What Is Meditation, Really?

Meditation is staying with one thought, the one you love, and feeling every distraction without being carried off by it. That is how Thakur Anukulchandra defined it, and this page unfolds what he meant: what dhyan is, what the Holy Name does, and why the two go together. Part One is for everyone. Part Two goes deeper, for those who have been initiated.

Part One — For everyone

A word everyone uses

Meditation is one of the most used words of our time, and one of the least understood.

The old word is dhyan (Sanskrit dhyana). In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras it is the seventh of the eight limbs, the unbroken flow of attention toward one object. The word travelled with Buddhism into China, where it became Chan, and from there into Japan, where it became Zen. So when someone today says “Zen,” they are, without knowing it, still saying dhyan.

Every living tradition has some form of it. The Christian monks of the desert repeated a short prayer to the name of Christ until it prayed itself. The Sufis practise dhikr, the remembrance of God through His names. Indian devotees have sung and repeated the Name for centuries. Thakur Anukulchandra saw the same thread running through all of them:

“Word-sadhana exists among Hindus, Muslims, Christians — everyone. The Muslims speak of the Awaz… Whoever does nam-dhyan regularly with devotion to the Ishta realises these things. This path is open for all.”

Today, though, meditation has mostly come to mean a technique: count the breath, empty the mind, scan the body, relax. These can calm a person for a while. But ask what meditation actually is, and what it is meant to do to a life, and most answers go quiet.

That is the question this page answers, in the words of one who lived it from childhood: what dhyan is, what the Holy Name is, and why, for this age, the two are done together.

What dhyan actually is

Thakur’s definition is short enough to carry in one breath. In Satyanusaran, the small book he wrote in a single night in 1910, he says:

“To remain engaged in any single thought and to feel that which distracts but cannot break our continuity is ‘Dhyan’ or Meditation.”

Try it for a moment. Hold one thought, just one. Almost at once something else arrives: a sound, a worry, a memory, a plan. The mind does not let us stay.

Most people take this as failure and decide they “cannot meditate.” Thakur’s definition says the opposite. Dhyan is not a state in which nothing comes. Things will come. Dhyan is that you feel them coming, you can see exactly what is trying to pull you away, and yet you do not go with it. The continuity holds.

Think of the mind as an ocean and each thought as a wave. The waves rise between you and the one you are thinking of. You feel every blow. But you are not swayed. You stay. That staying, that unbroken one-pointedness, is meditation.

And when it deepens until nothing else is left, he gives it its old name:

“When the mind is absorbed completely in conceiving anything thoroughly, it is called deep meditation or ‘Samadhi’.”

Dhyan is not emptying the mind. On the bank of the Padma, on 7 November 1923, he corrected exactly this idea:

“Whenever, by an utter pull toward the Beloved, we lose ourselves in Him, then we are in dhyana. Dhyana does not mean leaving out all other thoughts. Rather dhyana means realising the feelings or complexes of mind that come in a scattered way by establishing a harmonising, fulfilling connection with the Beloved, sensing them anew, and so enlarging Him in the variety of one’s sensing.”

He warned that forcing every other thought out does harm. If we go on suppressing them, he said, after some days we find we have become “like a crank or a madman, or like a numb, inert, immobile thing.” The way through is not to push thoughts down but to bring each one into relation with the one you love, and let it settle there.

Dhyan is love paying attention. In one of his earliest recorded sayings, from 1914, he asked:

“Do you know what dhyan is? To appreciate. You have appreciated me; whoever appreciates you will understand me. How, you know? If one eats that grain of salt, one gets the taste of the mountain of salt.”

And in his own English, years later:

“To attend and imbibe the Love-Lord with eager, repeating urge and to serve Him with active service accordingly is the essence of meditation.”

“Love is the leaven of meditation.”

So meditation, in this way, is not a technique applied to the mind. It is what the mind does naturally when it loves someone: it returns to them, dwells on them, learns them, and slowly begins to take their shape.

Why a living ideal

If meditation is staying with one thought, the obvious question is: which thought? On whom?

Thakur’s answer is a person. Not an idea, not a point of light, not the breath, but a human being in whom goodness has taken a form you can love. In Satyanusaran he puts it in two lines:

“Attachment to One or concentrated inclination is called ‘Yoga’.”

“To adhere the mind thoroughly to the Ideal is called Holiness.”

Think of an airplane. To leave the ground, you have to be attached to the airplane. Flapping your arms will not do it. In the same way, to rise above the pull of scattered thoughts, we need to be attached to someone who is already free of that pull: one who is still, one who is the master of the vibrations rather than tossed by them.

He described such a person in the same chapter:

“He within whom all the resources of the world — knowledge, love and activity — are spontaneous, and by the inclination towards whom the scattered lives of men and all the diversities of the world find a final solution, is the God of men!”

If the word God does not sit easily with you, that is all right. Read it as “the one in whom everything good comes together.” The point is not the word but the person: someone whose own love for their Ideal was so complete that it made them what they are.

