Meditation as a state of mind

Jeroen

I came across a passage in a book which said,

“Deep in you, meditation is already the case. So whenever it happens that your day-to-day turmoil is a little bit less…. Maybe you are watching a sunset, and watching the sunset your constant chattering mind has become quiet, the beauty of the sunset has made it quiet, and then you feel meditation come to the surface”

This struck me as something that was very likely, that in order to connect to meditation we just need to let it surface by encouraging the mind to be quiet. I woke up in the evening last night, and in my mind was the word “Prashant”, which is a common male name in South Asia and means patience, calm, quiet, or tranquil.

To be calmly aware is an excellent state. Often awareness has an element of searching to it, of shifting attention from place to place. These things are good to examine while waiting for quietness of the mind. But meditation as a state of mind implies that we can’t really do it, we aren’t actively making it so, at most we can make conditions favourable for it to arise.