Meditation Explained: Thoughts, Mantras and Samadhi

This is meditation. Bear with me.

You can't, can you? You can't stop it. Why not?

Because that voice in your head is not you.

You don't get to choose what it does. Yes, you can gently nudge it towards certain things, but not for long.

Generally speaking, the voice in your head is your mind, and you are not your mind. You are the thing that's aware of your mind.

If you don't believe me now, let's do one more test.

Predict your next thought.

You can't. You can't predict your next thought.

You don't choose your thoughts. Your thoughts just arise in your awareness, and this is what the yogis realized. They realized that the mind doesn't stop no matter what we do. In fact, it's the reason that we suffer, because we identify so strongly with that voice in our head.

It never shuts up. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's neutral, sometimes it's bad, and when it's bad, we feel bad. But what if we didn't have to listen to that voice? What if it could keep nattering on and we could just notice it without believing it? Wouldn't that be freedom?

That is what meditation is. It starts with something called dharana. That means concentration. We might use a mantra, for example.

So we would keep concentrating on that mantra, and every time our thoughts take our attention away, we let them go and bring our attention back to the mantra. And when that becomes effortless, we enter a state called dhyana. That means effortless concentration.

That's when we can repeat the mantra or we can just be totally absorbed in our point of focus without being distracted by the thoughts that continue to arise.

And if we can do that properly, it opens the door to total liberation, samadhi.

That is when we no longer fall for the illusion that we are the mind at all.

Sounds pretty good.

Hmm. Maybe we should rethink meditation.