Meditation on the Lord
« SANKHYA, The Philosophy of Lord Kapila
Chapter 04: Meditation on the Lord
Meditation on the personal form of the Lord is the essence of the process of devotional service and the best antidote for the impersonalism that permeates conditioned life. We may think Mayavadis are just a sect in India, but in reality, impersonalism is the default setting for all conditioned souls, and only when this tendency is counteracted can pure devotional service to the Lord flourish.
Lord Kapila describes the process of meditation on the personal form of the Lord following the process of astanga-yoga, but as Prabhupada explains in his purports, all the stages described by Him have equivalents in the process of Krsna consciousness. By learning and practicing these steps, we can fix our minds in the form of the Lord and be able to see Him everywhere we look. The process described by Lord Kapila serves thus as a guide of the devotional process and shows us many traps that can stop our progress. Bhakti-yoga and other yogas have as their ultimate goal the same Personality of Godhead, but one is practical, and the others are difficult.