Meditation is a very important action in life; perhaps it is the action that has the greatest and deepest significance. Not to be able to meditate is not to be able to see the sunlight, the dark shadows, the sparkling waters and the tender leaf. It doesn’t save you from any pain. It makes things abundantly clear and simple; but to perceive this simplicity the mind must free itself, without any cause or motive, from all the things it has gathered through cause and motive. This is the whole issue in meditation.
Meditation is the purgation of the known. To pursue the known in different forms is a game of self-deception, and when the meditator is the master, there is not the simple act of meditation. The meditator can act only in the field of the known; he must cease to act for the unknown to be. The unknowable doesn’t invite you, and you cannot invite it. It has no utilitarian value, but without it life is measurelessly empty. The question is not how to meditate, what system to follow, but what is meditation.
A mind that is capable of concentration is not necessarily able to meditate. Self-interest does bring about concentration, like any other interest, but such concentration implies a motive, a cause, conscious or unconscious; there is always a thing to be gained or set aside, an effort to comprehend, to get to the other shore. Attention with an aim is concerned with accumulation. The attention that comes with this movement towards or away from something is the attraction of pleasure or the repulsion of pain, but meditation is that extraordinary attention in which there is no maker of effort, no end or object to be gained.
The experiencer may concentrate, pay attention, be aware; but the craving for experience must wholly cease, for the experiencer is merely an accumulation of the known. There is great bliss in meditation.