Why it has to be the right one. We become like what we dwell on. That is the whole power of meditation, and also its danger. Thakur said it plainly:

“One must not meditate on just anyone, because if there is any imperfection or unresolved knot in the one meditated on, it can be transmitted into the meditator. He who comes from above bearing the mark of perfection — He is the object of dhyana.”

And in July 1923:

“The aim is to bring memory back. But without the help of one in whom that memory is awake — without taking refuge in him — it cannot be brought back.”

The word he kept returning to was concentric: having one centre. The more our life turns around that one centre, the more our mind, our own vibrations, are tuned to his. And slowly we too become what he is, a walking, talking solution for the people around us.

This does not ask anyone to abandon the faith they were born into. Thakur insisted on the opposite:

“With us there is no abandoning; there is joining. In this no side is left out.”

Where a beginner can start. If you have not yet found such a person, begin with the love you already have. Remember your mother, a grandparent, a teacher, anyone whose goodness has touched you. Let that love be the thread you hold. It is not the whole of the practice, but it is the right direction: from love, toward the One.

The Holy Name

If dhyan makes the mind receptive, something else has to make it sharp enough to stay. That is the work of the Name. In Satyanusaran:

“Repetition of the Name makes man keen, and Meditation or ‘Dhyan’ makes him calm and receptive.”

“Be keen but calm. You will feel everything.”

The ocean presses back. It wants to keep us up in the waves. The Name gives the mind the edge it needs to go down. And when you become still, you feel every movement around you, the way still water shows every ripple.

What the Name is. Everything in this universe is vibration. Some of it we hear; most of it we never will. Thakur taught that a true Name is not an arbitrary word but the sound-form of that vibration itself:

“Everything in the universe is created from vibration. Within this Name is the mechanism of vibration. So it fulfils each and every thing.”

In his Kushtia years he put it even more simply: the true Name is the first sound, the root of creation, the upholder of life and the nourisher of existence; and therefore repeating that Name joined with meditation on the one who gives it is the best of all ways.

How it works on us. He explained it in the language of nerves and cells, decades before anyone spoke of neuroplasticity:

“‘Doing the Name’ means uttering within the mind what is to be repeated and meditating on its meaning… from continuously uttering a word within the mind, it acts on our nerves and excites the brain-cells… our cells become far more sensitive… And through one-pointedness continually with attachment — that is, as a result of dwelling on the beloved, or meditation — those sensitive cells are so adjusted that they not only take response but are able to hold it more firmly, that is, they become receptive.”

The Name makes us sensitive. Meditation on the beloved makes us receptive. One without the other is incomplete, and he said so in a single line: Nam without dhyan is sterile; dhyan without Nam is dry.

Why not just any word? People often ask whether any pleasant word will do. Thakur’s answer, given in November 1925, was no: a mere exclamation stirs only a surface wave, while the Name given by a realised one “creates a wave on the vital flow itself.” Repeating words at random, or forcing a sound without love behind it, can unsettle the nerves rather than steady them. He also said the Name is not a word in isolation at all:

“The Name becomes meaningful in the Nami. The Name is not just a word. It is the Nami’s name. If the Nami is not illumined within me, then there is no Name.”

Nami means the Named, the one whose Name it is.

“The Name itself is He.” On 5 August 1923, after rain, a devotee named Ganeshilal sat with him on the veranda and asked to wash his feet and drink a little of the water as a blessing. Thakur turned him gently toward the Name instead:

“What’s the need for that, dada? Keep up the Name all the time — the Name itself is the charanamrita you should drink.”

“I do — but without your grace nothing can happen.”

“The grace is always there. He is in all your work. If you take the Name, He is there; if you don’t, He is there too… Try to become passive, take the Name, and His grace will show itself, and you will feel it easily. The Name itself is He. The more you take the Name, the more you make Him your own.”

The key and the door. On 14 June 1924, on a terrace in Kolkata, the great nationalist leader Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das asked him the plainest question of all: what is the Name? Thakur answered:

“Within the body, by action and reaction, a whole range of sounds is always arising of itself — that is what is called the Name, or Nada, or Bija. Our brain cells lie shut up under the pressure of our outward-turned complexes. When the seed-sound is repeated within, again and again, with attention, it acts on the nerves and stirs the cells of the brain. They open out, as it were — what was hard to grasp becomes easy, the understanding unfolds, and it is as though a key turns and the door of knowledge swings open.”

Deshbandhu protested that he had done a great deal of Name and got nothing from it. Thakur’s reply is the hinge of this whole page:

“One must first hear what Name is to be done and how it is to be done, and then carry it out exactly, by the rule.”

That same night, Deshbandhu took initiation.

The meditation of this age

For centuries, serious meditation meant leaving the world: the forest, the cave, the monastery. Thakur gave a practice for people who cannot leave, and should not. His whole prescription fits in one verse of Magna Dicta:

“Do meditate Mantra on thy Lord dawn and night, do repeat the Holy Name mentally and meaningfully in all the movements of daily life, do materialize the directions of the Guru in due time — that is Tapas — the way to achievement!”

