I have received several questions this past week about meditation.  As I looked at them altogether, I realized that I had been assuming things and not everyone had the same understanding that I did.  As a result, I thought I better pause our essay series once again and attempt to address some of these questions.  In many respects, they are very basic questions, and for that reason, they are important to address.  The questions included:  Is meditation really that important?  What will meditation do for my spiritual life?  Do I need to practice every day?  So here is my attempt to address them.  This is for those of you who have ever wondered about the purpose of meditation, or how it functions in our inner world.

On the face of it, meditation is a very strange process.  You are supposed to sit completely still for long periods of time in order to what?  See God?  Have a spiritual experience?  Heal some dread disease?  Calm your anxious mind?  What exactly is the purpose of meditation?

This is not unimportant.  If you are not clear about the purpose of your meditation practice, you are likely wasting your time.  Knowing why you are doing something – the purpose of it and the goal towards which you are aimed – gives you a clear focus and the ability to self-correct when your practice starts getting wonky.  So, let's start with a bit of background.

We live in a divided world, and we ourselves are frequently of two (or more) minds.  According to the great spiritual masters of all the major religions, this division is artificial in nature.  Our true nature is to be in union.  This union is variously understood, depending on the practitioner's belief system.  It may be a union with God, a profound union within your own self, often described as self-realization, or a communion with the Divine.  The purpose of meditation is to facilitate our perception of this underlying union.

The Importance of a Clear Target

One of the requirements for success in any endeavor is having a distinct and measurable target.  If you don't know what you are trying to achieve, how will you know if you have achieved success?  Perhaps more importantly, how will you self-correct if you don't know where the target lies?  You simply don't know if you are left or right of the target, whether you are north or south of it.  In this essay, I hope to provide some clarity regarding the target of the spiritual life.

Each of the six major world religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, teaches some form of deep, wordless prayer.  Each religion has its own name for this process, but for our discussion, we will lump all of these terms together under the label ‘meditation.’  Each religion has various practices that fall under the general label of meditation.  

There are two common problems for those trying to implement these practices.  First, there are too many targets.  I am most familiar with Christianity, and there are literally hundreds of different prayer practices that are commonly called 'meditation.'  If you are to be successful in your spiritual quest, having multiple targets is just not helpful.  If there is one clearly defined target, your chances of hitting that target go way, way up.

If you add to this problem within Christianity the hundreds or thousands of practices described by Hindus, Buddhists, and so on, the situation goes from really difficult to impossible.  Which practice should you follow?  Perhaps more importantly, why should you follow this method and not that one?  Or any method at all?

That brings us to the second problem.  None of these methods give us a clear target for which to aim.  They say, in effect, “Do this practice and enlightenment, or salvation, or communion with the Divine will occur.”  While that may be all they can say, it leaves the spiritual practitioner with precious little to go on.  I've noticed that there are very few enlightened or realized spiritual masters roaming around.  You may have noticed the same thing.  So, how do we know that we are practicing in the correct fashion?  How can we self-correct if we don't know what the target is?

Accepting this lack of clarity as the normal state of affairs seems wrong.  In our era, we have actually gathered a considerable amount of information about the spiritual journey from the perspectives of the different world religions.  What we haven't had was a compilation of this wisdom.  We have tended to see these different religious systems as competing with one another.  We have yet to understand them as simply having different perspectives on a common problem.   This seems inexcusable given the wealth of spiritual knowledge available to us from these multiple sources.  

The Unitive State

The end state of the spiritual quest is variously described as union with God, communion with God, enlightenment, and self-realization.  While these descriptions appear to describe different phenomena, my research into the major world religions leads me to believe that these differences are simply matters of perspective.  If you view an object from the left side, from the top, and the back, you are highly likely to get three different pictures, resulting in three different descriptions of the same object.

