Meditation, Plain And Direct

Meditation gets marketed as a way to calm down, focus more, or “fix yourself.” We take a sharper angle: meditation is the direct experience of spirit, and that changes the entire point of the practice. When you stop treating it like another self-improvement project, you begin to see it as a lived experiment in awareness, presence, and self-realization. 

We share a clear definition of meditation as the science, art, and morals of awakening. Science, because when you do the practice, results follow in ways you can test and repeat. Art, because meditation unlocks a deeper creativity and a more spacious way of seeing. Morals, because it reveals basic human goodness and quietly reshapes how we relate to ourselves, other people, and the world. We also draw a practical line between religion and spirituality: many traditions place intermediaries between you and the divine, while meditation invites firsthand contact through the “eye of spirit,” the part of you that can observe body sensations and watch thoughts come and go. 

Then we get practical about what makes meditation work in modern life. The goal is not just improving the ego, but transcending the small self and relaxing into a larger Self. We talk about why meditation can be tricky, why support matters, and how the right container (mentor, your own effort, and a group) prevents you from getting stuck. Finally, we guide a short meditation you can do anywhere, moving from body awareness to mind awareness to the felt sense of alive presence, so practice starts becoming a quality of everyday life. 

If you found this helpful, subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review so more people can discover it. What did you notice when you became the observer of your thoughts?

