A meditation pastiche

Meditation is not esoteric, it's simply your mind in effortless focus, as when you're enjoying a cup of coffee or a favourite ice-cream.

Spiritual meditation is indeed esoteric as it is effortless focus on an infinite object, which does transform us.

Spiritual meditation is difficult to practise only because our minds are habituated to effort-ful thinking. Like trying to sleep when wired up mentally. Yet, instead of taking a pill to dull the mind, one can relax by regular practice.

The natural mental state is that of lightness, simple observation, and purity. Our habitual, even obsessive, overuse of the mind creates unnecessary layers of biases, complexities, and heaviness or grossness. Use, not abuse, is needed. 

Bringing the post-meditation state into normal life is more important than just spiritual meditation. An exercise of deliberate transition like Daaji's AEIOU helps immensely. 

A lot of mental activity that drives our behaviour and thinking is subconscious. Meditation, and more so, Heartfulness cleaning, bring up its contents to our conscious awareness. Letting go of what comes up in a detached way clears our subconscious. But we must then deliberately fill our subconscious with positivity. This is easily done in Heartfulness by inviting transmission. 

The superconscious must be experienced, not read about. It is my innermost self, so the only thing blocking its awareness or experience is my self-created mental layers. Repeated meditative experiences expand my understanding of the Infinite. But the joy of meditation lies in the ever-new, ever-fresh, effortless experience.

A slightly different perspective

Meditation is effortless focus on an object. Every normal human being meditates every day, when they do something as simple as drinking a nice cup of coffee or tea. Their minds are in a natural state of flow, resting without strain on what they are doing. This can be extended to any activity that one likes to do. Going for a walk in a nice park. Petting a dog.

It's easy to meditate, or think easily, about a concrete, physical object. Normally, one's attention is naturally drawn easily to something that one likes (and perhaps even more easily to what one dislikes!)

But what about a subtle object of thought?

Something non-physical?

That is generally thought to be tougher.

Yet, here is the paradoxical basis of meditation as relaxation. The subtler the object, the gentler the effort. Straining or tightening the mind makes it difficult to grasp or accept a subtle idea, especially one that changes your conceptual frameworks or exposes your biases.

Babuji said that it's like using a crane to pick up a needle.

Going from activity - to thought - to idea - needs lesser and lesser effort, lesser and lesser energy.

That implies letting go of complexities, which stop us from:

• seeing the forest for the trees, 
• seeing underlying patterns in the myriad details of daily incidents, and
• letting go of negativities or impurities or veils or biases in our images, of others and of ourselves.

Strangely, relaxation takes more time and willpower than activity. We have to go against our training from birth to think, actively and incessantly; to keep the mind eternally busy. It is easier to give a higher priority to an external activity.

Learning something subtle, something new or different may require skill and effort, diligence  and patience, but it need not be emotionally stressful. Then it becomes abuse of the mind.

Daaji said that pausing [while doing spiritual work] is very, very important. I think it helps us to understand that unremitting activity is not necessary. It also allows you to work deliberately, and carefully.