How to meditate

Meditation is profound rest.

In practise this means establishing an inner silence and a relaxed state within oneself. The purpose of this article is to clearly explain how this inner silence and relaxed state is achieved without invoking any particular religious or philosophical discipline.

In teaching, one person attempts to pass on an understanding to others. In what follows, I assume the reader has no prior knowledge of meditation. So everything is expressed in simple statements (to the best of my ability). However, my remarks are also directed to the experienced practitioner who perhaps might already have a good grasp of the many different approaches to meditation.

The purpose of each small section is to 'clip the wave-tops' of the many facets of meditation. I am attempting to alert the reader to the various aspects which need to be addressed and to show how they weave into the major theme.

For those who would like to see this as a video presentation (edited for brevity) this is the YouTube link:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86wn_j9WDEg

The essence of these few pages is this:-

When a person accepts and integrates their emotional experience, their mind is naturally quiet.

There are 3 core aspects to Meditation.

• Ethics
• Emotions
• Generosity

Emotions

The central path to successful meditation practice is through understanding one's emotions. Every thought begins as an experience. Each experience creates feelings and emotions within us. From these feelings, thoughts will arise. This is natural and desirable. However, it is a problem if thinking becomes disordered, obsessive or out of control. A highly distressing, emotionally charged experience can often take some time to 'get over'. It is undesirable that endless troubled thinking be the result of a traumatic event.

The most common reason a person begins practising meditation is to 'relax'. The qualities of the person's motive determine how deeply they pursue meditation. If relaxation is your goal, then once you achieve a suitable degree of comfort, that is where your effort is also likely to relax. The most far reaching motive is curiosity.

Ethics

Ethics plays an essential role in meditation. Assume for a moment that you are neither 'enlightened' nor 'perfect'. Assume also that you are driven by unresolved emotional conflicts, various insecurities, and lashings of youthful hormones. How reliably noble are your decisions and actions? To impose upon oneself the highest conceivable ethical code is a protection against regret. Like everything else, one's understanding of what is ethical will evolve and mature over time.

How does one become an ethical person? The answer is one chooses to be so.

When we are young it is normal to follow the examples set for us by our parents and peers. If our parents are selfish and lacking in courtesy we also act selfishly. As we mature and grow in our capacity for self awareness we become more able to think for ourselves. Meditation greatly aids the process of developing self awareness. Hopefully, we reach that point where we no longer act purely based on the influence of others but instead become self directing.

As a self aware individual, one can choose to develop one's capacity for ethical behaviour; not for some reward but for its own sake.

Generosity

Generosity is also indispensable. There is a great deal of self confrontation involved in meditation. One's vanity is the greatest of obstacles. If you want to highlight your subtly expressed prejudice, selfishness and other conceits, then practise generosity. Meditation enjoys pride of place in several religions and philosophies for good reason; in its highest aspect it is about self transcendence.

How to begin

Strictly speaking there is no such thing as a meditation technique. The direct path of meditating is to establish a mental silence and maintain that state for some duration of time. However, this usually is impossible in the beginning. To acquire the necessary skills a technique is usually offered. There are any number of techniques, but they do vary in their value and application.

We can all relate to the phrase 'talking to oneself'. We are perhaps less aware that we are engaged in a non stop reverie. Seldom are we called upon to focus intently. The first attempt to meditate usually highlights the fact that our mind is 'going' all the time. This first experience is enough to put some people 'off' altogether; not only is the mind chattering incessantly, but also it cannot be made to stop. This is the stream of consciousness. A meditation technique is about gaining some initial control of it.

Some control is gained by enforcing restrictions on the range of topics one might contemplate. So, typically, a meditation technique will require one to pay attention to some detail of experience.

Techniques vary in degrees of difficulty. A person who is very easily distracted might start with chanting, as an example. In ancient India, the 'Guru' might have asked the student to endlessly repeat the name of some revered deity. If the student is deeply distressed, or otherwise completely unable to 'concentrate', chanting some God's name, to which the individual has an emotional attachment, might be the only way to get them started. But once the person starts to succeed with this it will be necessary to graduate them on, to subtler tasks. The general progression will be towards more abstract and less conceptual objects to focus on. The essence of techniques is to alert the meditator to the fact they are deeply fascinated by their own stream of consciousness. The initial sign of progress is the person has become more aware of their stream of consciousness and is less habitually drawn into it.

Before plunging into a sea of options and a mass of detail about techniques, it is important to examine the definition of meditation. Without a concise and well understood definition how is it possible to gauge one's progress or be confident one's effort has merit?

Three questions stand out. Is 'profound rest' the only definition? Is that a valid definition? Is such a thing even possible [i.e. inner silence]?

