Meditation

Meditation is the "Hour of God."  It is the eternal moment when you can spend some quality time with God.

Meditation is not sleep; it is an ever-awake state.

Get rid of darkness before sitting for meditation.  You say, "Oh, I cannot meditate," and that is because you have not mastered the yamas and the niyamas.  With these mastered, you eliminate the kleshas – ignorance, egotism, attachment, aversion, clinging to life.

Follow the Tradition.  Meditation is going to take you beyond the world, so you have to prepare in advance by renouncing the world in some way or form.  You should not meditate for objects, money, or health, which is a great delusion of our times.  They [the people of today] do not even meditate for spiritual health, but only physical well-being.  Meditation is communing with God.  Leave meditation where it belongs.  As Vivekananda has said, there are two tendencies in the mind: one, to drag Brahman down to our comfort zones; and two, to raise ourselves up to Brahman.  Unfortunately for the human race, most choose the former path......

Cessation happens, but you must be aware of it.  Meditate on the awareness of cessation. (i.e. Be the witness of the appearance and disappearance of the tattvas, the cosmic principles from Cosmic Mind all the way to the element earth.)

By jumping important steps in meditation, such as cessation of  thought, contemplating the teachings on AUM, and meditating on the Personal God, one might still get a kind of personal realization, but this will not make one a good teacher.  This is because one will not know what happened to the mind along the stages of realization.  One might arrive and say, "It happened by the grace of God," but the real Grace of God lies in self-effort.  The fruit of self-effort is knowledge.  Knowledge destroys ignorance.  This ignorance of the inner workings of silenced mind, AUM, and the Personal God within is present in most spiritual adepts.  And this is why there is a lack of truly effective spiritual teachers in the world at this time – this, and the fact that the seeker of the time does not persevere, cannot take what the really forceful teacher dishes out.

Controlling the mind is the first duty of the practitioner.

Witness is the ego at its most refined level.

Meditating on the tattvas (Cosmic Principles of Nature) leads to unification with Nature – but unification here means not identification, but connection, or association.

What is the test of concentration?  Time stops.

Thought is father to the deed.  Therefore, if one stops thought, action also stops – what to speak of the world of matter.