Transcript

Welcome And Podcast Direction

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hello everyone, welcome to the episode 12 of Spirit Dead Podcast. As always, I'm excited to be with you today. Our podcast is developing, it's doing really well. Thank you for your support and for your uh feedback. Uh, your feedback is very important for us as well as encouragement. We will have soon some guests and panels, so stay tuned. In the meantime, we are exploring my book, Spirit X, and we are exploring what it means to be spiritual in the 21st century in modern days, and also we are also exploring life, life in general from a little bit deeper perspective. So, welcome again. Uh, in the last few episodes, we started talking about uh spiritual practices. That's a very, very rich topic, very important topic. I would say spiritual practices are the core of any topic related to spirituality and modern-day spirituality. In the previous episode, I did talk briefly about satsang, yoga, and silence as important traditional as well as contemporary spiritual practices. However, today I want to devote the whole episode to probably the most important spiritual practice that ever exists on this planet, and that is meditation. I would say three most important practices across traditions and in the contemporary world are meditation, prayer, and contemplation. And we are going to devote to each one of them. We are going to devote to each one of them a separate episode. I did uh write a book about those three practices, Spirit X, Playful Presence, Meditation, Srayers, and Contemplation Our Time. So that's a kind of companion to the book that we're exploring. So I'll be using that book a little bit. But for today, meditation. Um one of the privileges of the job that I'm doing is that you try various techniques, practices, uh, injunctions and stuff like that across traditions that are available to us in this global age. And I have to say, there is no practice like meditation. So uh, in terms of effect, in terms of depth, meditation is the direct experience of spirit, and I'm going to talk about it more. But let me read the paragraph from my book, Spirit X Playful Presence, and we will start from there. So I have kind of my own definition of meditation or my own description of meditation. So let me read just one paragraph for you. Meditation is the experience of spirit as ultimate self beyond dimensions of inner and outer, and individual and collective. In a wider sense, meditation is the science, art and morals of self-realization. It is science in that if you do the experiment, then certain results and outcomes will follow that can be tested, repeated, and shared. It is art in that it connects us with and releases within us the cosmic creativity. And it is morals in that it reveals to us the basic goodness of the human condition and has inherent moral implications for ourselves, others, and the world. Meditations in this book are tailored for our time, and their major focus and goal is self-realization. So, very rich description of uh what meditation is. Uh the most important thing to understand about meditation before you practice it, that it's actually direct experience of spirit. It's direct experience of spirit. And that's the major difference between religion and spirituality, genuine spirituality, the way I see it. So in religion, there is always some intermediary between the practitioner and the divine. So there is church, there is scripture, there is uh bread that represents, let's say, Christ's body, there is wine, represents Christ's uh blood, and etc. But in meditating meditation, we go directly, you know, with the divine, directly with the spirit, and that's its most distinctive feature. Uh the second distinctive feature of meditation is that uh it's actually about transcending the small self rather than fixing the small self. So meditation is a self-transcending practice. So there is a small self, egoic self, and there is a big self, a self with capital S, which is uh the basic teaching of Hinduism, but also other spiritual traditions. So meditation is actually a journey from releasing the small self into the big self. It's a self-transcending practice. So when you meditate, you're actually transcending your small self and you are releasing yourself into the big self, universal self, rather than fixing your small self. Yes, meditation does improve our egoic self, our small self, but the key is transcendence. And the biggest key about meditation is actually that it's about self-realization. Self-realization or awakening or enlightenment, unfortunately, and I say unfortunately, it's not the biggest value in present-day life. Unfortunately, it's just not there culturally, it's not in education. My exploration of human life was very deep, and I did discover that that's probably the most important thing that we should do while heal on earth. Again, it's not there culturally, but meditation ultimately is about self-realization. It's about awakening, it's about enlightenment. And when you approach it that way, the results will be uh really, really, really extraordinary. Um what to say about meditation as a practice? So it requires certain posture, it requires certain training, it requires certain stillness, it requires certain skill. Uh I wouldn't say meditation is difficult, I wouldn't say meditation is easy, I would say meditation is a tricky practice. So if you do it in the right container, it's probably going to go smooth. If you don't do it in the right way, in the right container, you can get stuck for centuries and lifetimes. So in that regard, it's tricky. The container that I suggest for meditation is the same that I suggest for spirituality in general, is Buddha Dharma Sangha. So if you work with the mentor, if you make an effort on your own, and if you have a group to practice meditation with that's that I guarantee you there'll be a tremendous success. So Buddha Dharma Sangha. Um I work with a lot of people in that regard. Some people meditate with me during our private sessions, some people come to my events, some people practice on their own. So if you get the two of those going, you're good. If you get three of those going, you are, I guarantee you, results. If you do only one, you may have results, you may not. So let's say you're practicing on your own and you're watching lots of videos available on various platforms or or podcasts or whatever, audios, and then you get stuck in you get stuck in stuff like that. So mentor is important, group is important for success, but again, it's a little bit tricky practice, it's not difficult, it's not easy. If you do it in the right container, you will have immediate results, and results are usually beyond egoic, wildest expectations. For meditation, you need regularity. So if you meditate, I don't know, once a month, you are not going to have any results. If you meditate a few times a week, you will start getting results and stuff like that. So it does require four good results, it does require uh discipline and dedication and the right container. It doesn't have to be time consuming. I mean, 10, 15 minutes of daily meditation will do it. Not everybody has to go to vipassana retreats when you spend 10, 15 hours in meditation and stuff like that. So so periods of deeper rest, short periods of deeper rest work very, very well. And that fits to our daily uh more than life schedules. Uh the most beautiful thing about meditation is that once you do it, once you dedicate yourself to it, it becomes the quality of your everyday life. So there is no difference at some point between meditation practice and everyday life. So there is a meditative quality in your everyday life. It takes a little practice for that, but once you achieve that, uh that transforms totally your life. One of the distinctive features of this uh podcast is that we do experiential stuff. So we talk about stuff, but we also do stuff. Since we are talking about meditation, I invite you to do uh a short meditation with me. So I invite you to sit comfortably in the meditation posture. We're just going to kind of drop deeper for a few minutes. So I invite you to gently close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths into the belly and out just to kind of set the tone for our meditation and our inquiry. So I'm inviting you to pay your attention or to be aware or your body as a series of sensations. So we for we bring our attention to the body, we're observing our body. So we observe tension, relaxation, hot and warm feelings, comfort and discomfort, and we just watch it without getting wrapped up into it. We allow a little bit of positive stuff and a little bit of negative stuff. And we notice that there is an instance in our within our being that is aware of the body. And that which is aware of our body is actually spirit, it's the eye of spirit. Very easy to identify. That which watches the body is the spirit, and that's a good meditation. So we're going to do the same with the mind. So I invite you to bring your attention to the activity of the mind. So mind produces images, judgments, thoughts, visions. So we watch the mind without getting wrapped up into it. And that instance within us that is aware of the mind is spirit. So that's how we directly experience spirit and meditation, and that's what's so great about meditation. So your eye of spirit is observing your mind, and you're creating a different relationship with your mind. So let's just allow your thoughts coming and going, and you just watch it just like you're watching the the movie in the movie theater. So thoughts coming and going, images coming and going, judgments coming and going. But you're just the observer. And that observer is spirit. And any meditation that takes you directly to the spirit is a good meditation. And finally, the last thing for our meditation today is just be aware or pay attention to the alive presence within yourself. So it's alive, it's conscious, it's aware, it's still it's receptive and it's giving. And I invite you to be that alive presence because that's your core, that's your true self. So be that presence. So you have body, you have mind, but essentially your spirit, essentially, you're this alive presence. So just taste it full in this meditation, and this quality of your life is going to come from the background to the foreground with more of your practice. We gently open our eyes. I'm not sure something happened. But I'm not hearing myself well. Oh, it stopped. Oh no. No, it says stop. Oh no, sorry. No, you're gone. Okay. Yeah, you're gone. I can edit all that out. Okay, it's good. It's good there. Sorry. So meditation, yeah, great practice, great state of being, very healthy to do it, very important for our spirituality. Uh it is important to do it regularly, but again, meditation is probably the best spiritual practice around, the best spiritual practice we invented on this planet. And uh I encourage you to meditate. And we'll do other meditations within these podcasts. So thank you for practicing with me. Thank you for your attention, and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye bye.