Although it tends to be highly underrated and often misunderstood, meditation is one of the most powerful tools available to man to transcend the mind and to prevent and ease suffering in the world.
When you are meditating you are being and doing so much more than is obvious to the uninitiated. Meditation accesses a state of consciousness called collective super-consciousness.
This is the uniting connection between God External, God within you, and the God-Self within others. The lower mind is fear, and is thus based in force. The higher mind is love, and is thus based in power.
Meditation provides the most thorough means by which a person can experience transcending the lower mind.
The significance of doing so can be intellectually explained, but explanation pales in comparison to the magnificence of living the event. When the mind is transcended, happiness is 99 percent guaranteed. The term “Love Meditation” is symbolic of this understanding.
“Spiritual meditation is the pathway to Divinity. It is the mystic ladder which reaches from earth to heaven, from error to Truth, from pain to peace.
“Every saint has climbed it; every sinner must sooner or later come to it, and every weary pilgrim that turns his back upon self and the world, and sets his face resolutely toward the Father’s Home, must plant his feet upon its golden rounds.
“Without its aid you cannot grow into the divine state, the divine likeness, the divine peace, and the fadeless glories and purifying joys of Truth will remain hidden from you.” -James Allen
Meditation Affects the World Around You
Through meditation, we enter a collective global consciousness of other divine beings, both in the physical and non-physical world, who are holding a sacred space.
Numerous studies have shown that meditation can in reality influence the tangible world for good. Knowing this helps us to be disciplined with consistent meditation, because we can see how meditation will help the world around us by promoting peace and harmony.
In 1983, a daily study of a two-month assembly in Israel showed that on days when the number of participants in the meditation group was high, war deaths in neighboring Lebanon dropped by 76 percent.
Other possible causes, such as weekends, holidays, weather, etc. were statistically taken into consideration as a part of the control. These results were subsequently replicated in seven consecutive experiments over a two-year period during the peak of the Lebanon war.
The results of these interventions included:
- War-related fatalities decreased by 71 percent.
- War-related injuries fell by 68 percent.
- The level of conflict dropped by 48 percent.
- and Cooperation among antagonists increased by 66 percent.
The likelihood that these combined results were due to chance is less than one part in 1,019, making this effect of reducing societal stress and conflict the most rigorously established phenomenon in the history of the social sciences (Source: Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 2005, Volume 17, Number 1, pages 285-338).
Meditation has erroneously been misperceived as weird eastern mysticism. Yet all people have experienced its benefits without even taking notice.
Have you ever sat staring out a window, not focusing on anything in particular, in a peaceful state of being “spaced out?”
This might have happened to you while sitting in the car waiting for someone, watching traffic and people pass by in a state of non-attached awareness. No problems or worries exist in this place — it is peaceful, blissful, and calming.
Then something snapped you back into normal consciousness, and you resumed the normal pattern of thinking without noticing how good it felt to take a break from lower mind.
This preliminary experience is like dipping your toe into the ocean — when it comes to the enormity of the power that can be accessed through meditation.
Meditation is the spiritual discipline that people seem to struggle most with. This is because you confront the chaos of the ego-thinking mind face-to-face. Its job is to derail your efforts towards meditating, and in most people, it is successful.
Connecting With the Divine
Prayer is speaking to God, while meditation is listening to God. If you listen to God, the ego dies. It therefore considers meditation as a threat to its existence. This results in the ego turning up the volume on the intensity of the thought process.
It is similar to changing stations on your radio, and encountering loud static until you tune in to the new station. You are moving from the lower ego-mind to the Higher God-mind.
It is possible to listen to God, to become aware of God’s Divine Will for us, and for our lives to evolve.
Watching the mind in meditation is like walking into a giant 10,000-square foot warehouse that is totally empty, except for two men unexpectedly arguing in one small corner. Where does your attention go, and what does it become engrossed with? The argument.
In meditation we are aware of the argument (as noisy thoughts), but finally realize we cannot stop it. It is really none of our business, for the two men arguing in the mind represent the twin aspects of the ego — which are fear and desire.
By intentionally playing the role of the Observer/Chooser we merely witness it, and then choose to shift our attention to the G.A.P.—the God-Self Awareness Point.
This G.A.P. is like a high-speed Internet connection that links your individual computer to billions of other computers and trillions of bits of knowledge in cyberspace. Meditation links your individual consciousness to Infinite Consciousness.
In meditation we are the Observer/Chooser — observing the noise, but choosing instead to focus on and expand the space, thus creating a direct connection with the spiritual realm.
This is a monumental accomplishment in the soul’s evolution — choosing to turn around and look at the vast empty space in the warehouse of the mind, instead of being obsessed with fear and desire.
In the warehouse of the mind, you must learn to focus on the power of the space, instead of the chaos of the thoughts.
Soon we realize the space is not empty (a vacuum), but rather it is full (a plenum) of possibilities. As you master this inner space, you can then manifest your Soul Purpose in your outer space.
Once we realize the inner space is filled with Love, we can then externalize that Love into our work.
We can then fill the outer space with anything — a dance studio, an office building, a bookstore, a metal fabrication shop, an artist’s loft — it is the doorway to an infinite realm of creative possibility.
Meditation connects you to your imagination, which is the genesis for all invention throughout history. This is precisely why Einstein said “Imagination is far superior to knowledge.”
He called this realm the “quantum realm of probability,” but in simpler terms, it appears to be an infinite field of possibility. It is via this connection to the Infinite that your Soul Purpose can be downloaded as you meditate.
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Steve D’Annunzio is the founder of the Soul Purpose Institute, the author of The Prosperity Paradigm, and a productivity trainer and life success coach to Fortune 100 executives, professional athletes, and high-performance entrepreneurs. For twenty years, he has been helping people identify their passion, develop it into a business idea, and deliver it to the world.
A member of the Transformational Leadership Council, Steve has shared the stage with world-changers like Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson, Jack Canfield, and Barbra-Marx Hubbard.
He uses principles of higher awareness to inspire others to be far greater versions of themselves than they ever knew to be possible. By combining scientific and spiritual truth, he co-creates inner transformations for people to experience more outer prosperity in their life.
He is an author and composer of many books, paradigms, and artistic projects that have the common theme of alleviating human suffering and enhancing joy.
Steve lives with his family in Rochester, New York.
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Meditation is also a very useful way of freeing the deeper creative aspects of our mind. I know many artists use it to improve their work.