What is “Meditation” and why is everyone trying to sell it? Read Bob OHearn’s description of what it is… and what it isn’t.

True Meditation is without Ambition or Expectation

Regardless of the strategy, scheme, or method, the one common foundation of nearly all meditation programs is the assumption of the inherently substantial deluded reality of the meditator, and the eventual goal of transcending that illusory identity to become an awakened one –  from a suffering, bound, and conflicted individual into a free, peaceful, and happy one.

Essentially, all meditation programs are based on a desire to have things be other than they are, different and more agreeable.

“But true meditation begins with the recognition of the two-fold emptiness of both self and phenomena; the direct realization that subjects and objects exist purely by virtue of conceptual description. Upon their arising, all thoughts, self-images, memories, beliefs, sensations, emotions and perceptions are revealed in true meditation as impermanent and empty of substance, like holographic phantasms. There is no requirement for some special costume or ritual in true meditation, nor any strategic plan for self-transformation and personal ascendance. The one who would accomplish any of that is recognized as an imaginative figment of a fictional story right from the beginning.

In fact, true meditation is actually non-meditation, since it has nothing to accomplish, and hence requires no effort geared towards a change of state or attainment of something extra. Nothing has to be developed, fixed, or resolved, but only recognized. It adds nothing to nor subtracts anything from experience. It simply consists of being aware of being aware, or directly noticing mind’s true nature – our native awake awareness that is self-existing and spontaneously present, open and spacious, lucid and transparent.

Nisargadatta Maharaj put it this way:

“To be aware is to be awake. Unaware means asleep. You are aware anyhow, you need not try to be. What you need is to be aware of being aware. Be aware deliberately and consciously, broaden and deepen the field of awareness. You are always conscious of the mind, but you are not aware of yourself as being conscious.

The mind produces thoughts ceaselessly, even when you do not look at them. When you know what is going on in your mind, you call it consciousness. This is your waking state — your consciousness shifts from sensation to sensation, from perception to perception, from idea to idea, in endless succession. Then comes awareness, the direct insight into the whole of consciousness, the totality of the mind. The mind is like a river, flowing ceaselessly in the bed of the body; you identify yourself for a moment with some particular ripple and call it: ‘my thought’. All you are conscious of is your mind; awareness is the cognisance of consciousness as a whole.”

Excerpt from Bob OHearn: https://theconsciousprocess.wordpress.com/2014/10/12/true-meditation-recognizing-basic-sanity/