Three limbs: a sitting at dawn and at night; the Name running quietly beneath everything you do; and the Ideal’s wishes carried out in real work. Take away any one and the practice limps.

Why does his wish matter so much? Because it is not one person’s wish in the ordinary sense. The Ideal is one who is in tune with the primal Cause, and so in tune with everything; his wish already holds your well-being, mine and everyone’s. His wish is our total well-being. And when we love him, even that reasoning falls away: in true love, the beloved himself becomes the object of devotion.

The Name through the day. On 13 June 1923 he gave the simplest picture of the second limb:

“Do the Name in the midst of all work. As someone sings a line of a song while working, now and then when the mind goes to the work he forgets the song, and a little later hums it again — the Name too must be done like that, at all times.”

No bell, no counting, no strain. You forget, and you find it again, the way you find yourself humming.

Meditation is measured in life. He also defined meditation by what it does to a person in the middle of ordinary affairs:

“The psycho-physical moulding of objects and affairs to fulfill the interest of the Principal, unfurling the faculties of perception, conception, discretion and remembrance with a shortening of the reaction time is the fundament of concentration and meditation.” (Magna Dicta 116)

Read it slowly. Meditation, here, is not sitting apart from things. It is shaping things and events toward the good of the one you love, and in doing so your perception, your understanding, your judgment and your memory open out, and you respond more quickly and more rightly. That is a test anyone can apply to their own practice.

Sitting alone is not enough. A devoted early companion named Ananta loved silent meditation and found organisational work a painful descent. Thakur told him:

“Look, Ananta — merely sitting and doing Name-dhyan without doing work for people’s good, dharma does not happen. As sadhana must be done, so must the Ishta’s directions be made concrete in real work.”

And again: “Neither the Name alone will do, nor work alone. Both have to be run together.”

Character, not visions. People who practise seriously do sometimes hear inner sounds or see light. Thakur did not deny this. But on a June afternoon in 1927, under the big mango tree, he set the measure:

“Merely hearing sound or seeing light is not realisation… What is to be attained is character, and that is realisation.”

In Satyanusaran he gives the goal in other words:

“The solving and untying of all kinds of knots of the mind so that they become meaningful in One — is Salvation.”

“That to conceive which the mind retains its being is Finite. That to conceive which the mind loses itself is Infinite!”

Mastery. Life is an ocean. Running out of the water onto the scorching land is not enjoyment; that is leaving the field. Sinking helpless into the deep is not enjoyment either; that is drowning. The real thing is to know how to swim: to go deep, and to come up. Then, however many arrows the world throws, your response is in your hands. Whether you are shaken is in your hands. The old word for this is ishitva. Isha means master; ishitva is mastery. The Name, dhyan, and love are the keys to it. This is what we mean by the master within.

If you want to begin

The five-minute sitting on this site is only an entry: the first turning of attention inward, behind the eyes, toward someone you love. It is real, and it is worth doing every day. But it is not the whole practice. The Name itself, and the way of holding it, are given personally, at initiation.

Why a guide is needed. When we are ill, we do not read about every medicine ever made and take a little of each. We go to a doctor, who gives a prescription fitted to us. When we want strength, a good trainer gives a proper programme: which exercise, how much, in what order. The inner life is no different. Good intentions and borrowed techniques are not enough. It needs a right process, given by one who knows it, and followed exactly.

All over the world today, people are trying to revive the old practices: ancient breathing, ancient chants, ancient postures. Much of it is sincere. But a principle given for one age, lifted out of its setting and not fitted to the life we actually live, rarely carries its full power. That is why, from age to age, one comes who lives the eternal truth afresh and shows it in a form his own time can follow. In Thakur’s teaching, every past prophet is fulfilled in the living Ideal of the present, not set aside.

Think of how technology grows. The new phone does not throw away the telephone, the camera, the radio and the letter; it holds them all, in a form we can use today. Thakur said the same of the Name:

“In the present age all the Names of every previous age are converged and concentrated in the Sat-nama, just as in the full moon all the moons are present.”

“If one takes the mantra or Name of some gross level as ultimate and stays stuck in it, a man’s progress gets blocked. That is why so much is said about accepting the Purushottama of the age… The holy name he brings — within it all other Names lie contained.”

But even the best instrument needs right use. A phone in a drawer does nothing. The Name, too, needs its proper exercise and process. That is what initiation gives.

Be careful what you call initiation. In the name of initiation, a great deal happens in the world: mantras sold as charms, powers promised, people asked to fix their minds on whoever happens to be teaching. Thakur’s own tests are simple. Initiation is not a few secret syllables (as he says just below). The one meditated on must be one “who comes from above bearing the mark of perfection.” And the Name bears fruit only where there is a realised Sadguru and a real pull toward him: “Unless the Sadguru is a realised man, and unless there is a pull towards that Sadguru, the Name does not bear fruit.” After the Purushottama’s physical departure, he said, initiation is to be taken in His name from a Ritwik who himself follows Him, and it is that same Purushottama who remains the one meditated on. Ask, before you begin, whom you are being asked to love.

