Through meditation you become a witness of all things that happens to you, within and without. You become a witness to your body, thoughts, emotions and also the seemingly external world. Through this witnessing you are naturally detached, or as I previously used the term “defocused”, to a certain degree from those phenomena appearing before you.
That being said, when one is sufficiently distanced (in a healthy way) from ones own psychological noise, life naturally and spontaneously becomes direct and immediate.
You will not be able to help yourself but to be more directly in tune with existence.
However when your consciousness becomes mixed with the psychological identity, life is filtered and watered down. From this perspective the asphyxiating identity is the “sickness” and meditation is the “cure“.
Meditation, when reaching its completion, brings you back to your own core, and from this core, life is always direct. Meditation unlike the first paths mentioned, has more of a long-term and permanent quality to it. I feel that when one has completed ones own meditation, one will always be in direct experience. There will be no such thing as indirect living or a gross superfluous psychological identity. It will evaporate in the light of each moment.
This is the chief objective of meditation, at least from my own perspective.
Most people’s definition of meditation is that it is an activity that one undertakes a certain time-period during the day, to focus or calm down ones overthinking mind. I deem this understanding of meditation to be rather meagre, superficial and inadequate.
Meditation in my own understanding and more importantly in my own experience, is something that one fulfills and completes. The goal of meditation is to know yourself, and to know oneself should be a discovery and subsequently an established profound understanding should grow from this discovery.
When you know yourself, you won’t have to “re-know” yourself every day at 4 p.m, if you get my gist.
That being said, even after one has completed ones meditation, one can still enjoy a couple moments during the day to sit down and relax the body and mind fully. This is indeed what I do and its lovely.
How Begin Your Meditation
But before one can talk about completion of the meditation, one has to first of all know how to begin it.
If you have done some of the ways covered in this book, you will indeed have come in contact with your direct experience, which is one and the same thing as what meditation induces.
It isn’t hard to meditate, and you don’t need to “sit” down or create a certain ritual of meditating in a certain way or pose, though these can be helpful preconditions for some if not most people, but they are not essential prerequisites.
Your meditation is you simply witnessing the content of your consciousness without too much personal identity latching on to every object occurring in your experience.
Meditation is our true position, what is needed for us to realize this is only for our conscious and unconscious attention to be realigned and absorbed with it.
How to do this?
Do as the great mystic Plotinus said…
Withdraw into yourself and look.
Nothing beats experience, sit down or stand up, become more fascinated by the fact that you’re a conscious being. Become conscious of the subtle nuances that move around in your mind. What is a thought? What is a will? What is a self? Simply become fascinated, like a child, of each and every experience that you have. If you have a irritable psychological mind, become more conscious of that, how it acts, reacts, what triggers it. Just as you would look at a movie on a screen, look in the same way at your own mental realm. If you need more tips, feel free to comment below!
On the Completion of Your Meditation
One does not complete ones meditation, its rather other way round, where the meditation completes you, the active seeker of truth and perpetual direct experience.
When your meditation is complete, your sense of presence is sufficiently detached from your psychological identity, and in this detachment, you have come home into the universal space of consciousness.
This presence is your truest expression and original sense of existence. Honour it and you will be fulfilled like nothing other can fullfil you.
The light of consciousness arising from your own core…
Marvelous isn’t it?
Daniel Seeker is a wandering dervish and lifelong student of the past, present and future. He realized that he was made of immaculate and timeless consciousness when meditating in his hermit cave on the island of Gotland. His writings are mostly a reflection of that realizaton. Daniel currently studies history, philosophy, egyptology and western esotericism at Uppsala Universitet. He’s also currently writing his B.A. thesis in history which explores how Buddhist and Hindu texts were first properly translated and introduced to the western world in the late 18th and 19th century.