There is an array of definitions, each with its proponents. Several religions apply the label meditation to some of their practices. The general sense is the 'surrender' [obedience] to God [or Gods]. The aim is to enjoy greater affinity with God. Then there are philosophical systems which employ meditation. In the context of an analysis of life, the guiding principle is to identify the facts of life and to harmonize oneself with them and thereby to enjoy happiness and fulfillment, or, find one's place in the World and live a life of meaning, or, escape distress. There are egocentric conceptions in which people seek to exert their will over the World, the belief being entertained that by performing some set of rituals, personal powers can be obtained and one can enjoy an exulted life. These are competing ideas and also they are mutually exclusive.

I might defend 'profound rest' as the superior definition by claiming it as a common and essential component in all of the above examples. But this is a weak tactic. Not only will it fail to convince, it enters into the centuries old [and still unresolved] debates of comparative philosophy/religion. Much better to argue the point from the internal logic ingrained in the idea.

The key to it is motive. If your aim is to relax, then, clearly rest is what you want. Inner silence? Surely you are plagued by anxiety, ceaseless worry, tension and distress. Profound rest is the promise of reprieve. On the other hand, raw curiosity might drive you. You are determined to understand yourself. If your attention is irrevocably fixated on the passing parade of thoughts and images in the mind, which after all are only the final results of a deep and largely unconscious process, it will be difficult in the extreme to progress. A multitude of causes could produce a cascade of thoughts. Establishing an inner silence is a way to tackle the task.

So, inner silence, is such a thing possible? Thoughts and mental images have causes. They do not spring from nowhere, there are reasons and contexts. Introspection, reveals and confirms, that all thought is accompanied by emotion. Even when we engage in abstract thinking, a close examination will still uncover some emotional driver for beginning that particular train of thought in the first place. The assertion I make here is emotion [and feelings] is, in fact, the underlying cause of thought. We experience, this experience is felt and we go on to think about it. All very natural, no problem here, and certainly a process you would not want to dispense with. But there is another way to integrate experience. We are now entering the field of meditation.

Periodically focusing attention on one's internal emotional [feeling] state is to train oneself in non-conceptual awareness. Thoughts and images are conceptions formed in the mind, it is the 'stuff' of thinking. By such a process we can freely associate, compare, measure and form an internal model of the World. But, useful as it is, it has limitations. All concepts can only be understood and rendered useful in terms of other concepts. Learning and understanding is built upon realization. [We experience a series of 'aha' moments] Realization is non-conceptual. We form concepts based upon our realizations. In suspending the usual stream of consciousness [the habitual reverie] observation is less conditioned by prior experience. The prospects for new insights and realizations are maximized. Yes, inner silence is possible. The path to it is via the emotions.

Techniques

What I want to discuss is how a meditation technique 'works'.

There are several diverse techniques which all claim to be meditation. A technique is not meditation. It is a tool and just as different tools serve different functions each technique produces a different result. A further complication is most techniques are embedded in some religious or philosophical context which means there are assumptions and agendas that impose upon and bias the interpretation of any results which come from the practise of those techniques.

As a generalization a technique is an attempt to make something happen. It is this aspect of things which creates many unnecessary problems. The range of things invented which claim to be a meditation technique is as wide as the human imagination. Visualization, chanting, rhythmic movement, sensory deprivation, exposure to extreme heat or extreme cold, lucid dreaming, adopting a variety of physical stress positions, self flagellation, listening to sound frequencies, vocalizing different sound frequencies, autosuggestion and so on.

The attraction of these techniques is they each manufacture a result or an experience which can be intense in character. The simple fact of the matter is all that is happening is the person has engaged in distorting the normal functioning of their senses. Extreme practices produce extreme results. To the extent that they might qualify as meditation it is no more than exploring the limits of one's cognitive functioning.

Among the variety of techniques there are some which can lead to the accidental discovery of genuine meditation.

The most widely adopted techniques tend to be of the sensory deprivation category. Typical of such techniques is the person will sit for lengthy periods in a quiet darkened room and attempt to control their attention span by focusing on a single task. This task can be visual, purely conceptual or tactile. The common feature is a narrowing of the range of consciously experienced sense stimuli. This approach has the effect of sublimating much of the usual consciously experienced mental activity and results in mimicking the condition of the mind when it is untroubled by habitual concerns. It is valuable for the person to discover that such states of mind exist but all too frequently they do not progress beyond this point. Instead the usual outcome is people strive to repeat the experiences by ever more arduous application of the meditation technique.

The agreeable experiences of an untroubled mind come about when the disturbances have been sublimated. A person transitions from practising a technique to actually meditating when they turn their efforts to bringing the causes of those disturbances to conscious awareness and investigating them. This leads to comprehension; a possible resolution and eradication of such disturbances. Endlessly practising the meditation technique mostly serves to keep those disturbances sublimated and hidden from view. Once a person understands that serene conditions of mind are possible and available to them the technique has done its job and it should be abandoned.

