of knowledge. When you have understood and idea, not when you are in pursuit of understanding an idea… Imagine anything that you have understood and that understanding, when you have arrived at an understanding, you feel a great joy in that understanding.

You are not in a process of understanding, there is no successive movement. You are only centred upon what you have understood and that understanding goes on developing so deeply that the object which is understood is seized by you. You feel as if now you have gone beyond the idea.

You have come not only beyond the essence of the idea you have entered into the very object. That is called contemplation. Many philosophers when they reach a certain height of understanding reach a stage of contemplation. They are fixed upon… They have understood, there is no more process of understanding. But what is understood is so full of joy or is such a tremendous seizing of the idea that there is no need to develop that idea, no need to develop the experiences behind the ideas which manifest. At once from that understanding you enter into the object itself. You seize the very object in your consciousness.