In our case, regarding the goal of spiritual practice, the different perspectives are provided by the theologies and worldviews of the different religions.  Each of the major world religions views spiritual matters through the lens of their particular revelation.  For example, the multiple gods and goddesses of the Eastern religions are markedly different from the one God described by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  

Supporting this notion – that a common process underlies these apparent differences regarding the ultimate spiritual goal – are the descriptions of the end states of the spiritual journey as described by these different religions.  In my book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence, you can explore this in-depth.

All six describe a unification that takes place during and at the end of the spiritual journey.  Not surprisingly, these religions describe this unification somewhat differently, given their theological differences.  For example, Advaita Hinduism and Dzogchen Buddhism speak of this as an interior unification of the personal self, the ego, with itself.  This is congruent with their particular theologies.  Christianity and Islam describe a union with God as the end state of the spiritual quest.  Judaism, because of its belief that G_d is totally Other, believes that the closest a person can come to the Divine is a deep communion.  

The point here is to look beyond their apparent differences and notice that they all speak of a unification of some kind.  This has some interesting implications, both for the spiritual journey and for the practice of meditation.  

To have a unification, especially a unification of this kind, indicates that there must be a profound underlying separation.  Most of us, and most of the time, are unaware of any kind of spiritual separation.  We go about our typical day without thinking about God or noticing any separation from the Divine.  This merely shows how profound our separation is.  We don't even know that there is one!

Of course, this is not surprising.  We don't typically notice the presence of God as we go about our daily round, do we?  It is as if we are blind to our spiritual life most of the time.  This is a separation of the most profound sort!  The practices of meditation are designed to overcome this felt separation. 

How Does It Work?

All forms of meditation are ultimately aimed at helping you achieve stillness.  This is the ultimate goal of meditation.  From birth, our minds are involved in constructing our reality.  We don't notice this construction process because so much of it happens before we have language.  One of the more interesting findings of recent psychological research has been that almost all of what we remember is mediated by our language.  Have you ever wondered why you don't remember things in your first few years?  Because you didn't have language yet, you could not lay down long-term memories.  Hence, no early memories.

The goal of meditation is, first, to get you to stop talking to yourself.  Notice what happens as you begin to meditate.  Your mind rumbles around for a bit, and then you finally settle down into a brief stillness.  That stillness ends when you notice it and comment to yourself, “Ah, I think I've got this now.”  It usually takes a while for a novice meditator to recognize this comment as just another thought and that you are back constructing your artificial reality again.

This stopping of thoughts cannot be any kind of suppression of thoughts because that is just more of the same – it's just a fancy kind of thinking.  The stopping – the acquisition of stillness – will first come in little moments, interspersed among your thoughts.  Then, it will gradually lengthen as you are able to maintain your focus.  When this happens, you start to make true spiritual progress.

As you continue your practice, your stillness deepens and lengthens.  As this happens, you begin to perceive the reality which underlies our multiple separations.  You start to see how your self-talk constructs your reality.  You begin to perceive the subtle, unitive reality that lies underneath all of our mental busyness.  Your perception will continue to deepen and finally unite you with the Ultimate.  

To learn more about this journey, you can read Inside the Invisible where I describe this journey in detail.

So How Do You Achieve Stillness?

It is one thing to say that the target or goal of meditation is the achievement of stillness.  But for anyone who has ever tried meditation, you know how difficult stillness is to achieve.  So, to end this essay, let's focus on achieving this interior state.

Most of us have a constant stream of chatter in our heads – our self-talk.  As I understand it, there are two main ways of achieving stillness, and you are likely to choose one or the other based on whether you prefer to process cognitively or emotionally.  

The cognitive path involves letting go of your self-talk.  While this sounds easy, it is most certainly not!  You let go in this moment, and in the very next moment, you are off chattering about something else.  Almost always, I find that my self-talk during meditation is of earth-shaking importance – things like remembering to pick up some eggs and milk when I finish my meditation.  Perhaps you have had similar experiences?

