Inner Concentration vs. Outer Distraction

Of the 24 hours in a day, use six for earning and spending, six for contemplation of God, six for sleep and six for service to others. Most of you don't even have five minutes to truly contemplate on the Lord, and you are not ashamed. What a tragedy! Ponder over your present condition (sthiti), the direction you are heading (gathi), your capabilities (shakthi) and your inclinations and tendencies (mathi). Then enter upon the path of spiritual practice, step by step, so you approach the goal steadily and swiftly, day by day. Indian culture advises the control of the senses, not catering to them. The car is driven by means of a wheel which is inside it, so that when the inner steering wheel is turned, the outer wheels move. Trying to move the outer-wheels alone is a sign of ignorance! Inner concentration must be developed in preference to outer distraction. Cultivate quietness, simplicity, and humility, instead of noise, complexity and conceit.

Meditation is part of the six hours contemplation. 
We are back from New York and I am still tired. Writing takes time as well, but six hours seems a lot for people with a job and a normal life style, we are not living in an ashram here and our focus is not uphold and controlled by a strict ashram routine. We live in the world and society and we have to work without the nice comforting upholding and sathvic ashram structure in India and that is an all different reality, but usually after being here for some months as I meditated always morning and evening regularly when returning to the ashram I had the feeling I never left, only at that time I didn't understand it, the feeling was not the same, even if the focus was the same as it seems.   

Of the 24 hours in a day, use six for earning and spending, six for contemplation of God, six for sleep and six for service to others. Most of you don't even have five minutes to truly contemplate on the Lord, and you are not ashamed. What a tragedy! 

If we as most people don't even have five minutes of contemplation a day and it is a tragedy we don't feel it. We also don't feel ashamed about it, if we would we would change it and make it different and why we are not ashamed, because we just don't know that we have not the right focus, most of people I know think they have and they think they don't do anything else, but they don't know how and that doesn't work. 
Nobody is telling them how to keep six hours of that precious focus and how to change the tragedy into something positive. And even if we listen, we don't know how still. 
It is the biggest obstacle on that spiritual path that we think we know love and we have no idea of that type of pure love, that means what we think we know is based on delusion, it is an illusion, it is not true. We don't know and we don't know that we don't know. It is a tragedy, but people don't know and what we don't know doesn't trouble us if it is a tragedy or not.  

Ponder over your present condition (sthiti), the direction you are heading (gathi), your capabilities (shakthi) and your inclinations and tendencies (mathi). 

We should ponder about our present condition, we should be aware of the direction we have and our capabilities, inclinations and tendencies and all that we should do before we start with a spiritual practise. We think that he talks to the students, young people who have their life still in front of them, that is not what we would tell to older people. Usually we have to start with Sadhana first to even be able to understand spiritual issues and principles. As we can see with older age people never get there to make their mind up about their present condition and that means they never start with spiritual practise and that is common as he is telling us here, most of the people don't spend even five minutes thinking about it. Fact is we are quite busy in our daily life and we keep ourselves busy and that means we don't even get aware that there should be focused on something else if we don't start with regular meditation. 
We should expand the love from family to the countrymen and the world and it expands in circles, but if there is no love in the family what to do? 

Then enter upon the path of spiritual practice, step by step, so you approach the goal steadily and swiftly, day by day.

We can do that when we made up our mind what to do and as we were already meditating when we went to Swami we didn't stop with it. But most of people we met in the study circle tell us that they don't go for a regular spiritual practise and they just don't know how and there are too many open questions. 
It sounds good, but it is not a mediation instruction and it doesn't answer our doubts and what to do and how to do it, step by step is not a meditation instruction and he is not telling anything about the steps. 

Indian culture advises the control of the senses, not catering to them. The car is driven by means of a wheel which is inside it, so that when the inner steering wheel is turned, the outer wheels move. Trying to move the outer-wheels alone is a sign of ignorance! Inner concentration must be developed in preference to outer distraction. Cultivate quietness, simplicity, and humility, instead of noise, complexity and conceit.

Indian culture and control of senses, it is Indian and we are not and our life has taken different turns taken care off by the family, we had been thrown out of the house for something the father had done, blamed for something afterward all our life what had nothing to do with what really happened out of the reason that someone should be blamed and it turned into abuse and arranged them that the attention was on someone else. There was never an excuse about it, not exactly like the Indian culture in my parent's house. 

We have to develop inner concentration. It needs simplicity to meet with my ex, picking him up, driving with him around, bringing him back. 

It is a kind of a simplicity that demands nothing and is happy with nothing, it is about not getting upset, of no resentments and no bad feelings and after all letting go and be happy with whatever we get and be it abuse, manipulation, been taken advantage of, whatever, we smile and are humble and accept to learn the lesson. 
We sit down and meditate, but at night it is present as an unlimited energy and it is not that nice to feel it on the body love level as there seems to be no limitation what must have to do with Sai Baba as he felt like husband and it was the life energy and we think we cannot sleep anymore.

After all if we look at that we should no go into spiritual practise step by step …? 
We meditate knowing it is a spiritual practise and step by step means we do it regularly. Listening to his words we get a feeling for it just by thinking it over, that is important to get that feeling.