Man is gifted with the capacity to reflect, which helps him to change himself and his environments for his ideals. When reflection is directed towards refining our life and conduct, it is called meditation. Meditation is a human method to pass from a purely biological life of appetites and passions to a cultural life of understanding, beauty and goodness in interpersonal relations. It is to pass from the darkness to ignorance to the light of knowledge, from insensitivity to beauty to its appreciation and from the bondage of passions to the freedom of altruistic loves.
Although there are many books on meditation, none of them can be used by men of all climes and cultures, faiths and traditions. Applied Ethics of Devatma is tied to particular systems of beliefs and traditions, history and culture. We offer meditations that are universal in appeal, as His applied ethical thought does not require the reader to have any specific faith in order to benefit from them and omit any of the speculative beliefs about God and the soul. Whether the reader believes in God or does not do so, he can concentrate over these meditations on different relations without feeling that he has been put in the strait jacket of a particular faith.
No one questions that there is a human society and how we relate to our parents, brothers and sisters, partner in life, community, country, humankind and the natural world for our needs and enjoyments. This universal agreement remains untouched whether one believes or does not believe in a changeless soul both besides and beyond the empirical consciousness of thoughts, feelings and emotions connected with our nervous system and social world. Further, there is a universal agreement that good conduct in social relations is indispensable in the quest for the highest spiritual life or moksha or salvation; however, moksha may be conceived as either a disembodied existence in the transcendental world or as an embodied existence in the natural world.
These meditations are based on these universal agreements. They aim to cultivate a refined relationship with fellow human beings, the animal world, the plant world and the inanimate world. They are meditations to foster an appreciation of our relatedness to others and with the methods to sublimate those relationships by feelings of gratitude, affection, service and reparation. This moral culture is categorical in its claim on every one of us, to whatever clime, culture, faith and tradition one may belong. One may believe that this moral culture is inferior to spiritual culture, which is to establish relation with God. Even so, one cannot doubt that moral culture is an indispensable stage to the spiritual culture of a relation with God. One may believe that relationship with fellow human beings in the form of parents, brothers and sisters, partner in life, community, country and mankind is bondage. However, one cannot deny that this bondage can be removed by developing altruistic feelings for them.
There is no escape from moral culture or altruistic life. Hence, the present meditations have universal significance and appeal.