Lots of people mean lots of different things by the word meditation. Let’s nail down exactly what we mean and talk through the purpose of meditation.
A quieting of the mind
We use the term meditation to mean stopping conscious thought. Simply quiet the mind.
It’s easier said than done, that is for sure! But it does get easier with practice.
Whether you’re lying down, sitting upright Indian style (crisscross applesauce for younger folks), or anything in between, there’s no wrong position. A position and/or posture that allows you to comfortably remain still and undistracted for at least 15 minutes is all that’s needed.
We can work up to 15 minutes as it does take some practice.
A quiet room with nothing moving around is certainly recommended, especially in the beginning. When you catch a thought running around, just acknowledge it and let it go. Go back to a clear mind, and keep repeating this. Eventually, with some amount of practice, you’ll find the gaps of time between the interrupting thoughts will grow larger and larger.
Meditation is the mind’s neutral gear
When we stop conscious thought, we stop attracting. Well specifically, the physical you stops attracting, at least until you start thinking again. This works in both directions. We stop attracting the things we want, and we stop attracting the things we don’t want.
Your inner being, on the other hand, is always attracting you toward what it’s already become. This is where meditation really shines. When in neutral, your vibration will flow right toward your inner being’s vortex of attraction. You don’t need to be aware it’s happening, and you don’t even need to know where you’re going.
Like everything in life, the benefits are relative. For the rare person who’s very good at attracting exactly what they want quickly, shifting into neutral would actually feel like slowing down. For the rest of us, however, it’s quite a good habit to have. Abraham describes the relative usefulness of this and many other exercises through their book Ask and It Is Given.
Discipline that really pays off
Lots of amazing things happen when we start meditating regularly.
Meditation feels good. As you spend more than just a few moments meditating, your vibration will begin to align with what your inner being is attracting, and that feels good. Every cell will feel like it’s subtly buzzing with excitement, which Ramtha calls “sparkling.”
Clear-mindedness becomes more of a default. When life gets busy, you will find that you have more control over your thought process. You won’t have the constant droning on that your thought processes once had. Life automatically becomes less stressful, and you will find that you handle stress better.
You become a better thinker. We can’t think deep thoughts for very long if we can’t first control our thoughts. Being able to maintain clear-mindedness is a wonderful practice for focusing longer on anything of your choice. Thus it improves attention span. History’s most effective people have practiced meditation for this very reason.
All the health benefits. If stress is unhealthy, then removing stress from your life is more healthy. There’s also some amount of scientific research that meditation lowers our genetic age (here, here, here). Also, modern society is wrecking people’s quality of sleep, and clear-mindedness should help anyone fall asleep faster. Finally, if the meditation position is some kind of unsupported upright sitting, then this does wonders for your posture.
It saves you lots of money. Better control over your focus and attention helps you to gloss over the 10,000 advertisements you see on a daily basis. You become more comfortable simply existing without extra gadgets and screens.
Self-acceptance. We’ve all experienced the awkward lull in conversation before, but those same lulls aren’t nearly as awkward with our more comfortable friends and family. Similarly, many people have trouble spending time with themselves. Meditation helps you be more comfortable with the person you know best.
Meditation opens us to much more
So when we stop conscious thought, we put the physical person in neutral. Implicit in that intent is that we’re handing the reins over to our inner being who then begins to steer our vibration to a greater degree. The more we do this, the more our vibration begins to look like that of our inner being, at least to the extent possible in this physical world.
As our vibration further aligns with that of our inner being, we become more and more at one with who we really are. Various channeled sources describe this as how to become channels ourselves. As we blur the distinction between ourselves and our inner beings, we open ourselves up to more direct forms of communication.
Even if channeling isn’t necessarily something we want, more direct communication from a broader perspective is always welcome. We all have emotional responses to our thoughts as communication from our inner being, but more direct communication is certainly possible. Your GPS knows how to avoid traffic jams because it receives data from a broader perspective, one that can see the jam even if you can’t, and knows the alternate routes. A broader perspective is available to everyone and often appears as intuition, inspiration, or random luck.
Final thoughts
This process should also soothe the fear of death for many people. As we become more aligned with our broader selves, we also become more identical to the portion of ourselves that “survives death.” Your inner being does not diminish in any way when you kick off from the physical world. Thus it’s easy to conclude that by shrinking the difference between yourself and your inner being, you also lessen the portion of yourself that does not survive the trip.
We can’t remember which channeled source said this, but it makes a neat final thought. Meditation makes us more at one with our broader selves. This at-one-ment or atonement is a worthy goal to have.
