We have seen before that really things are not outside. As such, our persistence that things are outside poses a big mystery. Obviously, the functions of the mind are a blunder. What we call the mind is clearly a miscalculated affirmation. A terrible catastrophe has befallen us in the shape of our persisting in an error, which is contrary to the truths of the universe. If the universe or the world is not really outside us, and if we are not seeing anything but seeing externality, we are surely in a world of blunders. We are perpetually committing mistakes after mistakes, with the result that our entire life may be regarded as a heap or a mountain of mistakes, all mistakes being the consequences of our original self-affirmation called variously as the mind, the Chitta, and the Antahkarana. It is easy enough to appreciate why the mind is to be controlled. The mind is to be controlled, because it is the essence of mischief making, because it is the root cause of all the troubles in life. The mind is the central mischief in the individual personality. It is the great dacoit, as Acharya Sankara calls it, the thief who robs us of all wealth and makes us paupers, looking beggarly in the eyes of all people. Why should the mind be controlled? Why should there be a need felt to restrain the Antahkarana?

Because the mind is the principle of mistakenly asserting the existence of an externality which is really not there. The nature of things is such that the mind's functions, as they are being carried on now, are uncalled for, unwarranted, and thoroughly erroneous. We do not see things as they are, and therefore, we cannot act also correctly, inasmuch as action is preceded by thought, and thought is a mistaken movement of ourselves. Here comes meditation with a great message to us. Our life being a movement in the wrong direction, landing us in repeated problems and rebirths, it is necessary to station ourselves in the true position in which we essentially are, and not lose our own selves. Loss of self is the greatest of losses. We have lost ourselves in imagining that we are not the thing that we actually are in relation to the nature of the universe. We have lost ourselves in imagining that we are isolated persons - men, women and children and many other things - in relation to the nature of the universe. In order that we may be freed from this turmoil or sorrow called Samsara, or life in this empirical world, meditation comes as a rescue, as a message of hope and solace, telling us that there is no hope for humanity, that there is no chance of peace prevailing anywhere, if self-restraint is not going to be the law of life. Self-restraint, in a way, is the same as mind restraint, because we are practically the same as the mind. We do not make much of a difference between self restraint and restraint of the mind. Because, for us Jivas, empirical individuals the mind itself is the sorrow. What we are, as we appear now, is just the mind operating. The need for self-control or control of the mind arises on account of the need for perfection, which is the goal of everyone. We do not wish to be suffering like this. Our final ambition, aspiration or desire is redress of grief and attainment of freedom, which we have not seen with our eyes in this world. None has seen really what freedom is.

Everyone is bound in one-way or the other. When we imagine that we have got out of bondage and entered a state of freedom, actually we have entered into another kind of bondage in the name of freedom, a fact that we will realize sometime later. There is no such thing as real freedom in this world, because freedom is the same as attunement with the state of ultimate perfection, or at least, a degree of perfection. If we are far away from even the least percentage of what perfection can be, and our ideals and ideologies in life pursue a phantasm, we cannot hope to have peace in this world by any amount of technological progress. Gadgets and instruments today carry people away, and researches in the field of externalized technology. This is not an achievement. If by science is meant the logical knowledge of the nature of things, science is wonderful: it is unavoidable in life. But, if by science is meant technological inventions, setting up of factories and industrial organization, science is a bane on human life. It will not help us, because it carries us further away from the centre of reality, and compels us to affirm more and more that the world is outside us, rather than the fact that we are inseparable from the world.

The science of meditation, therefore, is a psychology of a philosophical nature. The very introduction of the system of meditation by Patanjali is by way of an instruction that the mind has to be controlled - meditations chitta-vritti-nirodhah. Patanjali does not go into the details of the philosophical background of the necessity to control the mind, the background that comes in Samkhya and Vedanta. Meditation is control of the mind, restraint of the mind-stuff. Meditation is Chitta-vritti-nirodhah. The moment we hear this, we begin to get excited. Meditation is control of the mind. Therefore, we have to control ourselves. We begin to close our eyes, hold our nose, and become nervous and tense in our system! That is an unfortunate result that often follows from an over-enthusiasm, emotionally aroused in us by hearing the very word meditation. We should not be stirred up into an emotion, just because we listen to the word meditation mentioned by somebody. A calm and sober understanding is meditation. Meditation is not emotion. It is not stirring oneself into any kind of made-up or artificial individuality. A calm Chief Justice in a court does not get roused up into an emotion; rather, he begins to understand the circumstances. Emotion is not possible where wisdom prevails. The mind has to be controlled. It has to be done intelligently. Emotion has no part in it.

Meditation is Chitta-vritti-nirodhah, and meditation is indispensable and unavoidable for every person, because everyone is in the same condition. Everyone is a part of the vast creation. Even those who do not know what meditation is, and do not practise it, and have no idea about it, are essentially intended for this great movement called meditation, towards the goal that is the goal of everyone. Meditation is control of the mind, and mind is to be controlled because it is the principle of isolation in a false manner. It is the mind, it isthe Chitta, it is the Antahkarana or the internal organ, that makes us falsely believe that we are individuals, with a physical independence of our own, isolated from the vast structure of creation. Therefore, control of the mind is necessary; it is unavoidable under the circumstances. If one understands one's position and knows where one stands, he must also know what is the step that he has to take to place himself in the correct position under the system of the universe. Having known something about the nature of things and the structure of the world, and having come to know consequently that the mind is the mischief-maker and the isolating principle in our own so-called individualities, we come to a conclusion that it is absolutely essential to tune the mind back to the structure of things, and abolish this isolatedness of ours as individuals, and that union of the so-called isolated finitude has to be effected with the original infinitude. This union is called meditation.