“The Most Poorly Understood Point About Meditation”
by Kelvin Chin
Meditation Teacher
Most of the time in the 52 years I’ve been meditating I am aware of body and surroundings. A meditator who still doesn’t understand how the mind works might very easily misinterpret that as “just sitting there with one’s eyes closed thinking thoughts.”
They would not be “wrong.” But unfortunately they would not be completely accurate.
How could that be?
Because the mind is not so simple. Mental experience is a highly nuanced phenomenon.
The superficial view of the mind is that it’s just a bunch of electronic signals randomly — and at times in a more or less organized way — bouncing around in the brain. Most people incorrectly define the mind as our thoughts and feelings.
No.
My experience is that the mind is much more than the sum of its experiences.
Remember my friend Charlie’s “conscious of XYZ” model?
Our minds are the consciousness side of that equation. We are the experiencers. Not the experiences.
But don’t stop there in your analysis.
Our mind can experience its experiences in a wide variety of ways. Which is why I constantly and consistently remind my TW students to not pay close attention to the various experiences they have during their meditations.
Why?
To allow their mind the freedom to experience in whatever way it chooses to express itself at that moment. Thus the term you often hear me use:
“Meditation is allowing the mind to experience itself.”
And when we meditate properly, without caring or vigilance, our mind is allowed to do just that. To be with itself in whatever way it needs to at that moment.
And without our even knowing it, our mind will sometimes leave the 8” bucket part of itself. It will “expand its capacity of experience” — without our awareness of it doing so.
How do I know?
Because of the result.
By meditating correctly for so many decades, my conscious capacity for experiencing life has increased dramatically. And as I said, most of that time I would have described my meditations as sitting with my eyes closed — often being aware of my surroundings.
So all of you who are addicted to watching YouTube videos on NDEs or OBEs, beware. Those extreme experiences are attention-getters no doubt. But they are incredibly misleading and incomplete. Seductive to the new initiate to meditation? Absolutely yes. But they are as misleading as the experience that can sometimes happen during meditation where we may be unaware of body and surroundings.
Do not get caught in the “Spiritual Materialism” trap. See page 193 in my purple book, Marcus Aurelius Updated, if that doesn’t ring a bell.
Heed my advice and guidance and you will continue to expand the capacity of your mind and naturally allow it to experience the vastness of itself. And most importantly, you will reap the practical benefits of that in your daily life.
Kelvin H. Chin is a Meditation Teacher, Life After Life Expert, and Author of “Overcoming the Fear of Death,” “Marcus Aurelius Updated: 21st Century Meditations On Living Life,” and “After the Afterlife: Memories of My Past Lives.” He learned to meditate at age 19, and has been teaching Turning Within Meditation and coaching others in their self-growth for 40 years. He helps people understand their life challenges through their individual belief systems, and helps them find their own solutions. His past life memories reach back many centuries, and he accesses those memories in his teaching and his coaching in the same way all coaches draw on their own available experiences for perspective and effective analogies. He can be reached at www.TurningWithin.org.