Methods for Achieving a Silent Mind During Meditation

0:01 Bringing the mind to a state of quiescence is essential for the practice of meditation. Once an individual is able to achieve this state during meditation, it is a next step to carry that silent mind into the external life. People frequently ask how it is possible to have a silent mind at any time or under any circumstances. They are used to looking at the mind as a factory of thoughts, and believe that the thoughts are created and disseminated from there. What they soon find out as they deepen the meditation practice is that the mind is not a creator of thoughts, but a receiving, transmitting device that captures thought forms from outside, processes them internally and retransmits them, possibly with some modification or adjustment, but frequently exactly as they were received.

0:59 This insight makes the attainment of the silent mind feasible and something the seeker can accomplish through systematic use of one of the proven techniques. It should be noted that Swami Vivekananda also provides another clue that can be extremely helpful for the seeker. He points out that there is a direct link between the breath and the mental being. By seizing control of the breath, the seeker can readily prepare the mind for achieving a quiet state. That is then useful for practising the more definitive techniques described by Sri or Ovindo, whose own experience of the silent mind has been described by him elsewhere.

1:44 When the mind falls silent, it is able to receive the inspirations, intuitions, insights from higher levels of consciousness that replace the ordinary traffic that occurs based on the energies associated with mind, vital and body that are the normal processes that occupy the mental space, Sri Robindo observes. Quote. If the difficulty in meditation is that thoughts of all kinds come in, that is not due to hostile forces, but to the ordinary nature of the human mind. All Sodaks have this difficulty, and with many it lasts for a very long time. There are several ways of getting rid of it. One of them is to look at the thoughts and observe what is the nature of the human mind as they show it, but not to give any sanction and to let them run down till they come to a standstill.

2:46 This is a way recommended by Vivekananda in his Raja Yoga. Another is to look at the thoughts as not one's own, to stand back as the witness Purusha and refuse the sanction. The thoughts are regarded as things coming from outside, from prakruti, and they must be felt as if they were passers by, crossing the mind space with whom one has no connection and in whom 1 takes no interest. In this way it usually happens that after a time the mind divides into two, a part of which is the mental witness, watching and perfectly undisturbed and quiet, and a part which is the object of observation, the procrity part, in which the thoughts cross or wander. Afterwards one can proceed to silence or quiet. The procrity part also.

3:42 There is 1/3 an active method by which one looks to see where the thoughts come from and finds they come not from oneself but from outside the head as it were. If one can detect them coming, then before they enter they have to be thrown away altogether. This is perhaps the most difficult way, and not all can do it, but if it can be done, it is the shortest and most powerful road to silence. End Quote Reference Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 3 in difficulty, pages 40 to 41.