CREATING SPACE FOR MEDITATION

Creating a space for meditation

IF you can create a special place – a small temple or a corner in the home where you can meditate every day – then don’t use that corner for any other purpose, because every purpose has its own vibration. Use that corner only for meditation and nothing else. 

Then the corner will become charged and it will wait for you every day. The corner will be helpful to you, the milieu will create a particular vibration, a particular atmosphere in which you can go deeper and deeper more easily. That’s the reason why temples, churches and mosques were created – just to have a place that existed only for prayer and meditation.

If you can choose a regular hour to meditate, that’s also very helpful because your body, your mind, is a mechanism. If you take lunch at a particular hour every day, your body starts crying for food at that time. Sometimes you can even play tricks on it. If you take your lunch at one o’clock and the clock says that it is now one o’clock, you will be hungry – even if the clock is not right and it is only eleven or twelve. You look at the clock, it says one o’clock, and suddenly you feel hunger within. Your body is a mechanism.

Your mind is also a mechanism. Meditate every day in the same place, at the same time, and you will create a hunger for meditation within your body and mind. Every day at that particular time your body and mind will ask you to go into meditation. It will be helpful. A space is created in you which will become a hunger, a thirst.
In the beginning it is very good. Unless you come to the point where meditation has become natural and you can meditate anywhere, in any place, at any time – up to that moment, use these mechanical resources of the body and the mind as a help.

It gives you a climate: you put off the light, you have a certain incense burning in the room, you have certain clothes, a certain height, a certain softness, you have a certain type of rug, you have a certain posture. This all helps but this does not cause it. If somebody else follows it, this may become a hindrance. One has to find one’s own ritual. A ritual is simply to help you to be at ease and wait. And when you are at ease and waiting, the thing happens; just like sleep, God comes to you. Just like love, God comes to you. You cannot will it, you cannot force it.