Now that you’ve experienced an active meditation, for which there are many (Listen to my Dr. Quiet audio companion for more methods), you will naturally begin having little meditative states.
When we string states of consciousness together frequently enough, this leads to progressively greater stages of meditative awareness.
Meditative awareness is not sleeping because sleeping is a state of unconsciousness. The purpose of meditation is to increase consciousness of yourself.
As your self- conscious grows in a healthy manner, you become progressively more fine-tuned to both your inner and outer experiences as well as the marriage of the two as one experience.
Here are some more advanced methods of going deeper into meditative awareness.
Dreaming Awake
Sit in a comfortable chair or lay on a bed. Place a plate on the floor beside you and hold a fork or similar metal object in your hand so that when in a relaxed position, your arm and hand hang such that if you drop the fork it will land on the plate.
Now, begin to simply allow yourself to relax.
If thought arise, don’t get involved in them. Simply watch them go by as though sitting in a café on the street and watching all the interesting looking people go by. This is called witnessing.
To witness, we must suspend judgment. We must not get entangled with the thoughts by saying to ourselves things like, “Why the hell can’t I stop thinking?” Or, “Why am I thinking such negative thoughts all the time?” Learn to simply witness.
Allow yourself to begin to fall asleep. But, this time, you want to witness and see where it is you go each night when you sleep. Simply close your eyes and sink into it.
Ask your inner-self to show you where it goes each night and then, simply witness, just as you do when you are in the back of a taxi in a new town you’ve never seen before. Don’t worry about falling asleep.
That’s what the fork is for. When you fall asleep, the fork will land on the plate and wake you up. With practice, you will be able to witness more and more of the journey inward. You will come to know the truth of yourself. You will, sooner or later, begin experiencing intuition.
Intuition is what occurs when you have a knowing, yet you were not thinking about something, you simply “know.”
This is the very process used by advanced yogis, reishi’s and wise men—they live in this state and can access literally any or all information contained in the Universal Mind this way.
That is why they are often referred to as wise men – they are wise without having to go to school!
Now, if that doesn’t motivate you to meditate, what will? When you find out where you go while you sleep at night, you will find out who you really are. I’ll let that be a surprise!
The Art Of Meditation
Now that you’ve developed your ability to experience your happenings without doing and you know that you can indeed reach a meditative state, you are ready for the next level.
Before I go on though the next drill, I’d like you to know that any of these methods can be used as a meditative warm-up for a more quieting technique.
Mindful Breath Meditation
Again, sit or lay comfortably. Now, begin simply by giving yourself permission not to think. It’s OK, the world won’t disappear in the next half an hour, unless you want it to of course.
Breathe slowly and rhythmically through your nose if possible. As thoughts arise, again, simply witness without judgment, regardless of how twisted, tormented or ugly any of them may be.
That’s just the ego scratching for a pet like a dog wanting attention. As your mind slows, allow stillness to emerge. You will feel the stillness as a deep inner-peacefulness.
You will notice that as you meditate, you are accumulating energy—life force. This is what I call working-in, which is functionally and energetically the opposite of working-out.
So, if you don’t like working-out, now you’ve got a great reason to work-in. But remember, there is no work being done here, it’s just a name that signifies the direction of both conscious and energetic flow—the work of mindfulness.
With practice, you will find that the number of stages of consciousness increases and they arise more easily. That will grow into increasing stages of inner-awareness. Eventually, you can meditate at will—as your ability to meditate grows, so too will your intuition grow.
Intuition is the capacity to perceive life through your heart, while thinking is the capacity to interpret life through your head. The head is a dividing machine, while the heart offers the experience of wholeness.
When we learn to connect our head to our heart through the art of meditation, we actually learn to create wholeness in our lives and to use thinking as a tool to cultivate true success, inner-balance and love for ourselves.
As we cultivate inner-love for self through meditation, we naturally share that abundance with others in our life.
Because you’ve now given yourself permission to take time each day to be meditative, you will find that you’ve got more energy than ever and that you are feeling better and better in yourself, experience less stress in life in general.
Soon enough you will come to realize why Osho devoted his life to encouraging and teaching people to meditate instead of going to churches to have their heads filled with thou shalt’s and other self-defeating thoughts.
You can’t truly think until you learn not to think, you can only be thought. Wow! What a realization!
Through meditation, you will learn to identify the thinker and separate the thought from identity. Once you truly know who you are, you will never be afraid of life again!
Enjoy the journey to your heart!
