Author: Rakesh Kapoor
Publisher: Rupa
Year: 2005
Language: multilingual
Pages: 234
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8129106817
Description
This book will make meditation into a discipline. Everyone eats foods, but if you are knowledgeable about the kinds of foods and eat properly, then benefits increase. Everyone exercises, but if you use better methods and are disciplined, then it becomes many, many times more effective. Similarly, everyone meditates, but when you study this book and adopt meditation as a discipline, then the benefits will be enhanced many times over.
In the real world of clocks and objective time, we live minute by minute. The past is a memory and the future is unknown. In the mental world of subjective time, we generally live in the past. The present is overcome by the past and the subjective future is false knowledge.
This book is about the mental world of subjective time. Meditation aims at removing an alienation from reality caused by subjective time. Once subjective/mental/self based time ends, the false knowledge of he world created by the self/mind ends.
This book has been written by a practitioner of about fifty years’ standing. It contains a synoptic view of meditation and a compendium of meditational disciplines from diverse international traditions. It also deals with the issues of psycho physiology of the meditating mind.
The second half of the book contains a translation of, and a commentary on, the ancient classic of meditation, Patanjali’s Yagasutra. Both the translation and commentary is from the viewpoint of a practitioner, rather than an academician. The book also contains solitary and group exercises and instructions on how to reorganize your life as a learner. The author invites you to a spiritual and intellectual adventure.
REVIEW
Shri Rakesh Kapoor, who combines experience as a modern educator with longstanding devotion to India’s ancient philosophical traditions, has prepared this book The Total Presence of Mind in which he makes practical advice on meditation accessible to the contemporary man and woman. I believe that this is a great gift because despite all the developments of the modern world, there is no machine that can produce inner peace; there is no shop that sells inner peace.
-His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Contents
What is Meditation
The Nature of time-The Temporal Perspective
Language of Reality, Thought and Self-The Linguistic Approach.
Temporal Linguistic Meditation: Changeable confused with Unchangeable
Temporal Linguistic Meditation: Un-changeable Confused with Changeable
Beyond TLM: Non-Conceptual Meditation
Main concepts of the Yogasurtra
Patanjali’s Yogasutra
Yogic lifestyle-directives and suggestions
Ways of sustaining transformation
Recommended Readings
Index of Key Terms in Yogasurtra
Index