How to Meditate Properly: Eyes, Music, Posture—What Really Makes a Difference

AVAlexander Volchek

People ask a lot of questions about how meditation works. Someone left a comment under a Telegram post: “How much time—how many hours, on average—do you spend meditating?” When people ask how many hours you meditate, or whether to meditate sitting, standing, or lying down, they are treating it as an exercise. There is a useful description of yoga in this respect: the yoga everyone talks about today consists of simple, basic exercises, a kind of sport. The conclusion is that however much you practice that yoga, it will have no effect on your spiritual state or development. The same can be said of meditation. If you treat it as an exercise, something to do for a certain number of hours to reach some not entirely clear state—perhaps calming the mind or making the body feel good—then you will be doing exercises. You need to ask yourself why you are doing them.

Why do it at all? What for? What do you want to get out of it? People talk a lot about doing triathlons, climbing mountains, running, or going to the gym. The most important thing is always to answer for yourself why you are doing it and what your purpose is. Do you want to prove something to someone? Change how your physical body looks? Become healthier? Have something to do? Find friends? Have a hobby, a way to spend your time? Why are you doing it? The same applies to meditation. Why do you do it, whether you stand or sit, keep your eyes open or closed? We will discuss that, but the first question is why you do it. Why do you need it at all? What is its fundamental purpose? Without paying attention to why you do it, there will be absolutely no movement. None. Someone might supposedly enter a meditative state every day: sit for thirty minutes, assume a particular posture, close their eyes, and recite a particular text inwardly.

Does that make them more spiritual? Does it bring spirit into their system, help them understand or see more, make their life more vivid? What happens? Or does nothing happen at all? What is more important and more effective? The whole world is driven by effectiveness now. Perhaps instead of sitting down to meditate for thirty minutes a day, it would be more effective to spread those thirty minutes throughout the day, observing your state. I am recording a video now, and I can do it with awareness—with the awareness and observation people are asked to bring to a meditative state. Or I can just talk about something, or speak while feeling intensely distressed and remain distressed the whole time. Can someone meditate and still remain intensely distressed? That can happen too: they appear to be practicing meditation while actually remaining in a state of intense distress. So the most important question is always why you want to do it, why you want to practice.

I talk about this a lot on this channel, in meditations, in assignments, everywhere. My meditations and this channel have a particular purpose. Mine do. Of course, you can find knowledge in many places, videos, and people. You ask why, in my videos specifically, people are sometimes asked to sit with their eyes open and sometimes with their eyes closed. That is a very good question precisely because it asks why I give those instructions in my videos. It can give you some very interesting, fundamental information. More generally, when people are in a meditative state or practicing meditation, should their eyes be open or closed? Should they be at home or outside, wearing headphones or not, somewhere noisy or quiet? What about when they are driving, riding the subway, walking, or sitting?

What is it, and where? This gives you a chance to understand more deeply why you need meditative states at all, why you need any of this, why you would be in a state of learning or expanded perception. Why be in that state? We have a numbered series of meditations, as well as meditations without numbers. At least when this video comes out, the numbered series is still being created.

In those meditations, I sometimes do say that it is better to watch with your eyes closed or open. People have different organs for perceiving information, both in the physical body and in their spiritual systems. Different structures within you perceive knowledge and information. Understanding how all of it is perceived involves a great deal of overlap. We perceive and process many things simultaneously. Could we say we perceive something through sight alone? That is difficult to say. On the one hand, it seems we perceive through sight alone; on the other, our activity, thoughts, knowledge, and experience influence us at the same time. The physical body is also sensing and perceiving something simultaneously. The question is not what comes first, but how this whole combination of perception happens. It is essentially impossible to understand spiritual perception if you do not perceive through it. I have always said that you can explain the difference between red and green to a blind person as much as you like, but those will only be suppositions and guesses. A person can truly understand the red and green you mean only if they are not blind or have regained their sight.

