What is meditation?
Finding a secret place? Sitting still? letting go of the mind? Focus on the "inner part" of your body? Be in nature? Live in the moment?...
There are many understandings, imaginations, senses and definition of what meditation means... Here is one definition by Wikipedia online:
Meditation is a discipline in which the mind is focused on an object of thought or awareness. It usually involves turning attention to a single point of reference. The practice may engender a higher state of consciousness. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation
When I recently dropped deeper into a state of meditation I had an experience that was instead of being aware of things around me, thinking process, feelings or focus on breathing, I found myself on a different level: rather than creating a mediation and work with the energies, I allowed myself to feel what is already there. Effortless and most interestingly letting go of all focus. I experienced that when I was able to "shut down" the senses I am usually using (like hearing the sound around me, see the candle's light, smelling the carpet, feeling emotions or pay attention to breathing), I experienced a stillness where was nothing but everything.
I probably have read in many books about similar experiences, learned about "enlightenment" or tried to understand what people were trying to describe with "stillness". It is like learning a language: As kids, we hear the word and make a connection to an event which we perceive through any of our senses, so we would understand and learn the meaning of a word. It is a learning process with thinking involved and through practice we automate the process until we have a picture for example of a dog and can use the word "dog" to express ourselves.
Since we were born, we perceive our environment through our senses (if we have the ability to see, we will see the dog. If we are blind, we are sensitive to perceive our environment through kinesthetic sense for example). We learn from our care takers the appropriate word and automate the picture/sense/feeling etc. in connection with the word and through practice: we learn a language that allows us to communicate through words with people that speak the same language.
Similar to meditation where we get instructions from books, Cd's or workshop, we are trying to usually "learn" how to meditate. The easiest way is to let go of the mind and thinking process first. For example we learn how to pay attention to our breathing...but in fact we are just switching our focus to a different sensation: instead of thinking (which involves perceiving somehow the pictures in our mind), we pay attention to breathing. Our Focus might no longer be in past or future events, we concentrate on the current breathing. This is a helpful step and let us be more "present", moving complex thinking processes that are not present in that very moment to the background. But focus on breathing is still a process of perception (through senses) and thus I experienced it as a hindrance to completely let go of the mind..
What I dropped into was a state like similar to learning a language where the picture (perception) and word is one. Nor learning to word in connection with repetition and practice but rather just knowing... A language where there are no words anymore but everything can be named and known. Difficult to explain and I guess the key is that there is no learning but just dropping into and experience.
To give some guidelines, just image knowing what a dog is when hearing the word before you ever had a picture or correlation to the animal. Sounds impossible? give it a try....
