Discrimination

To get the benefits of meditation that we hear about, like being more free of anxiety, being more positive, being more calm, more clear, more focused and also maybe a lot of things having to do with physical health, does not require a lot of depth in meditation. What it requires is a steady practice, doing something like watching the breath every day or just about every day, once or twice a day, short bursts of concentrated stillness and developing the commitment to do it, but also the understanding that when you're doing your meditation, it's got to at least feel decent, right? So the best way to feel decent if your mind's wandering, you're having trouble with the breath, you're physically fidgety, you have anxiety, you’re having negative thoughts or something, just keep bringing your mind back to the feeling of the breath without controlling it and learn to leave the meditation and feel absolutely successful that you did your best.

In the beginning, a lot of the benefits that we hear about in the medical field, in western science about meditation, those can be obtained that way and that kind of a meditation can evolve into something like twenty or thirty minutes at a time and you're just doing something, there's a lot of techniques out there like that, where you're just inhaling this, exhaling that, focusing here. You'll get a lot of the benefits. But when you read books about deep spiritual experiences, saints communing with God, St. Francis communing with Jesus, Yogananda with Krishna, or when you talk about that kind of meditation, going deeper spiritually, having a direct relationship with the Divine, the way I would define if we're moving deep, it's never going to be like visions, crazy astral experiences, out of body weirdness. Half the time when people experience those things it's because they fell asleep and they don't even know it, because you can get used to meditating and have a really straight spine and be completely asleep and you just go off into subconscious, you go off into dreamland and you'll have dreams related to whatever you think about meditation, whatever you want about meditation and you might come out thinking you had this mind blowing, great spiritual experience and it was literally a subconscious dream.

But the way to know if your meditation is deep, specifically what I'm talking about when I say depth, it's an experience of freedom. In other words you don't feel like you're meditating, you don't feel like you're doing a technique anymore. You might even be doing it, but you're observing a different experience inside where you feel free and when I say freedom what I mean is (and I can only speak about my own experience) when the part of my consciousness that divides everything up into life into likes and dislikes is gone. The likes and the dislikes go away and you're completely aware and you feel free...