That is why discussions of spiritual vision are illusory for most people: they do not have that awareness. They do not consciously understand what is being discussed or meant. It is like not understanding what it means to be in a state of observation. When recording a video like this, what does being in a state of observation mean? What is it to observe something? People are told to observe the sensations in their abdomen, or in their right or left hand. Even those instructions are very abstract. What exactly are you observing in your abdomen? Your circulatory system? Which impulses? Which sensations? What are you capable of sensing or recognizing at all? Can you actually distinguish every one of your organs, so that you can recognize your physical body? At a minimum, that requires understanding the body: knowing all its structures, every centimeter or millimeter, everything happening inside, and continually tuning in and directing your attention to it. It is not about vaguely knowing where the heart is on a diagram.

“Somewhere around here.” It is about truly understanding how it functions and works. How many people in the world really know their physical body? I am talking only about perceiving the physical body. What would it mean to perceive the whole world spiritually at the same time? Or to perceive the room I am in? What is happening in this room? What energies are present simultaneously? Only mine, or yours as you ask this question, or those of all the viewers who will watch this video? The energies of the street outside, or of the country I am in? What energies are in this room? Has someone imprinted and left energies here? Are the energies of these vases or paintings at work? What energies are here and now, all at once? This brings us to an interesting point: if you perceive something with your eyes and the scene changes, it clearly affects you. Suppose you are sitting looking at the ocean, and suddenly a shark appears, or a bear—

A bear starts coming out of the water toward you. That will affect you in a certain way, psychophysically: at the level of your body and your personality's reaction. It will definitely affect you. Yet you may be in a meditative state or an immersion independent of those circumstances, and essentially they should not affect you at all. Imagine watching a horror movie. Someone suddenly appears and startles you. People get frightened, even though nothing is actually happening to them. When you perceive a space with your whole system, through spiritual and physical senses, things can happen around you that influence you and interfere with your immersion. Sometimes it is easier to put on noise-isolating headphones or play music to block out the surrounding noise. You are sitting in a cafe where everyone is talking; you put on headphones, the music plays, and you are there with your own music.

Someone is working—programming, doing marketing, writing a book, or something else. They take off their headphones and say, “It is impossible to be in here.” What have they done? They have entered a particular range of perception through that music and used it to isolate themselves from the surrounding space, even though they remain in exactly the same space. That is important. An interesting question follows: could they be in that same space in exactly the same way without music? Of course. Definitely. If you can isolate yourself with music, you can be there that way without it too. Why do so many people play music while meditating, as you have heard and know? To isolate themselves from themselves, and from many other things. They narrow their perception rather than expand it. Through music they narrow it. This is important: they narrow it to a particular area and can tune in to something within that area. It makes sense that powerful music of a certain type can help you concentrate and tune in to something particular.

Concentrate—especially if the music repeats a particular text or mantra, an instruction to tune in to something. Imagine music that keeps repeating, “Observe the sun, observe the sun, observe the sun, observe the sun. More light, more light, more light.” Psychophysically, you will tune in and try your hardest to enter into it, engage, observe, and look. Various noises may arise for you. But if the music is fairly relaxing, with the right structure, dynamics, and pulses, at some point you will relax psychophysically and direct yourself toward something. Essentially, you narrow your perception and produce a particular effect, such as the relaxation that particular meditation is intended to produce. You get an effect. What it has done for your spiritual development or state is another big question. There is another interesting point: people often cry during meditation. We see huge gatherings where people listen to music and cry, and the tears are treated as evidence that the meditation went wonderfully. But let us examine the structure of tears. What are tears?

Tears are produced entirely by the ego within your structure, by the lack of development of your spiritual system. They result from your “I” engulfing and constricting your astral system. So what is positive about crying? There can be certain positive psychophysical effects when people transform the physical body through tears, but those are particular aspects of an experience. In serious, proper transformation and development, there are no tears. They are absent. Tears are not a sign of anything positive. You can keep talking about tears of love or happiness, but there are no tears of love or happiness. Those are socially invented ways of perceiving things. Tears can arise, and do arise, only from the astral body's suffering and contraction, not its expansion. Laughter and joy are an expansion of the astral body, of your whole system. A smile, joy, your own joy, the joy of life—that can happen in certain ways. This is an important system. Why does someone tell you to isolate your visual or auditory perception, to isolate yourself in a particular room, or enter a space that certain waves or energies, let us call them that, cannot reach?

