Why is meditation regarded as the highest of all spiritual traditions? On a given day in one's life, a person may fight 10 battles or maybe 20. Like anyone, he faces regular and, at times, extraordinary resistance through the day. But the meditator is fighting thousands of battles every single second.
When a meditator sits, and yes, sitting is essential to still everything, everything starts to sit with him. Stilling of the mind is what reveals who's the real King here. Does the mind rule you, or do you rule the mind? The mind drives you all day, but if you sit and drive the mind, it's impossible at first! Have you ever caught yourself saying, "My mind is driving me crazy?" That very "YOU" that recognizes the separation is the "YOU" that meditates and comes out on the other end a victorious warrior.
Here's a rather absurd and somewhat dangerous reality. Our Minds are not just ours alone. They are the construct of the commentary of everything and everyone around us. Minds are sponges. How much you store subconsciously and unconsciously can only be revealed through how illuminated those surfaces are. "We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society." — Alan Watts
Each meditation illuminates our perception. Gradually what follows are enlightened actions. Enlightenment is not what you run after achieving, simply because it's been repeatedly called a goal! How do you know it's a goal to be achieved if you don't know what it looks like? It's never found in isolation. It's through meditation that you cultivate the higher consciousness, at a natural pace for your growth, which leads to enlightened actions within the intimate engagement with life. It's not just what happens in the meditation, but rather after it that tells what you just cultivated in your being.
“Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.” — Shunryu Suzuki
But it's a practice, and it's fairly easy. It's the story around "meditation is tough for I can't concentrate or I don't have patience or I don't have faith in it" which is pretty much contradictory to what meditation is all about. Fundamentally at its very core - aimless. That's its mechanical nature. To have no aim! To not know a thing and embrace the not-knowing. That's the whole point because you can only go so far with what you know. In meditation, you allow things to be and come as they may. The practice may build concentration and patience because the battle is against friction, and through friction, we grow. Through dueling with friction, our neurons make improved pathways and experience improved neuroplasticity, and thus we attain the profound ability to watch our thoughts and not be caught in overthinking. You take with you to your conscious day the ability to see the thoughts as an invitation to act differently this time. And you take with you the ability to bend the mind and build new patterns.
"To a still mind, the whole universe surrenders" — Lao Tzu
Thoughts are part of meditation just as much as they are part of our daily lives. They aren't separate, but through the right technique, the mind learns how to "mechanically" deal with it all. And you learn how to deal with the mind.
You have to want it badly, though. I only started when I wanted it badly as if my life depended on it. If one is thirsty, no amount of explanation of the water, its chemical composition, its sources, or account of the experience of others will satisfy the thirst. Drinking the water will, and then knowing the rest is useless anyway. Animals simply drink the water when thirsty. And the thirst is quenched.
There are those mysterious things that can only be self-realized, and no amount of knowledge will manifest them. "Realizations" come when are ripe enough and bring true transformation. You can't force a plant to grow or a tree to bear its fruit. Such is the nature of deeply transformative realizations. Tending to the garden, to the tree, and our souls is simply practicing every single day what we wish, no matter how imperfect it looks at first.
But again, the trickster mind will talk you out and you will be at its mercy again talking it into it. Meditation arises from a place deeper than the mind, where YOU reside. Which is what makes you stronger than the mind through the practice itself. Here's the Paradox - "Mind cannot do anything about meditation. It simply does not know meditation, and there is no intrinsic possibility for the mind ever to come in contact with meditation. Just as I said before, darkness cannot come in contact with light because darkness is only an absence – so is the mind. Mind is the absence of meditation. The moment meditation arises in you, mind is found nowhere." — Osho
