Each day can bring up challenges for us as we live our lives. If we have a practice such as meditation, where we are trying to purify and bring the mind under our control, life itself becomes the testing ground.
As the tests and challenges come, we can see from the way we react how much we have progressed, how the technique and the practice has worked.
Shiva Rudra Balayogi (Babaji) gives the example of someone training to be a doctor. ‘When you go for medicine, for four, five, six years you read and want to become a doctor. So what you have read and what you have practised, when you have experienced, what you know comes to light only when you go out and try to become a doctor. In the same way, for every person who can claim they are doing a lot of meditation, it comes to light only when they behave in the society, in their day to day life. Their attitude, their words, their thinking. All these things tell what they have practised and what they have not practised.’
Whatever the state of the mind, it will behave in that way. Babaji says, ‘You can cheat the whole world, but you cannot cheat your own consciousness’. We know what is in our own mind, first and foremost. And whatever is in the mind will come out, it will behave as it is habitual to behave.
Since meditation is a purification process it will cleanse the mind of its habitual thinking as long as we practice consistently every day. So our behaviour, our thinking will undergo a transformation. We would be able to remain composed in life in spite of any difficulty that comes up and achieve the best concentration of the brain. We be able to behave in a mature, considerate way always.