What meditation is and isn't
The average person when it comes to meditation can easily be confused. The person who has not seriously looked into meditation, when confronted with the advice or suggestion to try it turns down the offer in a number of ways:
The most common way is to play off something they are already doing — that they enjoy — as meditation. They might say when they are going to the gym, going for a drive or performing music that that is their meditation. It is usually an outwardly performed action, where meditation is really an inactivity and inwardly focused.
Meditation is neither relaxation. Relaxation is not meditation because there must still be a disciplined intent and focus. Lying on your front as with a massage, or on your back to rest are positions of relaxation, but having the body upright shows focus and intent. Without this, someone can fall asleep or let their mind calmly wander, minimizing the potential for the critical component of focus. Meditation however does often come with a sense of relaxation.
Others might also say (but hopefully not) that they play video games or watch television as their meditation. To just veg out, but that is exactly what they are doing; they are vegetating. Meditation is not vegetation — meditation increases awareness, vegetation disperses it. If you don’t believe it lowers awareness, try talking to a child playing a video game or a sports fan watching a game. Their senses are almost entirely switched off to peripheral awareness, merely passing time hypnotized by images. I should note that I am talking about using these mediums as time killers rather than for hobby or leisure.
You may hear of people saying “I will meditate on it”. This can easily give the wrong impression that thought is meditation. Thought with focus and intent is contemplation, not meditation, although a meditative state is helpful for successful contemplation if the goal is realization. Meditation and contemplation are terms often used synonymously, although not officially incorrect, my personal feeling is that if meditation means both ‘to let go of thought’ and ‘to think’ it will inevitably result in confusion.
It is difficult to correct someone because it implies there is something missing in their lifestyle or that their passion is not sufficient, or at least their idea of meditation is incorrect, so they can get defensive. You might even argue that their ritual, whatever it may be, is a kind of meditation as it focuses the mind in some sense, but I believe this is the confusion of such experiences as creative flow, gentle focused activity or a relaxed wandering mind, with meditation. The difference is the former is engagement with content, where meditation is a release of content. Some of these are activities that can lead to meditation, but are not meditation in themselves. Once a meditative state is achieved, one can start to engage in small activities while not losing the meditative quality.
One of the aims of meditation is to see in yourself that you are not separate from the universe (phenomena), and that the law of nature (dhamma) flows through you as well as everything else. As you sit quietly and observe, you pay attention to the subtleties of your senses that arise, without changing or pushing away. You are to remain balanced and nonreactive in a state of equanimity. You observe cravings and aversions in either thoughts or feelings in a kind of voluntary dissociation of judgement.
The mind is complicated, so the right understanding is needed. Meditation is simple. It is an experience more than a practice. You reel in your awareness of content and withdraw from stimulation and thought. You sacrifice the external world for the inner. Quiet, alert and relaxed, you come home to yourself into simply being.
