Answers During Meditation: What Is Really Happening?

In this video, I answer the question of how to tell an inner experience received during meditation from an illusion, and how far you can trust the answers that come during practice — and I talk about what meditation is really for.

Your state in meditation is the ordinary state of your life

I was asked: “How can you tell an inner experience received during meditation from an illusion?” A young woman had been meditating every day for some time. During her first meditation she asked questions that troubled her, and she often felt that she was receiving certain answers to them. The question is: how far can such answers be trusted? How can you tell that this is genuine inner vision, and not your own expectations, fears or illusions that come up during the practice?

To sort out this question, you need to look at meditation very broadly — in terms of what is actually happening. As you know, I keep saying here that a meditative state is a state that accompanies your life. In just the same way, you can tell yourself:

However often you sit down to meditate, your state in meditation is simply the ordinary state of your own life.

This is very important. A meditative state should accompany you always; you should be in it always, no matter what. I’m recording a video — am I in a state of broad perception of everything that is happening? In just the same way, when you have come to a meditation and sat down, you are the same ordinary person, and this is your most ordinary life. And your ordinary life, believe me, always takes precedence over the state you have there.

That is the whole point. If you learn to be in a state of expanded perception and knowing, then you don’t really need to sit down anywhere for it, because the same thing happens during meditation. Your attention is simply directed toward this activity. Just as when you eat, it is directed toward eating rather than talking, in the shower — toward washing your hair, and when you brush your teeth — toward moving the toothbrush. In exactly the same way, when someone says, “Let’s sit down to meditate,” your attention is directed toward that. When you come to me for a meditation, I will direct your attention toward the things I convey. It is simply a matter of directing your attention.

So when you ask, “Should I trust what I came to know during meditation or not?” — it is exactly the same question that arises in your life. You are walking down the street and a thought comes to you: should you trust it or not? You are talking to another person, you hear certain information from them, and it reminds you of some event. Should you trust that or not? Should you trust another person at all? After all, who told you that the other person is conveying their own information to you rather than someone else’s? A great many people, at a particular moment, act as channels in terms of what they say. So this question becomes more serious and important.

Dead thoughts and distracted perception

You need to fix this very clearly in your mind. Because if you single out the importance of observing certain states during meditation rather than throughout your whole life, you will move somewhere only little by little. Or you will get carried away by the events that happen during meditation. During meditation, foolish, dead thoughts may come and spin in your head. This concept — dead thoughts — was introduced by Rudolf Steiner in anthroposophy. Of course dead thoughts can spin around. Just spinning — nonsense. The fact that you sit in a certain posture and are in a certain place doesn’t mean that sound thoughts must come to you.

More than that, a meditative state is a state of expanded perception. And a state of expanded perception is the influence not only of the thoughts that come to you. It is the influence of everything that happens on your life: for example, on causes and effects, on the events that take place in your life. And causes and effects and events do not necessarily have to be connected with your thoughts at all. You sat in one place, and ten years later you had a child. How is that connected with your thoughts, your desires, your whims, the direction you are moving in or anything else?

The world is such that people, of course, begin to get carried away by certain things they received in states of meditation: someone told them something interesting about their past lives, or they heard what will happen in the future. And they didn’t notice the real truth, didn’t see what mattered most for them in what was happening at that moment. They were distracted. This is called distracted perception. A person’s standard perception is distracted: it is always distraction toward one’s own personality, one’s own ego, fears, psychophysical tensions, problems, nervousness, various circumstances — distraction from all the life that is present around.

And all the life that is present around you always takes precedence over your ego, fear, problems, over absolutely everything, because it is always greater, always more beautiful.

If one can even use that word — “more beautiful” — it is always more beautiful than everything that happens. Always. But that doesn’t interest a person. What interests a person is their inner problems, their inner state, their importance, their significance.

Meditation is not for hearing something

And while caught up in this importance and significance, a person will always be in delusion and in conflict: “Does what I saw matter or not?”

I recently gave an example to my editor — we were discussing a similar question, not this one, but similar. I said: “Listen, Olya, yesterday I was going to bed. I have blackout curtains that make the space completely dark — the room is very dark. And when I pressed the button and the curtains closed, I saw a bright light in front of me and spiritual beings standing in that golden light. I looked at them and thought: spiritual beings are present in this room now. I’ll observe. And I went to sleep. I woke up in the morning. What did I do in the morning? Woke up, went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, drank water.”

It was simply my observation of the spiritual world and of spiritual beings. Can you bring importance and significance into this? You can bring in so much significance that a person won’t find peace for years afterward.

If you came to me in the evening for a meditative state, and I closed the curtains and brought you into the presence of certain spiritual beings, believe me, you would have a very serious experience of perception. But it would still only be your social perception of what happened. You still wouldn’t understand what had actually happened, wouldn’t understand the essence of the causes and effects.

So what a person tells themselves — did I hear the truth or not — is merely an echo of the reality of what is happening.

And being in a state of perceiving life is not so that you know more and then teach other people, see certain patterns or earn more money.

The very fact of being in perception of the world matters. Period.

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