The Upanishads (Easwaran's Classics of Indian Spirituality Book 2)

by Eknath Easwaran

It is important to understand that brahmavidya is not intellectual study. The intellect was given full training in these forest academies, but brahmavidya is not psychology or philosophy. It is, in a sense, a lab science: the mind is both object and laboratory. Attention is trained inward, on itself, through a discipline the Upanishads call nididhyasana: meditation. The word meditation is used in so many different ways that I want to be clear before going further. Meditation here is not reflection or any other kind of discursive thinking. It is pure concentration: training the mind to dwell on an interior focus without wandering, until it becomes absorbed in the object of its contemplation. But absorption does not mean unconsciousness. The outside world may be forgotten, but meditation is a state of intense inner wakefulness.