Achieving Inner Stillness

Everything in nature is on the move: the earth gliding and spinning through space; the bemusing choreography of the sub-atomic world; the hidden systems in the body; the continuous generation of thought. ‘The tree of man was never quiet’, said the poet, A E Housman.

Yet those who pursue the science of meditation tell of an inner transformation leading from restlessness and distraction to the raptness of one-pointed concentration, and beyond that, to identification with the pure Consciousness and Being that underlies thinking, and is motionless, undivided and without limit. In its chapter on meditation, the Bhagavad Gita advises: ‘keeping the mind established in the Self, let one not think of anything’. What does this mean, and to what extent can the would-be meditator expect to free the mind from the thought of any thing?