Question: How long should I meditate? Is fifteen or twenty minutes enough, or should I meditate longer?

Sri Chinmoy: It depends on your capacity, on how much progress you have made inwardly. If you have the capacity to meditate sincerely and soulfully for half an hour or an hour, that is good. But if you do not have the capacity and you meditate for two hours or three hours, that will be foolishness and a sheer waste of time. The soul will not be there. During your meditation, if your mind is calm and quiet and you feel that you are getting inner joy and inner satisfaction, then your meditation is good. But if after fifteen or twenty minutes of pure meditation the doubting, suspecting and unlit mind starts functioning, then you should stop meditating. Likewise, if your mind becomes restless and you begin to think of your friends and relatives and other such things, at that time it is useless to go on. This kind of meditation will not be fruitful and will not give you any joy. You can start again later when everything is pure and fresh.

A muscle is developed by taking physical exercise. Meditation is an inner exercise; if you practise regularly, its power increases. When you take physical exercise daily, even if for only five minutes, you strengthen your muscles. Then, after a few months you can take exercise for half an hour, an hour or two hours at a time. Similarly, if you meditate soulfully each day, then there comes a time when you make progress.

It is not how many hours you meditate but how you meditate. If you can meditate soulfully and devotedly for fifteen minutes and sincerely cry for Peace, Light and Bliss, that is better than three hours of meditation without any life in it. When you meditate, if there is a living presence in it, then that is meditation. Otherwise it is no better than sleep or death.

But if you say, "No, I want to have the highest meditation so that in this incarnation I can realise God," then I wish to say that you have to spend quite a few hours each day in meditation. Five, ten or fifteen minutes of meditation will not do. No, you have to spend quite a few hours in the highest form of meditation if your goal is to realise the Highest.