How to Maintain Your State After Meditation

During meditation, more clarity and awareness appear. How do you keep that state afterward, and how do you enter it in an ordinary day?

In this conversation with Olya, I look at why you can’t enter a meditative state at will and why you sit down to meditate at all.

You can’t enter a meditative state at will

– During your meditation, for example, I clearly feel the difference between “before” and “after”: my state before the meditation, during it and after it. It really does seem as though there’s more clarity, or some other states, more awareness in the moment. How do I keep that state afterward? That’s the first question. And the second: how do I enter that meditative state in an ordinary day?

– Look, there is a basic rule, and you need to grasp it very clearly for yourself: you cannot enter a meditative state at will. Someone might argue here and say they can easily move into an initial state of silence or certain perceptions. That does indeed exist. But that is already a certain capacity of yours. Then we need to set aside the case where your meditative state has become constant and you can stay in it and shift your attention.

But basically, on the whole, we’re talking about entering a state of deep immersion in certain things. There are, after all, things that are a little easier to pass through and see, and there are things that are harder to immerse yourself in: the formation of certain spiritual bodies, or immersion in a state of connection with full, genuine love, immersion in the state called nirvana or samadhi. Again, for people these words basically carry a certain abstraction.

That is, there is a sound perception of reality, but for that people have to immerse themselves in a particular state at the same time and then compare those states. There are very many states of silence and expanded consciousness. But entering such states at the snap of a finger is quite a unique ability, not even an ability so much as the development of the whole system. If those organs had formed, I wouldn’t be asked this question — you wouldn’t even have the question.

So it turns out that the development of the organs of spiritual perception and the change of reality do not come about through your own desire.

You can sit endlessly, for millions of hours, in meditations aimed at developing particular states. You will reach certain points, you will even feel certain states, but you must understand that you are going against the current. Because your one main goal should not be developing the organs of perception by means of which you will change your material reality.

Why do you want to enter meditation?

Usually people want to enter meditation in order to change their material reality. And why do you want to enter meditation?

– I can’t answer that question. I don’t know, it’s just an impulse. To expand my perception, to develop my spiritual system.

– You know the right answers. But an ordinary person wants to enter meditation so that life gets easier, so that he feels better, so that things go better at work, so that he sees something and tells everyone about it — that he experienced a particular state. In other words, he wants to live through a state for the sake of living through that state.

Why do people take various substances? They travel somewhere and take them. There are things you absolutely must not do — for example, people take ayahuasca. Why? What is their goal?

– To expand their perception too, I think.

– But why?

– To enter some state in which they will see answers to the questions that trouble them, understand something.

– Of course, they control nothing there — they don’t even control the questions. Some think they’re in control. They come in order to experience a particular state. That, by the way, is a drug, it’s obvious.

So he enters a meditative state — for what? First, in order to expand his perception. Expand perception for what? In order to come to know the truth, to understand what is happening and how. I have repeatedly given people the example of examining a relationship between a man and a woman.

There is a big difference. A man wants to resolve some issue with a woman — or a woman with a man: for example, whether to live together or separate, whether to act one way or another. And when he says, “I want to enter a meditative state to sort this out,” the main thing for him is that he wants to sort it out.

But at a higher level, you say: “I simply want to come to know what is happening. I don’t want to resolve it; it makes no difference to me how it turns out. None at all. I simply want to perceive it — to perceive it truly, genuinely.” And then everything changes.

What is more important to you?

I have a great many different conversations with different people. There are very deep conversations where you go with someone into such subtle details of matter, and then something surfaces — and you see that the person is a little more interested in finances or in their relationship with their children than in perceiving everything around them, perceiving themselves, their spiritual being, in coming to know their spiritual being and the movement of their spiritual being toward solar energy.

There is simply something higher. A person must put the question to themselves: what is more important to you? And it’s all very simple. What is more important to you?

I’m not saying that this must necessarily be the important thing. A person can immerse themselves in a state of love here and now — love for their children, their family — and that will be the most important thing for them in this life. Wonderful. But it is not the highest layer of perception. It is one layer of perception. These are all dependencies.

I am by no means doing away with these dependencies. Once again: I’m not saying you shouldn’t live with them, because a person must live in the ordinary labor of everyday life. That is the whole point.

The more truth you come to know

People want to get a good state in meditative states. Once again: these are completely unrelated things. Things can get worse: you may start to feel worse in terms of your physical body, your consciousness, your state. What’s more, this is obvious — if you came to know the whole truth. Why not sit down from the very start with the intention of coming to know the truth?

The more truth you come to know, the harder, perhaps, it will be for you to live. That is how human consciousness works: it does not want to see and know the truth.

Look at what is shown on television, what is written on the internet. It is a consequence of the current state of human development, of people’s interaction with the spiritual world and the spiritual world’s interaction with them — across different spectrums.

And a person’s task is precisely, having a new — modern, or at least new for the last five hundred to seven hundred years — system of the soul, a new system of perceiving the world around, a new space around, to remember what is main and important. Otherwise we will slide further and further and come not just to a robotic state of consciousness, but to a point where external robots begin to control human beings.

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