What Is Meditation About?

What is meditation? You have a way of understanding your own life and the world that opens up new vistas and unplumbed depth. It is called meditation and you should understand something about this amazing innate faculty without having to study for years, join a special group, or learn difficult practices.

What Is Meditation?

There is a depth and breadth and beauty to life which you often may miss. Abraham Maslow coined the term peak experience for that exceptional, joyful, self actualized trans personal special moment. Zen describes an experience known as Satori, which is seeing your essential nature. The Armenian philosopher Gurdjieff talked about how we need to wake up. Yogis speak of a non dualistic awareness known as Samadhi. Nirvana relates to moksha or liberation. All of these wonderful and exalted states actually point back to our essential nature of being. That which you are and remain, when you are not identifying with limited concepts about yourself.

Allowing Your Mind To Become Still

Meditation is the way you reconnect with the over arching and underlying essence of your own being. It is a process of uncovering and discovering who you really are in a way that transcends your restricted definitions about who you are and is based on learning how to allow your mind to become still.

Words You Use Are Only Symbols

It is easy to forget that words are symbols, not the thing itself. When you say a word, communication occurs as someone gets an image and understanding associated with that word, but the word never really possesses the color, flavor, texture, reality and being of the thing the word describes. In meditation you learn to have an open mind, and a quiet mind and this opens up an entirely new way of being, because you begin to be able to perceive things directly without just thinking words about them.

Contemplation, Concentration, Meditation

Christmas Humphreys used the descriptive phrase, concentration, contemplation, meditation to describe the increasingly deeper process whereby you can still your mind and become more aware of something. Actually, there are fundamental principles of being which can be deeply understood and experienced in no other way, such as infinity, identity and reality.

Surface View And Unified Understanding

You can adopt a surface view of things and get the general idea, but only through meditation can you touch the deep issues of life that are unchanging, and the questions remain with you until you discover the answers, assuming you're asking the right kind of question. Meditation gives you a basis for understanding that is simply inaccessible in any other way. It opens up a gift you have of knowing things from the inside, where you find the common principle people are describing in their own language and perspective and culture, but when you experience the thing itself, you see the connection that is otherwise missed.

A Key Idea

Often a mantra or key idea is given as a focus for concentration but quite honestly you may find that this keeps you from really probing the depths of understanding if you aren't able to relate to the ultimate meaning of the word or phrase. You generally begin by directing your attention upward and inward to the center of the forehead, to find a one pointed focus where you can begin to experience a wider and deeper understanding of what Mary Baker Eddy called the incorporeal nature of being, that is now being corroborated by modern subatomic physics.

Harmony, Clarity, Peace

What is meditation? It is the practice of learning to allow your own thoughts to subside so you can begin to perceive directly the harmony, unity, clarity, joy and peace that are obscured by identifying with and constantly thinking about yourself in a limited, finite way.

Next, to learn how you can discover more of your own depth and wonder within, visit How To Find Inner Peace or go to Finding Inner Peace - Guide.


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