True Meditation means Thoughtless Awareness... a higher state of human awareness free from worries, a collective conciousness, a powerful revolution that is silently working within us, transforming the world.
In Thoughtless Awareness the dualism of the human mind is transcended. The silence of 'thoughtlessness' leads to pure perceptive existence as opposed to the usual projective perception of the world, where projections from our logical human mind are thrown into reality and then extracted again. The perception of reality can therefore never be pure, if undertaken from an epistemic mental level. The mind sees the outside world only through the limitations of his own understanding, through the tinted lenses of human categories, laws of logic and interpretation based on past experiences.
These limitations of the human mind make it ultimately impossible for humankind to perceive reality in its pure form. The Kantian 'thing itself' can not be perceived independent from its translation through our mental categories. Reality without mental coloring, without the biased and distorted mental translation can thus only be perceived if we learn to transcend the human mind. And the human mind can only be transcended by mystical experience that allows us to enter this state of absolute silence, where we are aware of our surroundings without 'coloring' them with the projection of our thoughts.
In the mystical experience one enters a state of pure existence, pure awareness, pure attention and pure being. As pure Being, pure existence, one can experience reality as such, without translator, without thoughts, in absolute silence. This state of mystical transcendence of the mind, of absolute silence and complete serenity, has been called by different names according to the different mystical traditions: mystical extasis (Christianity), gnosis (Gnosticism), Tao (Taoism), Satori (Zen Buddhism), Sahaja Samadhi (Sikh tradition), Nirvana (Buddhist and Hindu traditions) and Yoga (Indian mysticism).
Meditation refers to an exercise where the thinking mind is relaxed and silenced so that the gap between thoughts is progressively widened. When in meditation we enter this gap between two thoughts, we enter a space of absolute presence, of present silence, of thoughtless awareness. This state is fundamentally different to the normal thinking state, where the content of our thoughts is always either the future or the past, but never the present.
Stress is caused by the thinking brain, either through thinking excessively about past experiences (causing trauma or experientially causal psychological problems) or worries about the future (future related feelings of stress). The 'here and now' state which comes from the practice of an authentic meditation leads to a witness state, where past or present life events, future worries and problems are perceived from a detached perspective, the perspective of the observer. Problems can be dealt with in a much more effective way from this distant and detached perspective than from the usual, emotionally involved, state of mind.
This detached state of mind, that is concomitant to the mystical meditative experience, has been denominated by western philosophers as 'serenity' or 'ataraxia' (the Greek word for a state of joyful indifference). It refers to a state that lies beyond the short-lived experiences of happiness or unhappiness, a state of ever-lasting serene joyfulness and detachment. It is this state of joyful detachment that makes true yoga a path towards freedom from suffering.
Relaxing the thinking brain through meditation by entering the space of the present, the 'here and now', even if it is only for a few minutes a day, has been shown to have numerous beneficial effects to our health and physiological system. At a subjective level, this state of thoughtless awareness is experienced as highly peaceful, pleasant and relaxing.