There is meditation, and then there is meditation
Not everything called "meditation" is the same. Roughly speaking, there are two kinds, each defined by our goals and expectations.
The most familiar kind aims at easily identified benefits, such as feelings of relaxation, calm, and well-being. This first kind may also yield physical benefits, such as lowered blood pressure or other improvements in physiological functioning. For long-term meditators, there may be slowly developing benefits in everyday functioning, such as improved concentration or decreased anxiety and emotional reactivity. Or familiar patterns of negative feelings and thoughts may become less frequent and more short-lived. Flare-ups of anger may happen less often, and they may be less overwhelming and shorter in duration. Recovery from them may happen sooner and with less damage to our relations with the people around us. There is a growing sense of self-awareness about how we tend to behave and react to what we encounter and experience. Who could deny that all these are benefits?
The second kind of meditation offers a benefit that goes a giant step further. If the first level is about becoming a better version of ourselves, the second aims much higher. While the first has to do with greater personal self-awareness and with freeing us from unhelpful habit patterns and traits, the second is about becoming free of self-awareness altogether. It leaves thoughts and feelings about ourselves behind and brings us closer to a form of awareness that puts us in the neighborhood of mystics and allows us to experience things the way they do.
In the first kind of meditation, we understand what we experience with our usual knowledge, ideas, words, language, and ways of thinking. In the second kind, we know them directly, without mediation by these. We are aware of what we experience without having to make an effort to know, name, or understand anything. We know what we know spontaneously and with certainty. We stop having knowledge and understanding. Instead, we have become and we are knowledge and understanding. That is all that is left of us: sheer awareness, effortless awareness. Such knowledge is revelatory instead of being merely informational and intellectual.
And what is it we become aware of without thinking, believing, naming, or saying anything? We become aware of the sheer is-ness of everything. We become aware that everything is as it is--without involving intellectual ideas, informational data points, or rational thought. We discover for ourselves what the mystic Rumi said: that the wordlessness of direct silent awareness is like divine knowledge and that all we can possibly say is inadequate commentary.
Such direct and wordless awareness is not out of this world. It is very much the original knowledge of being in this world. A newborn baby looking at the faces in this world in which he has just been born, or an infant looking and laughing at the moving mobile hanging over her crib is Rumi in silent, wordless wonder.
The absurdist and involuntary comic Yogi Berra said: "You can observe a lot by looking." This is no different than the old-fashioned "Lo and behold," which, in modern English, means "Look and see." The second kind of meditation is about just that: looking very closely at what we experience until we can "behold" that it is and how it is as it is and as we live it. This makes us mystics of our experiences without even trying.
Meditative self-care serves both kinds of meditation.
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