What initiation is. Thakur was blunt that it is not a secret word whispered in an ear:

“Initiation is the process by which those who have known by doing make a person know, bring his walking into reality, and stand him upright in life and growth; otherwise what meaning has initiation? Merely teaching a couple of words with anusvara and visarga, like spells and charms, is not initiation.”

He noted that the root meaning of the English word initiation is “to go in.” Initiation is the beginning of going in, with a guide who has already been there.

You are already in the water. Many people wait until they feel ready. He answered that too, with the same ocean we began with:

“If you think ‘I’ll learn to swim, then go into the water’, then know you are in the water already; drowning stands holding you by the hair… this very moment take initiation and, with a life bowed in reverence, start walking on the path He has set. And in this walking, even if you fall, even if your body is grazed bloody or broken for want of practice, walk on, do not give up walking.”

Taste it and see. Around 1933 a man named Priyanath sat up one night wondering whether initiation would be a gain or a loss. Thakur turned to a little girl nearby and asked her how one knows whether something is sweet or sour. “You put it in your mouth and you know,” she said. Thakur replied:

“Everything is like that. Without practising a while you can’t tell good from bad — and if you don’t like it, just drop it.”

Priyanath was initiated the next morning.

And it is only the start. “Taking initiation from the guru,” Thakur warned, “you think in your mind everything is done; it is not so, it is not at all so, if you do not keep it with nishtha” — with steady devotion.

If something in these pages, or in the few minutes you sat, has stirred you, we would be glad to talk with you. Contact Master Within about initiation →

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Part Two — For those who have been initiated

This part is for those who have received the Name. It does not repeat what your Ritwik gave you at initiation: the Name itself, the way of the sitting, and the words said before and after it. Hold to those exactly as you received them. What follows is what Thakur said around them, so that the practice can deepen.

The two sittings, and the thread between them

The earliest dated form of his instruction, given in May 1923, is still the whole of it:

“Put great stress on the Name. Regular sitting, at least morning and evening, is very necessary, with the body covered with a chadar. Besides that, sit for two minutes or ten minutes whenever you can. Do not let the Name grow old.”

And on the same occasion: “Even on the road it is good to keep a large handkerchief or chadar with one. Whenever there is time one should sit, like the Muslims’ saying of namaz.”

How long. On 10 July 1923 he told those around him: “Every day at least two hours of Name are a must.” Decades later, to a disciple named Sailen who admitted he was doing very little, he lowered the bar without lowering the principle:

“Then sitting half an hour right then will do. Doing it sitting on the bed is enough. This is the root thing. Just as there is the habit of tea-drinking, one has to make it an addiction like that.”

Why it works, in his own summary. On 26 September 1948:

“If a man does nam-dhyan at dawn and night, on rising does the Name and then Ishtabhriti with a will, and keeps japa running regularly while moving about — for him to fall into difficulty is itself difficult. A man’s real thing is the head; if the head stays healthy, sound and active, and the walking is in proportion to it, then there is no limit to what he can and cannot do. All experimented fact.”

Where the mind is held. You were shown the place at initiation. Of why it matters, he said:

“To do the Name concentrating the mind at the ajna-cakra means to do the Name with the mind fixed on the cakra of knowledge. By this the base of the brain becomes excited. As a result, the cells become active and receptive. Along with the Name, dhyan is needed.”

Sitting upright. “There is a fluid within the spinal column. Sitting in other ways it stays somewhat obstructed, but sitting that way it stays free — it can take up the stimulation better.” He also admitted, with his usual honesty, that he himself had rarely sat formally: “I never did Name sitting in a posture; I used to run about… But do not think from this that no one needs it.”

Within, not aloud. “If you do the Name mentally, pressure falls on the nerve; the effect is greater. Doing it aloud does not achieve as much.” (Though, he added, “it is not that doing it aloud bears no fruit at all.”)

No counting. Nowhere in his words is a count, a rosary or a number of repetitions required. The measures he gave were time and continuity.

Ishtabhriti, before anything. The morning sitting is followed by Ishtabhriti, before food or water. He explained why the order matters:

“The reason there is the rule of doing Ishtabhriti before taking food and water is: to see His delight as greater than my own need to still hunger, to give that the priority. So, observing yajan, yaajan, Ishtabhriti with feeling and with nishtha, Ishta-love becomes stronger than self-love.”

The thread between. Between the two sittings, the Name runs through the day. A simple check carries it: Is the Name still going? When you find it has stopped, you begin again, without guilt. In time it begins to run by itself:

“One has to form such a habit of doing the Name that it runs all the time. You are talking; then perhaps you find the Name has started again — that means the Name was there even during the talk. You wake from sleep and find the Name going — that means it was going even in sleep.”

Japa with meaning

The Name is repeated “mentally and meaningfully.” What does meaningfully mean? Thakur took the old line from Patanjali, tajjapas tadartha-bhavanam — “its repetition, and contemplation of its meaning” — and opened it out:

“In japa there is a mental inclination. Repetition means remaining in a proper way. The mantra or Name to be repeated is the symbol of the primal Cause. And doing the Name means bowing towards that causal Being and trying to abide in it. Artha means movement, or destination. The destination of the Name is the Nami. As soon as one thinks of the meaning of the Name, one must go and arrive at the Nami. To discover the meaningful consistency and relationship of Name, Nami, the world and I — that is the work of japa-dhyan. If we do not do that, it becomes like walking a road in the dark.”

