DISCOURSES Volume II - Avatar Meher Baba Trust

THE TYPES OF MEDITATION: I 113Many persons who do not technically "meditate" areoftentimes found to be deeply and intensely engrossed insystematic and clear thinking about some practical problem ortheoretical subject. Their mental process is, in a sense, very muchlike meditation, inasmuch as the mind is engrossed in intensethinking about a particular subject-matter to the exclusion of allother irrelevant things. Meditation is often easy and spontaneous insuch mental processes because the mind is dwelling upon an objectin which it is interested and which it increasingly understands. Thespiritual tragedy about ordinary trains of thoughts is that they arenot directed towards things that really matter. On the other hand,the object of meditation has always to be carefully selected andmust be spiritually important; it has to be some divine person orobject, or some spiritually significant theme or truth. In order toattain success in meditation the mind must not only get interestedin the divine subjects or truths, but must also begin by trying tounderstand and appreciate them. Such intelligent meditation is anatural process of the mind; and since it avoids the monotonousrigidity and regularity of mechanical meditation, it becomes notonly spontaneous and inspiring, but easy and successful.Meditation should be distinguished from concentration.Meditation is the first stage of a process which gradually developsinto concentration. In concentration the mind seeks to uniteMeditation andconcentrationwith its object by the process of fixing itselfupon that object, whereas meditation consists inthorough thinking about a particular object tothe exclusion of every other thing. In concentration there ispractically no movement of the mind, but in meditation the mindmoves from one relevant idea to another. In concentration the mindmerely dwells upon some form