People often ask how it is that simply doing nothing can entirely change your engagement with your world. Meditation is the act of doing nothing, of allowing thoughts to float through your head without focusing on any of them. It is the practice of grounding yourself in your breathing patterns and merely allowing your mind to reconvene its troops. “You can only see your reflection in still water,” is one of the most succinct metaphors about meditation. You must allow the layers and layers of nonsense to slowly settle like sediment at the bottom of the pond. Your thinking mind is constantly blending all sorts of junk into its water, and the less you meditate the murkier this concoction is. When you begin to meditate, the thoughts begin to settle very slowly. The process becomes easier over time. Eventually, you can see parts of yourself and your world that were never even visible before. Meditation provides you with a glimpse into the process of death and rebirth. It isn’t some sort of magical thing that happens after death, but is the process of living. When you meditate, you kill off that aforementioned false self. You allow yourself to see your true reflection in the still water rather than the murky ugliness of the untrained mind.