Name, the Named, the world, and I. The Name carries you to the one whose Name it is. From him, you see the world as his unfolding. And then you see yourself in that light. Do not force these as steps. Let the Name run, keep him before you, and let the meaning widen of its own accord.

Name and Nami are one. He said it many ways:

“The Ishta is the embodied symbol of the Word — an embodied human of vibration itself. That is why Name and Nami are not different. We meditate on that Ishta. To meditate on the sounding form of the Ishta means to meditate on the Ishta himself.”

“Name and Nami are non-different… Like a flower and its fragrance.”

“As one does the Name, the Nami’s attributes too come to remembrance. They come of themselves.”

This is why the Name is never done alone, as a sound. It is done with him in view, the way you say the name of someone you love and their face comes with it.

Meaning is also conduct. “Contemplating the meaning of the Name,” he said, “means doing the Name with fitting service to the Nami, keeping consistency on every side in one’s conduct, simply, with simple devotion — that which carries me towards that very Nami.” The meaning of the Name is finally lived, not thought.

And where it leads: “The more one does nam-dhyan, the more the urge of one’s being towards the living Sadguru grows. The feeling ‘he indeed is my very life’ presses upon the whole being… I see the One in all, and again I see all in that supreme One.”

Dhyan in depth

Not a frozen picture. The most common mistake is to think dhyan means holding his image still in the mind and staring at it. Thakur mocked exactly this in a verse:

«ইষ্টস্বার্থই ভুল হল তোর / মূৰ্ত্তি-চিন্তাই ধরলি, / ধ্যানটি গেল গোল্লায় কিন্তু / এমন করাই করলি।»

You forgot the Ishta’s interest and held only image-thinking; the dhyan went to ruin — but that is exactly what you did.

The form matters; that is why the eyes rest on it. But the form is a doorway to the whole person: his movement, his words, his moods, his wishes.

What to dwell on. In Chalar Sathi he described it in one long breath:

“Meditation is nothing else than the way in which a person, by thinking of his Beloved, becomes awakened and ecstatic — that is, to feel the one who is the object of meditation, to think about him and talk things over in the mind about him, as he is seen, with whatever there is in him, and whatever constitutes him, and with his doings and speaking, moods and gestures, and thus arrive at perception, meaningfulness, and the means of accomplishment, and to be awakened, overflowing, and whole-heartedly dedicated to him…”

And in The Message, his own English, the process:

“Be thou quick, active and of sharpened intelligence, observe everything thoroughly, think with every thoroughness of the Beloved — the Love — about what He wants, what He likes, what makes Him enlightened and enlivened, and discern practically with every thoroughness what is good to Him and what is not… keeping your trail of adherence untottering; this — the process of meditation.”

So in the sitting, with the Name running, you may let the mind move among his life: a scene, a saying, the way he received someone, what he wanted for the world. That movement is not distraction. It is dhyan.

Form and Name together. On 6 March 1925: “As the Name is the Beloved’s, His form too is His. So Name-japa and form-dhyana together are more fruitful. By this alone we gradually turn into His very nature. To go beyond body, beyond mind, the only provision is love, that vital hankering.”

When thoughts come. Not suppression, but joining. From a talk by the Padma in 1936:

“If you can, with a little skill, join that pull to your Ishta, then contemplation and dhyana will, in proportion, start moving of their own accord. And if you whip it up with speaking and doing, and set it going in the rehearsal-ground of japa — who can catch you?… The one thread capable of joining them all is your very attachment to your Best, your Ishta! Catch hold of that thread, and whatever you tie to it will stay bound.”

When a thought arrives in the sitting, ask what his interest is in it, tie it to him, and come back to the Name.

The stages. He laid out the road from dhyan to samadhi plainly:

“Dhyana means thinking of something — and dharana comes when this thinking becomes so satisfying that it clings to the mind unbroken; and when, by this clinging, the mind with all its complexes is so absorbed that, though the response to outer impulses is felt, they cannot break that clinging — then comes savikalpa samadhi. ‘Samadhi’ means holding in the full way… When, pleasing the beloved by holding and giving with all one has, a man in the frenzy of love is wholly cut off from outer response, mad in the beloved, and loses the sense even of the outline of the beloved’s existence and of his own — then comes nirvikalpa samadhi… So when a man returns from such samadhi… he comes back with an endless store of knowing.”

Notice how exactly this matches the definition in Satyanusaran: distractions felt, but unable to break the continuity. The beginner’s dhyan and the deepest samadhi are the same movement, carried further.

It takes falling. Of his own early years he said: “I heard the meaning of dhyana from mother’s mouth. I did accordingly. Doing and doing I got stuck. Again I rose. In this way by doing and doing and doing it came right.”

