Chapter 11Combining Work, Meditation and Bhakti · The Time Given to Work and Meditation

The work should not be diminished for that purpose [meditation and japa]. On the other hand it is not necessary for you to work all the time. If the work assigned to you is finished earlier, it does not matter about your not keeping the full office hours.

* If this arrangement [in work] gives no time for meditation — no time for going inside and establishing there the peace, wideness and joy in which you can meet the Divine inside and in work — it seems defective. What I meant is that it is not necessary either to work all the time or to intoxicate the brain by unrelieved meditation as some do. The result of meditation can be obtained by work, but then you must be able or learn to live inwardly even in the work and to do all from within.

* Half an hour’s meditation in the day ought to be possible — if only to bring a concentrated habit into the consciousness which will help it, first to be less outward in work and, secondly, to develop a receptive tendency which can bear its fruits even in the work.

* I have not suggested that you are to progress by dhy¯ana alone; but you have a great capacity for that and you cannot progress fully without it. In this Yoga some kind of action is necessary for all — though it need not take the form of some set labour. But for the moment progress through concentration and inner experience is the first necessity for you.

This [stream of thoughts] is what we call the activity of the mind, which always comes in the way of the concentration and tries to create doubt and dispersion of the energies. It can be got rid of in two ways, by rejecting it and pushing it out, till it remains as an outside force only — by bringing down the higher