The first step is, therefore, to follow unquestioningly a routine to imbibe the discipline in action.
Whoever calls himself a Sikh of the True Master, He must get up early in the morning and meditate, Let him make an effort to wake up early at day-break.
In the same
sabd, Guru also avers:
From dawn he sings divine hymns of the Guru,
And meditates while sitting or standing, (In all postures).
Whosoever recites my Lord with every breath,
Such a God-centric person is blessed by the Master.
Based on this stipulation, the succeeding stage for the seeker is to fully immerse in love and presence of God, as an all time activity. Such a person sheds the selfish view of the world and life as he has no time any more to promote self-centered activities, even being a house-holder.
[SGGS 35]
If one were to consider the time and mood,
How would one select a particular time to meditate?
[SGGS 35]
If one were to forget Him even for a moment,
What sort of meditation would that be?
The Guru then advises the pilgrim of divinity:
[SGGS: 35]
O my mind, concentrate on God’s name,
True adoration is that,
When the True Lord dwells in the mind!
The true Gursikh, in the final stage, perceives himself as a part of the cosmos, without his own small ego or worldly worries bothering him, verily the true purport of
Vairag:
[SGGS : 1422]
Those God-centrists who are imbued with the Beloved’s love, Nanak, they are merged in the true love day and night, God-centrists have true love whereby they attain to the True Lord, They remain in a state of constant bliss,
O Nanak, they remain in pure beatitude.
Human mind has been prone to the hypnotic inducement for a long time. It is deeply imprinted in it, fully convinced that meditation is what the Indian yogis have defined since the ancient times. In Christian, and other occidental systems, meditation denotes a similar discipline of concentration into a state of trance. In Islam, the prayer is fixed in time and postures. But
Guru Nanak broke fresh ground by redefining meditation as different from this classical view-point.
He pleaded with the Muslim audiences to shed mundane worries and get into the state of communion with God. The meditation of trance is, at best, of a temporary and periodic duration, and, once out of it, the subject reverts to worldly affairs with the same trickery which is part of his mental make-up.