Meditation is a very simple thing. When all the fluff and nonsense is stripped away, all that is required is a person makes themselves comfortable, maintains mental alertness and simply relaxes. A beginner can remain that way for only a relatively short time before they start to feel agitated. It is that agitation which is the value of the practice, it is the subliminal internal state coming into conscious awareness. Simply finding the way to relax further leads one to a deeper self awareness and eventually a greater self understanding. That is meditation in a nutshell.

This article tackles the essential problem of meditation... how to bring the mind to silence. To attain a state of rest one has to resolve all inner conflicts within one's self. It might seem that would be the final goal of meditation but in fact this is the beginning of meditation. I offer the definition of meditation as profound rest... it is what comes of abiding in that state of rest that is the benefit of the practice.

I am adamant that the key to the practice is to recognize how one's feelings and emotions are at the heart of the matter.

Progress

Progress will mean different things to different people. There is a great deal of hurt and pain in this World. Some of us live in a peaceful place and there is always food on our plate. For others life is harsh. Everybody's life is different, everybody's mind is different and, for those who take up meditation, everybody's practice is different.

Meditation is profound rest and that rest is won by reconciling one's emotional conflicts and accepting. Everyone finds it a difficult task and it takes years. Some people have suffered dreadful trauma, for them it is arduous but patience, practise and time will bring the result.

One progresses in ethics and generosity as well. We are a social creature. Our well-being is adversely impacted in times of social upheaval. We all want peace in the World, but it seems always to elude us. There is a straightforward path to peace. We negotiate a lasting peace when we can trust the other and we come to trust the other when we have confidence in their ethical standards. You can know this intellectually and that gives rise to a sentimental sort of ethics, a rule-book, legalistic approach. As you progress in meditation practice one comes to recognize, with ever greater force, how emotional betrayal damages well-being. It gets into your bones that you do not want to perpetrate these crimes. This is ethics based upon realization and it is much sterner and reliable stuff. Similarly with generosity. Within yourself you see deeper into the connection between your emotional state and your actions. You learn to accept and forgive yourself and you are able to bless others with the same courtesy.

Practical matters

How much practise should you do? I would answer this question with another question. How often should you hug your kids? My answer here is, when you need to and when you want to.

What about sitting position? There is no such thing as a magical sitting position. The requirement is to be suitably comfortable. A practical difficulty is maintaining a consistent level of alertness. Sitting in the middle of the room, with your legs tucked up under you in some fashion and no back support has its advantages. But, it is worth remembering that meditation basically comes to us from the East, where sitting on the floor is the most natural thing in the World. If the cultural gift had gone the other way, from West to East, there would be a brisk trade in meditation chairs.

What about joining a group? That is your judgement call. It is like going to a party. Some parties seem to start well, but by 3 am we are talking to the cops. Other parties go on for days and we all stay friends. Inevitably though, there is always the appropriate time to leave.

It is common to fall asleep while trying to meditate.

Exercise is a good idea. Believe it or not, meditation can be physically demanding. It takes energy and effort. You do not get much from your practice when you are sick.

What about a teacher? If you have a truly open mind, everybody is your teacher. The great teacher is life.

Extremes

For those of you who are familiar with the literature of meditation, you will be aware that littered throughout are reports of exotic experiences. There is 2500 years worth of accumulated writings which are about meditation or related topics. Pick any century and pick any culture, you will find some example. Prior to that was the oral history and it is anybody's guess how far back that might go. The lure of the exotic attracts some people and that is their reason to practise. Consequently, they exert themselves to their limits.

Well, here is the problem. We do have limits. Push yourself past those limits and normal internal functioning will be stressed and distorted. You will get some vivid experiences alright. But, how useful are they? Think about the near death experience as an example. I think it is reasonable to assume dying is accompanied by internal stress of great magnitude. If the person is pulled back from the brink, should we be surprised that they report very unusual things, once they revive? Philosophically, the problem is this; are these experiences reliable indications of a another facet of life, normally beyond the reach of the senses, or are they mind created events [hallucination]? You might have an opinion, but, it is no easy matter to be certain either way.

In the course of a long life of practise, perhaps you will have strange and inexplicable moments. If so, you will be faced with the same dilemma. Was that real or did I just hallucinate? Think about this. When we sleep, we dream. While we are dreaming, the strong tendency is to be fully absorbed and to experience the dream as real. Our mind, somehow, creates an entire reality. When we wake, we immediately know the difference. The mind seems to have no trouble at all in creating the bizarre. Better that such an event, if it occurs, happens in the context where stress plays no part. Certainly, you will be left with things to consider.

