Intelligent meditation

Meditation has often been misunderstood as a mechanical process of forcing the mind upon some idea or object. Any purely mechanical handling of the mind is not only irksome but is bound ultimately to be unsuccessful. The mind can be controlled and directed in meditation only according to laws inherent in the makeup of the mind itself. Meditation is often easy and spontaneous when the mind is dwelling upon an object that it is interested in and that it increasingly understands. The spiritual tragedy about ordinary trains of thought is that they are not directed toward things that really matter. The object of real meditation has to be spiritually important; it has to be some divine form or object, or some spiritually significant theme or truth. Such intelligent meditation is a natural process of the mind; and since it avoids the monotonous rigidity of mechanical meditation, it becomes not only spontaneous and inspiring but easy and successful.