Methods for Achieving a Silent Mind During Meditation

Bring the mind to a state of quiescence is essential for the practice of meditation. Once an individual is able to achieve this state during meditation, it is a next step to carry that silent mind into the external life. People frequently ask how it is possible to have a silent nind at any time or under any circumstances. They are used to looking at the mind as a factory of thoughts and believe that the thoughts are created and disseminated from there. What they soon find out, as they deepend the meditation practice, is that the mind if not a creator of thoughts, but a receiving/transmitting device that captures thought forms from outside, processes them internally and retransmits them, possibly with some modification or adjustment, but frequently exactly as they were received. This insight makes the attainment of the silent mind feasible and something the seeker can accomplish through systematic use of one of the proven techniques.

It should be noted that Swami Vivekananda also provide another clue that can be extremely helpful for the seeker. He points out that there is a direct link between the breath and the mental being. By seizing control of the breath, the seeker can readily prepare the mind for achieving a quiet state that is then useful for practicing the more definitive techniques described by Sri Aurobindo, whose own experience of the silent mind has been described by him elsewhere.

When the mind falls silent, it is able to receive the inspirations, intuitions, insights from higher levels of consciousness that replace the ordinary traffic that occurs based on the energies associated with mind, vital and body that are the normal processes that occupy the mental space.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “If the difficulty in meditation is that thoughts of all kinds come in, that is not due to hostile forces but to the ordinary nature of the human mind. All sadhaks have this difficulty and with many it lasts for a very long time. There are several ways of getting rid of it. One of them is to look at the thoughts and observe what is the nature of the human mind as they show it but not to give any sanction and to let them run down till they come to a standstill — this is a way recommended by Vivekananda in his Raja-yoga. Another is to look at the thoughts as not one’s own, to stand back as the witness Purusha and refuse the sanction — the thoughts are regarded as things coming from outside, from Prakriti, and they must be felt as if they were passers-by cross the mind-space with whom one has no connection and in whom one takes no interest. In this way it usually happens that after a time the mind divides into two, a part which is the mental witness watching and perfectly undisturbed and quiet and a part which is the object of observation, the Prakriti part in which the thoughts cross or wander. Afterwards one can proceed to silence or quiet the Prakriti part also. There is a third, an active method by which one looks to see where the thoughts come from and finds they come not from oneself, but from outside the head as it were; if one can detect them coming, then, before they enter, they have to be thrown away altogether. This is perhaps the most difficult way and not all can do it, but if it can be done it is the shortest and most powerful road to silence.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 3, In Difficulty, pp. 40-41