The inner sound and light

With steady practice, many people begin to hear sounds within, or to see light, that no outer source explains. Thakur spoke of this openly, and as physiology, not mystery.

Where it comes from. In the 1936 talks by the Padma he explained that practice according to rule makes the brain cells more and more responsive, until a kind of heat arises in them:

“It is much as when a grain of sugar-candy is cracked under pressure in the mouth: a flash of light is often seen. And this flash too has varied expressions — somewhere red, somewhere yellow, somewhere green predominates… And likewise that radiant excitation, travelling through the nerves, excites the cells of the ear and creates corresponding sound. With the inner ear, that is, through the nerve-vibration inside the ear, we can perceive it.”

“And because sound is heard though there is no collision of any kind, they have called this place Anahata (the unstruck).”

Of the true Name he said: “If one does that Name with love for the Sadguru, all the sounds sprout forth of themselves.” Nothing has to be manufactured. When it comes, it comes from the Name done with love.

Where it can lead. In the same talks he described, in the first person, an ascent through the inner centres, each with its own hum and colour. We do not reproduce that map here, for a reason he gave himself (below). But its end is worth knowing, because it shows what all of it is for:

“For those who are so intensely attached to the Ishta, that absorbed state breaks, now and then, with the appearance of the Ishta’s form. Receiving such a luminous, tender, startling appearance… there he is, welling up… giving his child an intense, tender embrace radiant with kindled affection.”

The summit is not a sound or a light. It is him.

His warning. On 6 March 1925:

“By thinking again and again of the ideas of different stations or regions we may excite the brain cells and mistake it for some realisation… Contemplation of the regions is in this way full of danger and so to be given up.”

So do not go looking for sounds or lights, and do not try to picture inner regions. If a sound comes of itself, receive it as his resonance and keep his form and the Name where they are. For anything further, ask the one who initiated you.

Two kinds of fruit. “Done concentrically, the flash comes. In someone it comes out through inner vision, in someone through endowment. One is called anubhuti (experience). The other vibhuti (power). In some, both come together.” Neither is the goal. The goal, as he said under the mango tree, is character.

In his last years at Deoghar, those near him said a sound was always ringing in his ears. Once, in the middle of a conversation, he fell silent as though listening, then smiled: “I have taken this all the way to its limit.”

Signs of progress

Thakur called the effects of nam-dhyan experimented fact, and he told people what to expect. The signs he weighed most were in the mind and the character. The ones in the body and senses come too, but they are not the measure.

In the mind and character — the ones he counted.

• Depth: “Doing nam-dhyan, one becomes of a deep penetrating kind; one does not remain superficial. One can think a whole thing through right to its consequence. Those whose stream of thought is not sound and consistent — know that they do not meditate.”
• Seeing oneself: “Without nam-dhyan a man is not even caught by himself. If he cannot even catch his faults, how will he correct them?”
• What was hidden comes up: “Doing nam-dhyan, the propensities float up. As when water is heated the water at the bottom rises to the top. When what is suppressed within is caught, it becomes easier to control. Nam-dhyan moreover creates an enthusiasm and kindling.”
• A free intellect: “Then the intellect can be applied at will anywhere, and also withdrawn easily.”
• A taste that outweighs the world: “Once there is delight in Name-and-Nami, it is done; then no attraction of the world can unsettle a man… in comparison everything else tastes insipid.”

If old faults seem louder after you begin, that is not failure. It is the heated water rising, so that what lay at the bottom can be seen and set right.

In the body and senses.

• “If one does nam-dhyan with pressure, whatever else happens, the body is sure to improve.”
• “If the Name can be done at all times, the head stays clear and right. A radiance comes in the body too.”
• “The Name makes us so responsive that with the naked eye many of the subtlest of subtle matters are caught, and with the ear too much is heard.”
• “Doing nam-dhyan, the eyesight increases. If after nam-dhyan one keeps looking for a while towards the green distant horizon, the power of sight grows.”
• “While doing the Name, often one feels sleepy. — And often the opposite happens too — one feels as perked up as after drinking a bottle of wine.” Both are passing states; keep going.

The final sign is not a vision at all. It is that he is held, thought of, pleased and served with the whole of your being, in the middle of an ordinary day.

Mistakes, and their remedies

“I have done a lot of Name and got nothing.” Deshbandhu said it, and Thakur’s answer stands for everyone: first hear what Name is to be done and how, then do it exactly, by the rule. He often observed that many take initiation but do not practise regularly, steadily, and with the urge it needs, and so never discover what they have been given.

Hollow japa. “Often we do it in a hollow way; then it is not perceived. Done concentrically, the flash comes.” The remedy is always the same word: concentric, with the centre. The Name said while the mind is elsewhere is a shell. The Name said toward him, with his face before you, is alive.

The Name without dhyan, or without love. “If one does not do japa being devoted to the Ishta, eccentric (de-centred) distraction can come.” The Name raises energy. Without a beloved to give that energy direction, it can just as easily feed restlessness or passion. He put it most starkly: “Even if one does nama-sankirtana for a crore of births, still no one attains” the Lord without a real pull toward a realised Sadguru.

