There is no hard and fast rule. There is not one kind of meditation that everybody has to do. You have to meditate according to your development and according to the needs of your soul. Each patient has his own medicine; each individual has his own way of meditation.

Whenever a disciple of mine comes to me and says he has not yet discovered his way of meditating, if I see that he is sincere, I tell him to come and see me. I meditate with him first for a few minutes, and then I tell him how to meditate. The meditation is meant only for that person. It is given in strict confidence. If that person tells others I won't be the loser; it is he who will be the loser. Each person must go his own way during his meditation because each one has a particular role, a special mission on earth to fulfil. In God's divine Lila, His cosmic Play, everybody cannot play the part of a king or queen. But each one has been allotted a particular part. And to perform that part one has to meditate according to his own inner necessity.

Some seekers feel that what they actually need is love and devotion for God. They feel that to enter into the mental world, to approach God through the mind, is a waste of time. These seekers pray with the heart. But there may be others who like to pray with the mind. Basically, if somebody wants to be very intimate with God, like a child with his mother, then he has to approach through the heart. If one wants the knowledge and wisdom of God, if one wants to know what is happening on which plane and so forth, he has to approach with the mind.

When one has reached God, when one has God, the path ends. At that time we do not say, "I came through this path and he came through that path." Once we are in God's Consciousness we get the benefit of all the paths. That is to say, if I follow the path of devotion and you follow the path of the mind, when we have reached the ultimate Goal, we get the same thing. But according to our propensity we should follow a particular path. There are various ways. You have to go your way and I have to go my way. But ultimately we reach the same goal.

We seem to forget that the world problem is the individual problem, that the problems of the world are created by you and me as individuals.The problems of war, starvation, exploitation, and all the other innumerable problems that confront each one of us are created by you and me, and as long as we do not understand ourselves at every level, we will maintain the rottenness of the present society.

Individual aspiration has to grow along with collective aspiration. Individually if one feels the need of realising God, then only he will enter into the collective world of aspiration. Without entering into the collective world, he will have no existence of his own. His true existence lies in offering himself to the rest of the world.

In the field of aspiration, in the field of realisation, individuality and collectivity must go together. To those who have become very, very close to my heart on the strength of their aspiration, devotion and dedication, I wish to say that each one should feel the necessity of spreading the message of the Supreme. I give you full authority to spread the message of the Supreme. If somebody asks you, "Who has told you to give this message?" just say, "My Master, my Guru has asked me to give the message." I give you full authority to spread the message of the Supreme. Each person here has the capacity to spread the message of the Supreme. This mission is your own mission. Each person has the capacity to awaken and inspire the seekers who have not yet found the Source or who do not have any temple in which to pray and meditate on the Source.

It seems to me very important, then, to understand the total process of individuality, because it is only when the individual changes radically that there can be a fundamental revolution in society. It is always the individual, never the group or the collective, that brings about a radical change in the world, and this again is historically so. Now, can the individual, that is, you and I, change radically? This transformation of the individual but not according to a pattern- is what we are concerned with, and to me it is the highest form of education. It is this transformation of the individual that constitutes religion, not the mere acceptance of a dogma, a belief, which is not religion at all. The mind that is conditioned to a particular pattern which it calls religion, whether Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, or what you will, is not a religious mind, however much it may practice all the so-called religious ideals.