The Art of True Meditation

You can gain such extraordinary results from practising meditation that they will stun and amaze you. Your life will be filled with a pleasure and ease that surpasses any other experience. You will find that you will become more creative, happy, intelligent and healthy by practising it regularly. But you must be taught correctly, as there are various highways and byways that will take up your time and result in you losing interest or not gaining the results that are available for you.

There is much confusion about what meditation actually is and this is because there are so many well meaning, but under informed and untrained people teaching it. Many practices that are stated to be meditation are nothing more than guided visualisation or stress release. Pleasant though they may be, they will never bring you the jewels of your own inner being. Let’s look at the three very important facts you must know if you are to be successful at meditating.

Meditation is the oldest art-science of human life. It has been consistently practised for thousands of years by all cultures in the world, without exception. The founders of all religions, philosophical schools and therefore civilisations, have been meditators. The reason being that it delivers tremendous, measurable benefits to peoples lives that are experienced as a direct result of the practice. It is also the only means of removing all the contractions of your psycho-physical organism and, as a result, awakening the higher faculties of the brain-mind complex, including genius, artistic abilities and psychic powers that are latent in all human beings.

True meditation is based on the ability to increase internal concentration. This ability allows you to explore the depths of your own mind, to bring the unconscious to consciousness. So this is the first factor: Ensure the method you learn increases your ability to concentrate internally. There are techniques that suggest you listen to a mantra (an inner sound or repeated phrase) and allow your mind to wander off. This is entirely wrong. Meditation is a warriors art. Not in any sense aggressive, but in the alertness and awareness required to remain conscious as you explore the internal universe, the subconscious and unconscious. Otherwise you are merely day dreaming or sleeping. Also avoid listening to music, or other sounds, through head phones, or those glasses that flash in your eyes, or other toys. These are all diversions and an irrelevancy to the serious meditator.

Meditation can also bring great health benefits and is now used by the medical profession to enhance healing and recovery from illness. This acceptance by the mainstream has started to unravel the myth of meditation, which was that it is a practice used by old hippies or by people with weak minds who were easily manipulated by gurus of various types. It is also watched warily by some of the mainstream religions as they are losing many of their clients to the various meditation schools that are available. Some of these religions or cults even teach that if you meditate you will allow the ‘devil’ into you, because, in their belief, when you are closing your eyes and looking within you are ‘unprotected’. This ludicrous suggestion is of course immediately silenced when they are told that everyone does this every night when they go to sleep!

So the second point is that you must retain your own integrity and not give over the power of your life to any group or organisation or individual. Learn from a great teacher, but do not get involved in becoming a door mat or slave, regardless of how attractive this avenue may initially appear. I was trained as a teacher of meditation over a seven year period. My teacher was an extraordinary man, a genius and fully enlightened and worshipped as a living saint in India and many other Western countries. But every day he always said: ‘Meditate on your own Self, kneel to your own Self, worship your own Self, your God dwells within you as you’. He wasn’t talking about the ego or the personality, but the very life force itself, that essence of yourself that is the source of your life. In other words, it is within you, not outside in the hands of someone else or some institution, who may only really want your money.

Meditation, when it is practised correctly, allows you to consciously enter the dream world and explore it. You can enjoy a totally new level of experience, unknown in the outside world. It is also actually the easiest way of becoming fully alive. In life you have two choices, like every other living thing: You either grow or stagnate and die. Growth means that you express more of life’s energy everything you do. You live to the full, you give and receive, you create and you relate, you love and you inspire, using each opportunity to open to more of life’s sweet, blissful energy.

The third point is to make sure that whichever meditation path you follow you use one that actually opens up your whole being to an ever increasing flow of energy. And not just physical fitness, even though that is important for good health, but more the latent energetic forces that await within your self that will take you to the highest realms of human experience and fill you with a staggering, expanded view of life and an ecstasy and love that allows you to live in awe and humour every moment of your being. Meditation when properly learnt and practised is truly the master key to life.