Meditating on the wrong object. “If the object of meditation is not the embodied symbol of the Name but something else, then the destination of the Name cannot be reached. Either one has to stop midway, or a state of being pulled two ways is created… the sadhaka’s life may even become split in two, because the Name gives him one impulse and the meditation gives him another impulse. Sadhana and tapasya are a science.”

Heat and over-intensity. Some people, practising hard, feel a burning in the body. He knew it from his own experience:

“Repeating the Name, that happens. Because doing the Name puts a pressure on the nerves. It used to happen to me too. But as one goes on doing the Name it later diminishes. Still, it is good to increase it by acclimatising gradually. Do it as long as it feels good, then give a little gap, then do it again. Arrange eating and drinking so that it is moderate, easily digestible and nourishing… Along with the Name, dhyan is needed, and real work is needed too.”

Sitting without working, or working without sitting. Both are half the practice. “Neither the Name alone will do, nor work alone. Both have to be run together.” The one who only sits grows heavy and turned in on himself. The one who only works, telling himself the work is his sadhana, loses the inner fire that makes the work true.

Irregularity. “The Name happens now and then, and then gets cut off.” His answer: “It will come by practising.” And: “Do nam-dhyan properly every day. If there is a shortfall on that side, shortage and disharmony will appear in every sphere of life.” On a hard day, keep the root: the Name with him before you, however short, and Ishtabhriti before food.

Letting it grow stale. “Do not let the Name grow old… For me the Name has never become old — it always feels new.” Return to it as to someone you love, not as to a duty.

Chasing experiences. “Many, when even a little of it happens, set the world on fire about it. If along with it there is a meaningful conception, then with that yearning go on working like a great soul.” Tell your Ritwik, not the world, and keep going.

The craving that will not leave. He once told a disciple how he dealt with his own fondness for rasagolla, the Bengali sweet. It works for every pull of the mind:

“I saw that at that time one only has to become otherwise engaged. In this way I began to adjust my craving. The complex comes and twists our thought. And if right then we become otherwise engaged, that suffices. Even now I love rasagolla. But now if I don’t get it, it causes no pain.”

His own practice

Everything he prescribed, he had lived first. These scenes come from his own tellings and from those who lived beside him.

It ran by itself. From his earliest childhood the Name rose in him without his calling it up, and he took it for granted that everyone did the same, the way people see with their eyes and breathe. Of what drove it, he said: “I never did anything with an idea of profit or loss. I liked doing the Name and did it to myself — as if I could not do without it! What I would get, what would happen — no such thought. But there was a desperate intoxication. I went deeper, still deeper… Anurag is the root of it.” Anurag: loving attachment.

“Whenever I call, will you come?” At seven or eight he heard people talk of seeing God, and his mind went mad with longing. Knowing that to call God one must do the Name, he lay down and did the Name with all his heart. A form appeared on the bamboo wall. He tested it three times, then asked: “Whenever I call, will you come?” The answer came: “Yes!” He drew one lesson from it all his life: the Name is how one calls, and the call is answered.

The road to school. As a boy he repeated the Name so fiercely that it felt, he said, like rowing a boat upstream against a strong current. One day on the road to school the whole world filled with red and blue light and he fell face down in the mud. The family called it hysteria, or a ghost. Nobody around him imagined it came from his unbroken repetition of the Name.

He refused the miracle. He found that a dead insect, touched while doing the Name, would stir. He tested it again and again until he was sure. Then he stopped. It was not a good thing to do, he felt; the mind begins to drift toward such things. He did not encourage it.

“I am the son of light.” When someone told him to pray as a sinner, he tried, and within days fear and guilt closed around him. He went to the bank of the Padma at sunset and cried out: “I am not a sinner, I am not weak, I am not base… I am your child, O Supreme Father! I am your child, I am stainless, I am pure, I am the son of light, I am eternally luminous.” From then on he never again laid such burdens of weakness on himself.

As a student. Kshitish Sanyal, who knew him as a student in Naihati, remembered: “Every morning and every evening he sat for the Name with deep attention, and every night before he slept he sang a long Hindi doha… By day too, coming and going, he hummed one doha or another under his breath.” Morning, evening, and the thread through the day: the whole formula, already, in a student’s life.

At the bedside. As a young doctor he walked his rounds absorbed in the Name. Putting the stethoscope to a patient’s chest, he sometimes heard not heart and lungs but the Name going on. Feeling the pulse, it gave the beat of the Name.

The kirtan years. At Himaitpur he and his companions sang the Name aloud through whole nights, with drums and conch. Even inside the singing, the method was the method of the sitting: eyes closed, the mind on the form of the Ishta at the place within where each had been told to hold it. “Unless you can call as one should call,” he told them, “He never comes.”

Deoghar. To the end, he rose before dawn and sat for a long while in the Name before he came out. Before five, disciples would gather silently on the veranda and wait, watching his still shape through the mosquito net, until he moved. To three visitors who sat with him there he gave the simplest instruction of all: “Just shut your eyes and enjoy the bliss.”

