Meditation is an inspiring invitation to the most intimate adventure of human spirituality: the direct experience of one's own soul. Here P.B. focuses lucidly on a topic for which his extraordinary expertise has been widely acknowledged since he was a young man in the 1930s. He explains the purpose and importance of meditation, provides an unusually rich variety of tested and proven techniques, explains the potential dangers of meditation, and advises how those dangers can be avoided. This section will prove highly useful to beginners and intermediates alike. It should be welcomed by advanced meditators and teachers of meditation as well.
The fourth "category" (major theme) in P.B.'s overall outline of twenty-eight, this section stands in direct relationship to the twenty-third category, Advanced Contemplation. Because of the editorial decisions involved in distinguishing and presenting these two categories, more is required here by way of introductory explanation than has been necessary for any of the previous sections in this series.
As is the case with previous categories, the selection and sequencing of material here is the work of students and not of P.B. himself. Because of the general unfamiliarity in many parts of the West with meditation, however, and because some fundamental ideas might appear unnecessarily confusing if paras were printed somewhat randomly, we have taken much more care in the sequencing within some of the chapters than is our custom. In this particular case, the risk of imposing unintended meanings by context is far outweighed by the risk of obscuring the fundamental clarity with which P.B. approaches and explains this important practice.
Progress in meditation, the inward penetration to deeper and more satisfying levels of the inner reality, can be schematized in several different ways. Two schemas are important to understanding the vast majority of P.B.'s writings on meditation.
The first distinguishes "elementary" and "advanced" practices. All the practices involving willed effort, the struggle to overcome the mind's inherent restlessness and focus it one-pointedly on a single image/idea/ideal to the exclusion of all else, are considered elementary in this schema. Only after such one-pointed concentration can be maintained indefinitely does one intelligently change over to the rapt, highly alert state of inner passivity requisite for the advanced practices.
This division into elementary and advanced practices is the one that distinguishes the fourth and twenty-third categories from one another in P.B.'s general outline. But since the practices considered "elementary" in such a schema are far from "elementary" in the practice of most meditators and would-be meditators, and since these practices include nearly all of what is generally recommended by way of "meditation" to spiritual seekers in the modern West, we felt that P.B.'s title of Elementary Meditation could be misleading to the majority of Westerners now practicing some form of meditation. Feeling ourselves forced to offer the present form of introductory explanation in either case, we have chosen to use Meditation as the title on the cover of this volume rather than the somewhat technical term Elementary Meditation from the original outline.
The second general schematization of stages of practice that it will be helpful for readers to understand is threefold. Within the generic term "meditation," it distinguishes three stages: concentration, meditation proper, and contemplation. Though there are occasional exceptions and further elaborations, this threefold framework is the one that readers will find most useful in understanding the material in this volume. These three stages are quite clearly explained in the section on "Levels of absorption" in Chapter 1. The reader should also be aware that the word "meditation" is sometimes used as a generic term covering all three of these stages, and that it is sometimes used more technically to mean only the second of these three stages. Informed of both these usages, readers should have little difficulty discovering for themselves which meaning is appropriate to individual paras.
Editorial conventions for this category are the same as stated in introductions to earlier volumes. Likewise, (P) at the end of a para indicates that it is one of the relatively few paras we felt it also appears in Perspectives, the introductory volume to this series.