Why You Cannot Meditate Regularly

In this conversation with Olya, I look at a question many people know: a person understands the value of meditation but cannot make themselves sit down to practice — as if there is no energy, no time or attention, or they forget about it completely.

I talk about what meditation really is, why a person who sits down to expand their perception runs into resistance, and what you need to rely on in order to come to practice.

You understand the value of meditation but cannot approach it

– Many people — and in general those who want to meditate — understand the value of meditation. Plus, watching your videos, the practice seems to gain even more value. You seem to understand that it is important, but inside there is still no desire to sit down and practice. What should a person do in this case, when they understand the value but just cannot make themselves sit down? Is there anything else? And do they need to do anything about it?

– When we talk about a person understanding the value of meditation but being unable to approach it — unable to make themselves do it, or feeling as if they have no energy, no time, no attention of some kind, or forgetting about it completely — let’s look at this question from several angles. It is an important subject, necessary for a sound perception of this whole situation.

But first, we need to say — and I keep saying this, I say it everywhere, including within the meditations themselves — that meditation is not a deliberate action aimed at obtaining some kind of consciousness or state.

Which part of the spectrum you shift your perception to

Then the question is which part of the spectrum you shift into for this perception, which range you want to sense and look at. Imagine: an enormous number of different states are present in you at the same time, a great many processes are going on. And you can shift your spectrum of perception:

• To your physical body — begin looking through it, or feel the whole system.
• To your relationship with your boyfriend — and try to perceive it.
• To your relationship with your parents.
• To your professional activity, your work, the people who are there.
• To perceiving the space around you — the Earth’s etheric space.
• To perceiving this transition — I will call it spiritual worlds, although the Earth’s etheric and physical space is also the spiritual worlds.
• To other worlds — for example, people use the term “astral world”: a transition into the astral world.
• To the spiritual life of the planets, of a particular planet.
• To the spiritual state of a particular people.

Imagine: a person is in these different zones of perception. Usually, when a person sits down to meditate, a cool effect for them is shifting their perception to one of the zones listed above and feeling a certain grace. And obviously, if you move your perception away from professional activity toward contemplating spiritual beings — especially higher hierarchies, true beings, beings of light, solar beings — then of course you will enter a state of greater balance or greater calm. You will enter it in any case. And for the person, this state is a meditative one — what they would like to experience and live through.

Yet when I speak about this state, it is a complete abstraction. Because what does “this state” mean? What is it like? How would you measure it? What kind of sensors would there have to be to even connect with this state and measure it in one person, a second, a third? Such sensors do not exist today. And they are unlikely ever to exist — this is very important.

So, is meditation your attention, your capacity for attention in these different zones and in others — not only in the solar system, not only in some unique place or, I don’t know, in hundreds of states of love or thousands of states of silence, in these worlds?

Is looking at your own personal events, which you may not be very happy with or may not like very much, meditation? Obviously, it is.

You will run into resistance

And so, when you talk about whether a person can or cannot sit down, you need to understand perfectly well: in essence, a person who turns on a meditation — mine, for example, with tasks aimed at expanding a person’s perception, their state of perception — sits down to expand their perception. And their inner system — this is the psychophysical system — takes in various barriers, blocks, damage, various kinds of resistance: their own and external, in the surrounding space. And there is an enormous amount of external resistance too.

They don’t see it as you having sat down to feel good. The point is that you sat down to expand your perception. That means being in awareness, entering a state of awareness. And as soon as you enter a state of awareness, you will run into reality and into the actual things happening around you. What’s more, you will begin to develop organs of perception in yourself. These are not physical sense organs — it is the skill of learning to develop organs of spiritual perception, and organs of perception in relation to your life in general, so as to stay in such a state of perception constantly or for longer: to be in a state of expanded perception more, to register more different states.

Obviously, your psychophysical system will resist this. The ego will not just resist — it will do everything possible to keep this from happening to you. There will be various external systems, various interventions, including an incredible amount of resistance. Plus there will be your own resistance — the resistance of your own personality. By personality here I mean a series of various uncontrolled psychophysical programs.

This doesn’t mean you need to get rid of yourself, to stop perceiving your own life. But you need to break through the barrier in order to truly see — the barrier of a perception built solely on scientific education. If only it were scientific education — it is built on your own personal interest, ignorance, your own personal wish for how things ought to be, how one ought to live.

The most important thing is that you run into this resistance. Understand: if you didn’t run into this resistance and it were so easy, that would be incredible. Everyone would have developed long ago.

And the very notion of personal desire would not exist — it would disappear completely.

You want to connect with a state of, for example, feeling love for people. Or there are traditions that speak of a feeling of love, of a sense of connection with all living beings. But if you felt love and connection with all living beings on a constant basis, your ego motive would disappear completely, and the state of your own desires, your own damage, would disappear completely. It would simply disappear; it would not exist — in any form. This is very important. And this is the most interesting, fundamental thing that is happening: this system is in a state of resistance.

You act like a robot

So what should you do? This is an important point — it’s good that you raised this subject. I have a spiritual group, and just a few days ago I was teaching a class in it and talking about, describing how whatever state you are in now, it can easily vanish. Everything starts to seem unnecessary or unimportant. You feel apathy, you don’t want to learn anything, watch anything, study anything. You only want to lie on the couch.

You need to understand that this is your life. You have a whole complex of cause-and-effect connections, karmic causes, including the physical body you are in right now. You already have a whole range of programs from your own upbringing, heredity, family line — you are simply packed full of them on top, to the brim, in full.

Let me remind you that you may not even have come near your karma, not even approached it. You may touch it a little, of course — it is all very relative what “not approaching” means. But in general you may not be living through the fundamentals needed in your current life in terms of your karmic experience — you may not even approach them.

And you act like a robot — absolutely like a robot. Even when you come to a particular class, you come like a robot.

Because you simply have an impulse to come to a particular class, or to meet a particular person, or to come to a particular meditation, or go on some retreat, or read a particular book — because it was supposed to happen to you, and not because you are so enlightened and clever.

Nowadays people say: if you have made money, now you need to take up your spiritual upbringing. Or: you have made money — now you need to take up calm. Someone says: you don’t need to make money, you should only work on calm. And so on: “Don’t help others, help yourself first.” Just a succession of certain statements, an endless variety of them, all of which are true from one side and all of which are false from the other. The question is which side you look from, at what moment, what is happening with a particular person.

What you rely on

And for you to want to come to meditation, for example, or to have the energy for it — for reading books, for example, for attending retreats, for interacting with other people in spiritual sessions, perception, conversations, study — you need to have some foundation, you need to rely on something.

A person brushes their teeth relying on something — this is very important. They don’t brush their teeth for fun or because some theoretical belief has occurred to them. For the most part, they understand very clearly what they are doing. Although, let’s be honest, people don’t fully understand their teeth and everything connected with them. But basically a person relies on something. A person eats — they rely on something, they understand why they are doing it.

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