As a result, the 'letting go' process is constant.  You let go of this thought, the next one, and the one after that.  Sometimes this is so arduous that you get up from meditation more tired than when you sat down.  If you can step back for a moment and look at the whole process, you will see just how undisciplined our minds are.  At times, this whole business of trying to achieve stillness reminds me of herding cats.

In addition to the 'letting go' process, there are other approaches.  These different approaches involve the same kinds of processes as 'letting go.'  Some people describe it as the process of surrender.  You surrender your passing needs and the self-talk accompanying them to draw closer to the Divine.  Still others, notably the anonymous mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing, describe a related process that he calls humility.  Humility, as our anonymous author describes it, is the process of seeing yourself as you actually are, not as you imagine yourself to be.  So humility, as it is understood here, is not some mental self-flagellation but rather a cultivation of self-observation that results in a recognition of our deepest self – a self already profoundly connected to the love of God.

On the other hand, the emotional path involves the internal cultivation of qualities like love, compassion, gratitude, etc.  This path typically pulls attention away from the intellect and moves it into your heart center, sometimes called the heart chakra.  This spiritual center in your chest is the place that the spiritual masters of all the major religions say is the place where it is easiest to encounter the Divine.

Let's take the cultivation of gratitude as an example of this process.  You sit in your meditation, letting go of the initial distractions and minor discomforts.  Then, you move your attention from your head into your heart center.  This movement is not always clearly understood.  Many think that their attention permanently resides in their head – a kind of fixed feature like your nose or mouth.  Anyone who has ever stubbed their toe or barked their shin knows the fallacy of this.  When this kind of trauma occurs, absolutely ALL of your attention is directed to the point of injury!  This shows that attention can be placed wherever you need it to be.

What people haven't known is how to move their attention out of their heads in a more gentle manner.  You begin by feeling the sphere of energy that surrounds your head, the energy we typically describe as our ‘self’ or our ‘ego.’  Then, slowly, move this energy down your spinal column and into the region of your heart, taking several minutes or so to complete the journey.  Just feel that sphere of energy getting heavier and heavier until it comes to rest in your chest.  Then, when your attention is rooted in your heart, begin to cultivate gratitude.

When I say, 'cultivate gratitude,' I do not mean that you make up a feeling about some false thing that you think you should be grateful for.  Instead, think about those aspects of your life for which you really feel gratitude.  For example, I have had a knee problem since childhood from playing sandlot football.  When my knee is not hurting, it is easy to feel gratitude for that.  I often start here, with my not-hurting knee, and I generate feelings of gratitude for that.  Then, my mind turns to other things I'm grateful for.  Some days, it is quite a list.  

As these feelings of gratitude multiply, I find a kind of quiet developing – the stillness we talked about earlier.  If I stay with it, this stillness gradually deepens until I find myself floating in a wordless ocean of gratitude.  It is here, in the stillness, that the emotional and the cognitive practices of meditation flow together and become one.

As you can see, with both the cognitive and emotive approaches to meditation, entering into stillness takes time and constant practice.  To achieve genuine stillness, daily practice is required.  For most of us, this means daily practice over a period of years.  As my own practice has deepened, I find that I am learning to live within this inner stillness, so that its cultivation is becoming a constant feature of my inner life.  It is a deeply peaceful place; and when I can enter this state, it often feels like I am coming home.

Conclusions

We have covered a lot of ground in this essay.  We discussed the importance of making a clear target for our meditative practice.  We have identified the pre-existing and underlying unitive state that is not perceptible by our ordinary consciousness.  We discussed that the goal of meditation is stillness because it is through our inner stillness that we can pierce through our apparent separation and perceive what is ultimately real.  It is through stillness that we can perceive the Divine.  Finally, we talked about two different meditative methods that can take us into stillness – a cognitive-based method and an emotional one.  

As one of my seminary professors encouraged me, I would encourage you to "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" this material.  It will serve you well on your spiritual journey.

With love,

P.S.  Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class.  If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web.  If you have an interest, please write me at [email protected]. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

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