What is meditation? We have already established in Chapter 1 that it is not some sort of metaphysical, spiritual or mystical state that you enter. It's definitely not some sort of attempt to achieve some sort of alternate reality or navigate some sort of spiritual truth. Instead, meditation works with how your mind already operates.
The bottom line is, if your mind did not have a self-correcting system to achieve some sort of balance or some sort of inner peace at some level or another, you would have gone crazy a long time ago. That is the bottom line. Meditation really all boils down to getting in touch with that and becoming more aware of that machinery so you can call it into action when you need it, and on your own terms.
Your mind is a very powerful biochemical machine. It has all sorts of gears and processes and systems. Meditation just simply taps into this amazing interconnected network of internal systems that manage your personal reality to make the system work for you instead of against you.
The Cloud Analogy
To get an understanding of how these systems work, I need you to imagine that you are looking at the world from 500,000 feet. At that distance, the world is a globe. You can see the clouds at the surface, and you can see some storms.
And when you sink deeper, let’s say, to 200,000 feet, you can see the storms up close. You can see the lightning; you can see the movement of the air. You can even see the surface of the waters. You can see the heat of the deserts. There's a lot of commotion. There's a lot of stress.
But when you sink another 200,000 feet, you can see everything up close and personal. There's a lot of turbulence. Then you sink another 500 feet into the ocean. It starts getting calmer. You can still see some patterns from the surface or, if you dig into the earth, you can see some mild disturbance.
But when you get to the core of the earth, it's surprisingly stable. In fact, it's a molten core. It rarely moves. It's just liquid because of all the heat and pressure from the surface. But it is very, very stable in the center of the earth.
Your mind is the same. When you drill down enough, things get calmer and calmer despite how traumatic, turbulent and stressful the surface areas of your mind become. When you get to the core, you can take a lot of comfort from the fact that it will always remain calm.
It has to be this way because, as I said earlier, if humanity did not develop in such a way that our minds have some sort of self-correcting system that's always stable, we would have died as a species a long, long time ago.
Meditation is All About Getting to Your Core
Practical meditation is all about getting to that inner core. It's all about getting to that part of your mind that is always at peace. It has these mechanisms that ensure that you keep going back to this sense of peace.
Believe it or not, really stressed out people, people who are going through a living hell as far as their emotions, their relationships, their career, their finances, and everything else in their life, actually have a calm inner core.
Unfortunately, that's just buried in all the stuff that’s taking up all their mental energy. But it's not going to go away. It's always there. You are programmed by biology to have a calm inner core, otherwise, you would have gone crazy a long time ago. The bottom line is simple: meditation is all about living in the moment. That is where we reconnect with our calm inner core.
Here's the twist, though. Meditation is an art, not a science. If meditation was a science, like some sort of equation that you just plug in variables into and you will get the same predictable result, then we wouldn't be here.
But unfortunately, it is personal in nature because you have to go through the process of making choices to clear up your mind, so you can lock in on the present moment. That's how you reconnect with your deep, abiding inner core of calm and serenity.
Now, with that said, although meditation is an art and not a science, it's been scientifically studied thoroughly. In fact, there are at least 200 peer reviewed, hardcore scientific studies of meditation. A lot of this was done in the 1970s.
Meditation has a lot of scientific benefits. I will go into that in the next chapter.
But don't think that what I'm going to be teaching you is some sort of an experimental or completely new method. No. Its effects have been known for quite some time. In fact, in many parts of the world, it’s been practiced for at least 1,000 years.