Something needs to be said about the psychology of meditation practice when it comes to experiencing a variety of trance states and the like. Upon experiencing something unusual the strong tendency is for the person to become self impressed. As an example, one might experience seeing a bright light as the result of an intense period of practise. The problem arises when a meaning is attached to the experience. Depending upon the context, one might imagine it is an experience of the divine if it occurred while praying or enlightenment if experienced while meditating. This is only one example, there are several unusual states. The common mistake is the same, people frequently believe something "special" has happened. Certainly such things are interesting but the hazard is they can feed one's ego and compound one's delusions.

Compassion

Nobody realistically expects young children to be acutely aware of the needs of others. Day to day experience demonstrates, adults vary in their willingness and ability to see things from another's point of view. In formal meditation practice, a lot of our reverie is largely 'thinking' about ourselves. If you confirm that particular discovery within yourself, it is a good bet, that is what you are doing most of the time.

Philosophical musings

It seems a simple activity; sitting still. You might come upon this scene. An elderly person, perhaps dressed as a monk, in a traditional setting. Maybe they started just last week and there they sit, a lifetime of experience and event swirling within. On the other hand, perhaps they have been practising for many, many years. Long ago, they made peace with themself and they made peace with the World. Now they are examining the nature of consciousness itself; attempting to meaningfully answer the question, "what am I?". No, just by looking it is impossible to tell; all you see is somebody sitting still. The casual observer might view the scene, think it quaint and walk on; content with the opinion, you have seen one person meditating, you have seen them all.

The thing of importance I should explain is how I treat meditation in the context of 'spiritual growth'. To my mind, if such a term does have any meaning, it is along the lines of one's ability to appreciate life. A nice way to illustrate my meaning is cute baby animals. Almost everyone finds delight in the wide eyed, open expressions of young animals. People treasure happy baby photos. That innocence stays with some people, in their demeanor, for all of their life and it is a true richness. Spiritual growth, in my opinion, is an ever increasing capacity to appreciate life.

Expectations

The hardest thing to perceive is that which is not there.

Meditation is a deeply philosophical undertaking. There are countless exotic tales of mystics who have experienced wondrous things by their practise of meditation. So, naturally enough, people can approach the topic hoping to gain 'something' from it.

It is the things within oneself which are lacking which are the most difficult to perceive. We more easily see the shortcomings of others. It is great and valuable to recognize one's own shortcomings. To comprehend one's own fear, to notice how one's perception is coloured by culture and peer prejudice, to consciously understand how one has been molded by experience and environment; this is the stuff of true 'self transcendence'.

But more than this, to see that which you do not possess; this is truly wondrous. Simple human emotional warmth, selfless love, contentment and peace of mind are all things one might unconsciously acquire if one lived in a World where one was surrounded and immersed in such things. It would be these things which influence us and shape our minds. But for most of us these are the things which are 'not there' and so are the most difficult to perceive. If one does perceive such things one can embody those traits and make them one's own.

Results

It is a reasonable question to ask ... how can a person become aware of their own emotions and then integrate them? Also ... what does that even mean?

If a person is suffering emotional pain that will also be accompanied by physical tension. The simple event of physical relaxation will bring about the gradual conscious arising of the emotional experience, to which the person is otherwise numb. This, necessarily, means that suppressed and possibly highly traumatic emotions will vividly come to the surface. A willingness to be accepting and to allow this process to unfold, to its completion, is an attribute one has to cultivate. Once the emotions have been consciously experienced the related symptoms of tension will gradually subside.

The best explanation I can think of, to describe integration ... that is when the events and the associated emotions no longer remain uppermost, or hidden, in one's daily life. An event can be said to be fully integrated when the only time one thinks about it is when one is reminded of it and the remembrance of it is not a cause for refreshing the distress.

Meditation is actually quite a natural process. It relies upon automatic corrective mechanisms which seem inbuilt into the psyche.

The ultimate result which comes from regular practise of meditation, over the course of the years, is one abides with a mind which is unencumbered, resilient, flexible and open. A person comes into full possession of their innate faculties.

To conclude ... Meditation is profound rest.

A suggested way to proceed

Meditation in 7 words:-

Close your eyes, relax and stay awake.

Close your eyes.... this internalizes your attention,

relax... this mimics the natural state,

and stay awake... maintaining mental alertness (the essential ingredient).

Most people already have settled upon their preferred approach and l in no way wish to interfere. However, l offer this for your consideration. There are many different ideas about meditation. In my opinion, the most useful aim is to bring the subconscious into conscious awareness. This l contend is the path to genuine self understanding.

I further think that finding the most natural way to proceed is much to be preferred. Are complicated philosophies and arduous practices really necessary... I think not. As we go through life we gradually better understand ourselves, each other and the World in general. It is an entirely natural process. The more meditation, as a deliberate activity, conforms to a natural way the more reliable and sane the results will be.