Ramesh Balsekar consistently placed meditation and spiritual practices in a secondary, almost incidental role, rather than at the heart of realization. From his standpoint, enlightenment is not the product of effort, discipline, or technique, but a spontaneous happening within the impersonal functioning of Consciousness. Any notion that a separate individual can “achieve” Self-realization through practice was seen as subtly reinforcing the very illusion Advaita seeks to expose: the belief in a personal doer. In this light, formal meditation and structured sadhana are not condemned as wrong, but are regarded as part of the natural flow of conditioning, arising and subsiding according to the same cosmic will that governs all events.

Because of this emphasis, Balsekar gave primacy to understanding rather than to method. What mattered for him was the clear seeing that there is no autonomous individual acting, progressing, or purifying itself. When meditation or other practices are undertaken with the sense “I am meditating,” “I am advancing spiritually,” they tend to solidify a refined spiritual ego. Yet if a quieting of the mind or a meditative state occurs spontaneously, it is simply another happening in Consciousness, neither to be claimed by an individual nor used as a ladder to climb toward some imagined future attainment. The pivotal shift, in his teaching, is the deep recognition that liberation arises from this understanding of non-doership, at which point practices naturally lose their imagined instrumental value.

At the same time, Balsekar did not prescribe abandoning practices by an act of will, for that too would presume an individual controller. Meditation and other disciplines may appear and disappear in a person’s life, but they do so as expressions of conditioning rather than as effective tools wielded by a separate self. Some may find that such practices temporarily quiet the mind and create a more receptive atmosphere for understanding, yet this supportive role does not transform them into a genuine path to realization. From the perspective he articulated, there is only Consciousness functioning, and all spiritual striving, including meditation, is simply part of that impersonal movement, not a means by which an individual can secure enlightenment.