According to Sage Sankara meditation always means the critical analysis of the Self to get salvation from ignorance.+

 

Sage Sankara opposed the Buddhists only, who misunderstood Bhagavan Buddha and became atheists. According to Sage Sankara meditation always means the critical analysis of the Self to get salvation from ignorance.

Trying to imitate the nondual nature of the Soul through various meditation techniques is not meditation but imitation.

Remember:~

But once Buddha died, great philosophical schools arose. It had never happened in the whole world as it happened in India after Buddha. The man who for his whole life was against philosophy and philosophizing became the source of the greatest philosophical endeavour ever. Thirty-six schools of philosophy were born when Buddha died. And the people that he had always condemned all gathered together to philosophize about him. And see the beauty, the irony of it all! They started philosophizing about why Buddha kept silent.

Why he did not say anything about the beyond: that became their philosophy! They started talking about why he kept silent about the beyond. And there were as many answers as possible.

Somebody said, "Because there is no beyond." Now one philosophy has taken roots. Another said, "The beyond is, but it is inexpressible. That's why he kept silent." Now another school, and so on and so forth.

Even the silence of Buddha became a problem, and people started discussing the silence. Nobody tried to become silent; people started talking about the silence.
Beware of this trap, the mind is very cunning. If I say something about meditation, I am saying it so that you can meditate. But you start thinking about meditation, what meditation is. "How many kinds of meditation are there in existence? What is the difference between them? Why are they antagonistic to each other?

And then you can go on ad infinitum, and there will not be any time when you will ever meditate.

You will become more and more confused. You will become so confused finally that you will not know how to start meditation. because there are so many directions opening. Where to go? What to choose? You will simply be paralyzed.

The mind always does that. And only a few people who are really alert are capable of getting out of these traps of the mind. The mind is a great philosopher. And life is not a philosophy, life is a reality.

Philosophy is an escape from reality; philosophy means thinking. Life is - there is no question of thought. You can simply jump into it. -OSHO Unio Mystica Volume 1, chapter 3: Crying For The

Remember: ~

Due to the eccentric ego of the then atheists, Sage Sankara did not go beyond this since the atheists will not accept God beyond themselves.

This limitation is not due to limited knowledge of Sage Sankara but is due to the then-existing situation of the psychology of the surrounding society.

Even Bhagavan Buddha kept silent about God because the society dealt with by him consisted of Purvamimamsakas, who were strong atheists. Buddha says that everything including the self is only relatively real (Sunya). This is correct because the self is a part of the universe, which is relatively real with respect to the absolute unimaginable God.

Bhagavan Buddha stopped at this point because the atheists cannot realize the existence of the unimaginable God indicated through His silence.

The point of Bhagavan Buddha is that if God is non-existent, the entire creation including the Self is non-existent.

Sage Sankara wanted to establish the existence of the Brahman. For this purpose, He made the Atman as the Brahman. He brought out the identity of self with the consciousness and made the Atman the Brahman. Since one will not negate the existence of himself, he will accept the existence of the Brahman, which is the Atman or Soul, the Self.

Both Bhagavan Buddha and Sage Sankara kept silent about the absolute unimaginable God. The same philosophy was dealt with them at different angles in different situations.: ~ Santthosh Kumaar