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SPIRITUAL PILGRIMAGE
Another practitioner complained that when he settled down to meditate for the first time, he felt as if he was wasting his time. The time wasted in meditation could be profitably employed elsewhere. Sitting idle with closed eyes for an hour or so is certainly not a profitable job. A profitable job is one which produces tangible results. For example, eating food satisfies hunger. The pursuit of knowledge enables one to collect useful information. What does one get from meditation? The meditator will not be able to say what he had achieved.
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There are thousand of research-centres financed by industrialists where various investigations are being conducted by highly qualified scientists. The financiers do not know the nature of the work being done in these centres and its complicated nature. The research workers are often faced with perplexing problems the solution of which needs a lot of time and energy. The directors of these centres cannot appreciate the difficulties faced by the research workers. For example, the uncertainity of a single technical word takes enormous time and energy to fix an exact meaning of it. The research workers have to do a lot of hard thinking before they can arrive at some definite conclusion. The directors, on the other hand, go by how much work has been done and they assess the value of the work in terms of the investment which has been made and the monetary returns the work brings. Such an attitude is harmful in sadhana. Those engaged in sadhana have a long way to wade through and they often lose patience.
I sincerely believe that each and every true practitioner gains some thing or the other if he is sincere. Those who have participated in the sadhana camps have come to develop a strong hunger for spiritual experiences and would like to continue their exercises. The search for the self is a great endeavour. It is the basic instinct of man and is bound to produce substantial results.
Breath perception, body perception, perception of normal breathing, lesya meditation and kayotsarga are the
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