There are only two ways of meditation in the khayaal", Pandit Amarnath would tell his students. "One is the meditation on the 'Sa', the primordial note or the aadi swara, as the This, Here and Now, the manifest, and the other, the meditation on 'Sa' as the That and Beyond, the unmanifest".
The first meditation concentrates on 'Sa' as the brahmanda or universe of notes at the micro level of the 'bindu' and expands to its fullness at the macro level, to the ananta apaar, the Endless and the Beyond. The other method starts with 'Sa' as shunya, or nothing. The nothing is actually everything, a state of the vastness of the universe, of the brahmanda of its notes, but itself without a sense of time or space, progression or history.
To begin with, all meditations in raga music are based on 'Sa', the parental note from which are born the rest of the notes, quite like the colour white, from which are born all the other colours. From 'Sa' and the handling of the 'Sa' begins and ends all meditation.
The slow portion of the aalaap (from aalaapanaa, to spread) or badhat (from badhanaa, to grow or expand, the slow musical progression) of Panditji's guru, Ustad Amir Khan Saheb's khayaal was a mystic expansion of 'Sa', from the seed or 'bindu' of the musical universe, opening the mythical lotus of the swaras petal by petal, dwelling on each note till the elixir flowed. When it reached the point of endlessness, this meditation became an ecstatic liberation from everything, including the awareness of its own self.
For Pandit Amarnath, the 'Sa' in meditation was the flip side of the 'bindu'. It was shunya, or 'nothing'. Everything started from nothing, nothing being the required state of the deconditioned or unconditioned mind at the beginning of meditation. This is a tough meditation indeed, because the swaras or notes have to be constantly created without any sense of the manifest universe or brahmanda of swaras.
Shunya or zero in eastern philosophies is symbolic of fullness rather than emptiness, and the beginning of any meditation on the zero is the awareness of the universe in all its fullness and not its emptiness, in its experience of the eternal. This is why Panditji's khayaal, from the moment he evoked the 'Sa', called out to the entire universe at a go, and his note-petals unfurled, one by one, like the unravelling parts of a puzzle that take their predetermined positions in a vast design moving consistently with its own self. This was the macro-cosmic form of meditation.
The complimentary nature of the two meditations is interesting, one starting where the other leaves off... with one meditation, the manifest, coming down to tell the story of Infinite Compassion and the other, the unmanifest, moving away to tell the story of Infinite Pain.
But in their approach to the lyric or shabda, it is just the opposite. Panditji speaks of This and Now, and Khan Saheb, always, of That and Beyond.
A khayaal lyric from the raga Meghranjani illustrates this beautifully: the first two lines or asthaai are by Khan Saheb, and the next two lines, the antaraa, are by Panditji, who completes one of the Ustad's incomplete lyrics. In translation, the asthaai speaks of "The one Omkar, the Formless,/ Which is spread into the universe", and the antaraa of: "And That which we see before us, as proof and as the World,/ Is That which we meditate upon again and again..."