Meditation is a simple act.
It has nothing to with sixth sense.It is not an explosion happening at some point of time in one's life.This claim is against the teachings of Patanjali Maharshi.
It is accessible to great swamis as well as poor- illiterate- lay men.
Just be with your breath. Just be with your body. Just be with your thoughts. Just be an ordinary human being.Find a quite place. Sit some time . Don't try to eliminate your ordinary thoughts. Just be with that. Thoughts pass through your mind. Be with the thought.
After some days of practice you may notice that you are losing the presence of physical body. You are losing your thoughts and you feel quietness, you feel stillness.
That stillness happens in a meditation.Concentration is not meditation. What people say as meditation is just pratyahara ( the withdrawal of senses) and dharana ( one pointedness of the mind). Meditation happens after this. Then we don't know our thoughts. We don't know our body. What people tell about meditation is only after effects,like we describe a good sleep.
When our mother sits at home and do nama japa or dhikr, she gets the same feeling of happiness and coolness. When a hindu mother does mala of 108 beads, when a sufi chants dhikr/ thasbeeh she/ he gets the same feeling.
After meditaiton we get a happy mind, get a peace of mind, get a coolness. We don't need any great people to take us to meditation. Nobody can take us to. We are finding our own way. Depending on the life of the person each person has a unique feeling. I have heard some people marketing this pure knowledge. They claim that they can make you fly through meditation.They can enable you to read others mind. They can make you this and that. Many many things. All are tall claims. May be true for those swamis, not for all.
The purpose of meditation is samadhi to make you jeevanmuktha.There are 8 limbs of Ashtanga yoga or Raja yoga. It starts with yama which contains ahimsa, not- stealing, honest words,compassion etc etc.Yama is only one those eight limbs. There are many things like observances called niyama. Observances are "Dos" , yama is " Don't Dos".Patanjali Maharshi insits us to practise these basic things before meditation.How can one practice meditation without cleanliness, how can one reach samadhi with himsa, how can you steal , cheat , harm and still do meditation. If you can , then Patanjali may be wrong.
Meditation is a fancy marketing word now, to make people a better CEO of a company, a better HR manager. This is not the way of Ashtanga yoga. This is a money making way.
Pranayama, prathyahara, dharana come after this. We do asanas for awareness of physical body. We do pranayama for control of breath.Without awareness of physical body and awareness of breath how one can have awareness of subtle feelings inside our mind and body?
Meditation or dhyana is only the seventh one. This are all meant for eternal bliss called samadhi. Samadhi is not a one time happening. We have a notion that after samadhi there is nothing. No. After attaining samadhi. we wake up and lead the normal life. we go to farm and do farming, we do our ordinary business of life. But again,we do meditation and reach samadhi. It is easy then. ditaion is a happy state.My request is we don't have to complicate this simple meditation.
