Bill Faill: Just a stilling of the mind, trying to sit in the center without swimming either way.
Prabhupāda: So what is that center?
Bill Faill: Oh, I don't know.
Prabhupāda: Then? Why you are asking me? You do not know. So everyone does not know what is meditation, and they talk very much "meditation." This is going on.
Bill Faill: Isn't it a starting point?
Prabhupāda: These bluffers, they say "meditation," but what is the subject matter of meditation they do not know. Simply bogus propaganda. You see?
Bill Faill: Not even beginning to get people thinking right?
Prabhupāda: No. Meditation means this: dhyānāvasthita-tad-gatena manasā (SB 12.13.1), mind saturated with God consciousness and thinking of God. But if you do not know God, then where is the meditation?
Bill Faill: So it's a long . . . something you have to learn.
Prabhupāda: No, it is very nice, but at the present moment in the name of meditation, simply cheating and bluffing going on. They do not know what is the subject matter of meditation. Besides that, in this age, mind is so agitated that you cannot concentrate. I have seen the so-called meditation. They are regularly sleeping and snoring. They do not know. Yes. This is going on. So unfortunately, in the name of God consciousness or this self-realization, so many not-standardized methods are being presented by the so-called bluffers without any reference to the authoritative books and knowledge, Vedic knowledge. It is another type of exploitation.
Bill Faill: What about some of the other schools that have grown up, people like Ouspensky and Gurdjieff and people who've brought a message similar to yours to the West in the past?
Prabhupāda: That we have to study particularly whether it is standard. Otherwise they may speak so many things, but if they do not know what is the standard . . . just like medical science or any science, that is one. It cannot be different because it is spoken by different men. That is not one. That is not science. "Two plus two equal to four," this is a science that is true everywhere, not that because it is spoken by somebody else it becomes "two plus two equal to five" or "three." No. That is . . .