Rajiv Malik, HPI Correspondent,
NEW DELHI, October 4, 2005: “Meditation is nothing but attention. Meditation is paying attention to the divinity within us. Everything in nature including animals and birds are meditating. Even in the tiniest of the things in nature the ability of being attentive is there. We must also know that meditation has great curative powers. If we meditate on each and every part of our body, thereby focusing on the life energy, we can even cure a disease like cancer.”
These were the views expressed by Swami Nikhilananda, Regional Head and Acharya, Chinmaya Mission, while delivering his keynote address on the subject- “Power Of Meditation” at The Mega Spiritual Convention organized on September 30, 2005, by Chinmaya Mission’s Chinmaya Centre of World Understanding at their Lodhi Road auditorium situated in the heart of New Delhi. The event was jointly sponsored by Sir Ganga Ram Hospital and Panacea Biotec, while Aastha television channel was the media partner for the convention.
The convention began with half an hour of Vedic chanting. In his welcome address, Shri Sunil Sachdeva, a devotee of Chinmaya Mission, was greeted with a thunderous applause when he announced that Chinmaya Mission’s head, Swami Tejomayananda was recently awarded the Hindu Of the Year Award conferred by Hinduism Today.
The audience greeted Swami Nikhilananda with an applause, when he said- “We are amrutasya putras [the children of immortality] and we must always have a positive world view of the life. Our scriptures have said- ‘sarvam khaluvidam brahma’ which means that virtually everything in this universe is divine. Which means that while on one hand an elephant is divine, on the other hand even a speck of dust is divine. All human beings are divine and even the devatas are divine.”
Simplifying the art of meditation, the learned swami said, “Meditation is experiencing the divinity and infinity and both these can be defined as pure existence, pure bliss and pure energy. Sometimes we have the perception that the world is our enemy and we start reacting. Our scriptures state- ‘yatha drishti, tatha srishti’ which means- ‘as is your sight, so is your vision of the universe’. So depending on our vision, the world changes. We start looking at the world from a narrow standpoint because we have forgotten our true self, which is divine. This narrow perception of the world develops because the world addresses us in so many different ways. And because of this bombardment of messages we tend to lose our true identity, causing us a lot of sorrow and suffering.”