What is meditation?

[Korpo]

Sometimes it is helpful to look from the other way, so here are two accomplished meditators explain to where meditation took them.

Adyashanti is, as little as I know about him yet, into "non-conceptual meditation". His meditation has no focus. Everything is observed as it is, unchanged. Nothing is focused upon, only awareness itself.

As you gently relax into awareness, into listening, the mind's compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Silence of being will come more clearly into consciousness as a welcoming to rest and abide. An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness to be revealed as your natural condition.

Silence and stillness are not states and therefore cannot be produced or created. Silence is the non-state in which all states arise and subside. Silence, stillness and awareness are not states and can never be perceived in their totality as objects. Silence is itself the eternal witness without form or attributes.

As you rest more profoundly as the witness, all objects take on their natural functionality, and awareness becomes free of the mind's compulsive contractions and identifications. It returns to its natural non-state of Presence.

(Adyashanti, "True Meditation", http://www.adyashanti.org/index.php?...r&writingid=12)

Bruce Frantzis is a Taoist meditator, following a Chinese mix with both Buddhist and Taoist influences. Here the mind focuses on the blockages/attachments that bind our awareness and prevent us from being free, dissolving them. The more blockage is gone, the more the meditator moves beyond the self, concepts, etc.:

When you begin to experience spirit - the third treasure - you move into the depths of your awareness and essence - you begin to realize at the very core of your being that which is not bound by time and space. At the level of spirit, you begin to become spiritually alive, connected with yourself, others, and the environment in a profound, unified way - a genuine spiritual process has begun.

With additional practice you will start to experience emptiness. Everything will seem to be without content. Ordinarily, we experience both external and internal objects in the world as having shape, size, and some kind of content. Everything has an inherent identification or meaning that the mind can grasp. As emptiness is accessed through meditation, however, your spirit starts increasingly to transform the energies of your perceptions of solid objects and stored mental images. Even though another person or a house or tree or airplane is still present (that is, exists for you), they are experienced as having no substance. They are literally nothing (emptiness). As you start perceiving every tangible thing as nothing, you discover that nothingness becomes simultaneously full of Universal Consciousness, which is potentially able to become anything.

[...]once in a while you spontaneously catch a glimpse of the unchanging source of emptiness and fullness that cannot be expressed verbally. There quite literally are no words to describe what you become aware of. It is just what it is. It is known by many names in many traditions; the Chinese call it the Tao.

(Bruce Frantzis, "Relaxing Into Your Being", "The Three Treasures and Emptiness")

This is, of course, ambitious stuff. This seems to be what happens when you follow meditation to "its end". Or like Tom put it very aptly recently:

just know what you are experiencing while you are experiencing it, because it creates a gap between the awareness and the experience. As the gap increases, you begin to see that your body, your emotions, your thoughts, and even your mind itself are not you. The process goes on until nothing is left that you can call you. At that point everything will be reversed - you are not separate from anything or anyone. That's the funny thing about zero and infinity.

(from here: http://forums.astraldynamics.com/vie...11253&start=15)

Oliver