Working English translation of the Tamil teaching — for review.
Meditation is something our life greatly needs; only when we practise it can any of us live with composure. Whenever you have gone wrong in life, you will have lost your composure at that moment. To make the best decisions in life — firmly and calmly, without agitation — meditation is essential. Meditation is a great discipline. Only by doing it daily is its full benefit received; and it goes on storing positive energies in the body. If you practise daily meditation continuously for twelve years, you will be able to make your decisions firmly, without being swept away by emotion.
In the meditation classes taught at the ashram, a practice is given under the name “a journey to a distant land”. Everyone who takes part settles the mind to one point and enters meditation. During that time all sit with eyes closed, and each may think of whatever they wish. Yet at the end of the class, when each person is asked separately about the scenes their mind saw and the places it travelled to during meditation, they all give the same answer. This is the distinctiveness of this practice.
The great Siddhas such as Agasthiyar and Bhogar saw the earth, the nine planets, and the twice-seven fourteen worlds of the universe through meditations of this kind. This method of meditation is called the “dhyana pothagam”. Gurus who have learned this method all teach it in exactly the same way. Today, people say that simply sitting with eyes closed and rising after the mind has wandered where it pleased is meditation. But in earlier times the Gurus taught the further methods of meditation practice only to those who already knew the basic dhyana-pothagam practice. Like the formulae that appear in mathematics, the dhyana-pothagam methods are the formula of that practice. Even if these practices are learned from different Gurus, without proper practice their full benefit cannot be attained. Those very practice methods are what is taught in the meditation classes held at the ashram.