3 ms·
> aren’t we doing it anyway on a regular basis without introducing a word for it? I think this is the heart of the matter. Meditation is not something you need
by yusefnapora 4y ago
> aren’t we doing it anyway on a regular basis without introducing a word for it?
I think this is the heart of the matter. Meditation is not something you need to "do" in addition to the living of your life. It's just an awareness of what your mind is actually like in the present moment, as your life unfolds.
The "practice" of meditation is just a way of conditioning your environment in a way that makes the processes of your mind more obvious.
Many people spend most of their waking moments identified with and fascinated by an ongoing internal narrative that aggressively converts sense experience into language. The stream of lived experience is instinctively and unconsciously divided into separate things and events, and usually those things are immediately classified as either pleasant (to be grasped at) or unpleasant (to be rejected).
There's nothing inherently wrong with this process, but because it tends to happen "under the surface" of conscious attention, we can easily forget that we're doing it.
The brief cessation of this process is what I believe people mean by "doing nothing" - you're not actively "doing" nothing, which as you note is logically impossible. But you are ceasing to do something that has been happening so constantly for so long that it has become part of "the background" and faded away from conscious awareness. The thing that you are ceasing to do is the constant identification of "yourself" as the stream of thoughts and classifications that occupy your mind.
If you are able to experience that without the practice of meditation, or if you have no interest in experiencing that state of mind, then of course there's no need to meditate. Or you could easily say that whatever you happen to be doing while this state of awareness is happening _is_ the practice of meditation - there's nothing special about sitting with crossed legs or chanting or whatever.