Embodying Meditation

Meditation here leads you to improve the staying power of your concentration. When guided through the various approaches of the practise, you manage to increase and prolong the moments of quietude and inner peace. Your awareness evolves to acquire an enhanced sense of clarity, nimbleness and ease.

By now you have enough authority of your mind that to focus on an object or words is easy for you. Via regular meditation your consciousness has gone from strength to strength, whereby concentrating for longer stretches of time is not difficult. Bottom line while earlier you could manage to think about the painting or the three word chant somewhat sparingly, gradually to longer minutes unwaveringly, you are finally sustaining your meditative state uninterrupted for much longer times, potentially up to an hour.

You may wonder what more is left in Meditation?

Focused Attention → Effortless Meditation → Meditative Absorption

Shortly put – a last chapter of total bliss.

Starting off at the level of focused attention you graduated to doing Meditation effortlessly. What awaits you now is reaching Meditative Absorption – a state of perfect consciousness. This last stage of consciousness is differentiated from its two previous avatars in terms of its purity. Think of it like conducting a process of distillation in the first two phases; boiling (Focused Attention) and condensing (Effortless Meditation) your mind to arrive at the end result of a consciousness in its most purest and concentrated form in Meditative Absorption.

Consider Meditative Absorption as one of the summits of your journey in self-discovery and body-mind-soul connect. A summit to climb and hold on to in a continual unidirectional travel to betterment, nirvana and profound spiritually.

What is the next stage of Meditation like?

In the highest meditative state, the meditator aims to achieve complete assimilation. Herein you are wholly and fully stripped of your philosophies, your lifelong ideologies, your dread, your angst, your wrath and even happiness. Yes…in this ultimate degree there are no truant thoughts that intrude your mind. It is a state of nothingness, where your state of refined consciousness is everything. You don’t even think of this nothingness because then you run the risk of making nothingness your object.

At this point, there is no difference between an object or words and you. You both are the same. Signalling that all your senses have come to a stand still and other brain messaging working through the other sensory organs are now centred in your mind. The object/or the words is entirely under your mental command.

Simply put, there will no longer be an object/or mantras between you and your inner self…just your heightened consciousness. It is a state where you will not only have no thoughts but also no body. Your breath too would have disappeared. All that would be left behind would be your naked consciousness.

In other words, your awareness, the very process of meditation and the object/mantra are all fused into one.

In this zenith, you are no longer aware of the ‘I’ in you. This meditative state helps you unlock a more profound anchor than the reactivity of your ego. With the dissolution of the “I”, your inner sanctuary, hitherto uncovered becomes your shield from the externalities existing in the outer world.

Meditative Absorption truly empowers you … now you realise how much fuller and bigger you are as a human being than what you thought or felt before. Meditation slowly permeates every nanosecond of your life as it becomes an integral part of your every waking moment.

As you live, sleep, breathe, and walk meditation, you embody it not just physically but also emotionally and spiritually. A sense of permanent calm begins to define you. The perpetual churning of your emotions in the previous two instalments of meditation now come to a complete halt. In the total absence of ego you feel a sagacious compassion for your fellow brethren. Your empowered body cells leads to reduced bodily pain, lower blood pressure, and depression. Your brain’s prefrontal cortex, the home of attention, personality, emotions, memories, feel good chemicals switches to constant ‘on’ mode – meaning a happier you with a healthy outlook.

Having ultimately united with your inner spirit, you’ll develop a deeper love for yourself…and for the world that you live in.

How much ever we might be like the idea of a linear, simple, direct progressive line to Meditative Absorption as if our consciousness could be worked upon step-by-step over time. Many great masters remind us to be humble and accept that although the progress we make is one directional – singularly positive, we reach there through small circular routes not a straight line.  And that we strive to reach this paradise.