Beauty ＆ Pure 239

Sri Ramana Maharshi ;

Keep your mind steadily on your family deity,
discard outside thoughts and meditate,
or keep the Self itself before your mind
and meditate.

If that is done,
that which comes from outside
will gradually disappear
and meditation alone will remain.

You need not meditate separately.
The meditation on Self will steady itself
and will remain constant.

What IS, is meditation.
There is no such thing as attaining deliverance.
Getting rid of extraneous things itself is deliverance.

Breath control (pranayama)
and other spiritual practices are only
for concentrating the mind on one thing.

Breath control
keeps the wandering mind within the body.
That is why breath control has been prescribed first,
and only then the practising of japa
(repetition of Divine name),
tapa (austerities) and the rest.

If breath is controlled and kept within for a while,
it helps in practising Self-enquiry.

If the family deity or some other form is meditated upon,
the mind becomes controlled of its own accord.
Where that is done repeatedly,
that meditation itself leads on to the realization of the Self.

You will not then have the duality of the doer
and the thing done.
All becomes one’s natural state (Swarupa) only.