And to one, searching for his sandals in the dark with a small torch, he said what may be the best last word on all of this:

“Whatever small it is, try to switch it on.”

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Whatever small it is, switch it on.

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Sources

Magna Dicta, The Message and Chalar Sathi are Thakur’s own English. Satyanusaran is quoted from its authorised English translation. All other passages are translated from the Bengali by Master Within. Abbreviations: Al. Pra. = Alochana Prasange (volume/page); BBDR = Brajagopal Duttaray, Sree Sree Thakur Anukulchandra (Bengali, vols 1–2; English translation where noted); KP = Katha Prasange; NP = Nana Prasange.

A word everyone uses — “Word-sadhana exists…”: Al. Pra. 11/81.

What dhyan actually is — dhyan and samadhi definitions: Satyanusaran. “Whenever, by an utter pull…”: BBDR-2, entry 30 (7 Nov 1923). “Like a crank or a madman…”: NP-3, p. 51. “Do you know what dhyan is?…”: Punya Puthi, 20 Bhadra 1321 (1914). “To attend and imbibe…”: The Message, vol. 2. “Love is the leaven…”: The Message, vol. 3.

Why a living ideal — Yoga, Holiness, God of men: Satyanusaran. “One must not meditate on just anyone…”: Al. Pra. 11/66. “The aim is to bring memory back…”: BBDR-2 (July 1923). “With us there is no abandoning…”: Al. Pra. 12/103.

The Holy Name — keen and calm: Satyanusaran. “Everything in the universe is created from vibration…”: Al. Pra. 19/89. The first sound: BBDR-1, ch. 14, p. 304. “‘Doing the Name’ means…”: NP-1, pp. 21–22. A wave on the vital flow: talk of 32 Kartik 1332 (Nov 1925). “The Name becomes meaningful in the Nami…”: Al. Pra. 18/67; Diparakshi 3/262. Ganeshilal: BBDR-2, ch. 2, entry 27 (5 Aug 1923). Deshbandhu: BBDR, English translation, ch. 9 (14 June 1924); the answer to “What is the Name?” appears only in the English edition.

The meditation of this age — Magna Dicta 68 and 116. The song while working: BBDR-2 (13 June 1923). Ananta: BBDR-1, appendix 7. “Neither the Name alone…”: Al. Pra. 9/12. “Merely hearing sound…”: BBDR-2 (14 Ashvin 1332; 30 June 1927). Salvation, Finite, Infinite: Satyanusaran.

If you want to begin — “Initiation is the process…”: KP-2, pp. 69–70. “To go in”: NP-3, p. 62. “I’ll learn to swim…”: KP-2, pp. 70–71. The full moon: Al. Pra. 14/181. The Purushottama of the age: Al. Pra. 10/22. The realised Sadguru: Al. Pra. 1/118. Initiation after His departure: Al. Pra. 2/294. Priyanath Basu: c. 1933. “Taking initiation from the guru…”: Anushruti 7, Sadhana 40.

The two sittings — May 1923 and 10 July 1923: BBDR-2 (entry 22). Sailen: Diparakshi 3/237. 26 Sept 1948: Al. Pra. 14. The ajna: Al. Pra. 17/177. The spinal fluid: Al. Pra. 17/152. Within, not aloud: Al. Pra. 15/46; 8/63. Ishtabhriti: Al. Pra. 4, pp. 133–134 (21 Oct 1942). The Name running all the time: Al. Pra. 16/20.

Japa with meaning — Patanjali’s line: Al. Pra. 10/6. The embodied Word: Al. Pra. 10. Flower and fragrance; meaning as conduct: Diparakshi 2/126. Attributes come of themselves: Al. Pra. 18/67.

Dhyan in depth — The verse on image-thinking: Anushruti 1, Sadhana 45. Chalar Sathi 95. The Message, vol. 2 (Process). 6 March 1925: BBDR-2, entry 42. The thread: KP-1, ch. 3. The stages: NP-3, pp. 36–37. “I heard the meaning of dhyana…”: Priyaparamer Atmakatha, p. 130.

The inner sound and light — KP-3, pp. 37–40, 51 and 46–54. Sounds sprout of themselves: Al. Pra. 18/67. The warning: BBDR-2, entry 42 (6 March 1925). Anubhuti and vibhuti: Al. Pra. 20/405. “All the way to its limit”: Atmakatha (Deoghar talks).

Signs of progress — Al. Pra. 16/63, 16/60, 19/117, 17/215, 2/86, 16/12, 17/177, 15/46, 17/269; the free intellect: BBDR-2 (May 1923).

Mistakes — Al. Pra. 20/405, 14/95, 1/118, 11/46, 19/50, 9/12, 16/12, 21/291; BBDR-2 (May 1923); Al. Pra. 17/269; Diparakshi 3/238–239.

His own practice — BBDR-1, ch. 10, pp. 181–189, and ch. 7, pp. 115–116 and 143–144; Atmakatha, ch. 1; BBDR-1, ch. 12, pp. 221–227; BBDR-2, ch. 4, pp. 200–202; the memoirs of Kapur and of Spencer.