Spaces like that do exist in some form. For example, you can isolate yourself. There is a practice of being buried in the ground: people are covered with earth and left with a breathing tube. People conduct such practices. Why do it? A person is deprived of a degree of physical freedom to experience certain states. There are also practices that expand perception, placing someone in a space to broaden what they perceive. Right? The instruction may instead be to enter an urban space, move, travel somewhere, or do something else. That expands perception. But most of the meditations people talk about call on you to limit your perception. Why limit it, Olya?

OLOlya

So that a person experiences a particular state and probably connects it with spiritual growth, an awakening, or an insight. When you gave the example of burying someone, I imagined it. My first thought was that it is a stressful situation. Perhaps it is an opportunity to learn to feel calm within a stressful situation. That is the spiritual growth people are selling. Maybe that is why they narrow perception.

AVAlexander Volchek

You have just identified something specific: the person is supposed to get a particular effect that is being sold.

OLOlya

Yes.

AVAlexander Volchek

It is very important for each of us not to sell ourselves on something either. Even when nobody else is selling it to us, we sometimes want to sell it to ourselves. Instead, understand why you are really doing it, what effect it has, and what is actually happening. I am by no means saying you must not meditate with headphones, lying down, standing, or sitting. But you need to understand the difference in what happens. What is really happening, and why is it needed? What is the point of meditating in the lotus position, which so many people talk about? Is it a physical exercise, or does it actually give a person access to something? If so, to what, and why? Above all: to what, and why?

OLOlya

About posture: when I studied this, the explanation for why proper posture matters was that your feet or knees should touch the floor or ground, your back should be straight, and the crown of your head—I forget the name of that point—should reach upward so that energy flows properly within you during meditation. Your physical position affects how energy flows through you; that is why a particular posture matters. I also wonder how true that is. I do not know.

AVAlexander Volchek

Let us suppose it is true. This is a useful addition to the answer about why I sometimes tell people to close or open their eyes during my meditations, or to sit in a room without other people. Suppose what you said is true: a person needs a particular flow of energy. Why do they need it? Why do I need that flow? What exactly will happen because of it? If we look at relationships in the world, whether someone can sit with a straight back does not correlate with the events in their life.

There is no relationship at all. Find me anything, any description of one. If there were any description of it, there would already be scientific studies on the subject. Scientists would be delighted to take it up quickly. Find me a description of a real correlation between these events. How much does it affect how many children or how much money you have—the things people usually do all this for—or your state or mood? What does it affect? Look at these things. Also, look at the bodies of different yogis. I mean real yogis: what did their physical bodies look like? Were they beautiful bodies, or simply bodies? Again, the question is why you do it. Most people are doing sports and physical exercise. They go to yoga, sit, do breathing exercises, and then eat a bun. That is the point. They happily eat a bun afterward or drink a glass of champagne on Friday, whether or not they understand the connections.

Does the person understand what consuming any amount of alcohol does to their astral body, and how long the effect lasts? The duration matters greatly. Do they understand what specifically happens after sitting in a certain state and what effect it has? We keep talking about effects. As I said, when you cry, your “I” compresses the astral body, immediately setting off a whole cycle of damage and deterioration in your spiritual system. It is damage, a state of damage and underdevelopment of the spiritual bodies and system. The central question is why this is done and why it happens. Become aware of it. That awareness is possible when you can observe many events simultaneously. Consider people's speech. Some people speak to you or give presentations on television. You can notice differences in their speech: their tone of voice, speed, physical appearance, and how much or how little they move.

Why does it happen that way? Why do they do it? Why do they sometimes speak very quickly? I have videos or channels where I speak very quickly, and others where I speak slowly. First, look at why I am in a state that makes me speak quickly or slowly, or why I briefly close my eyes. What happens to the people watching on the other side? What happens to them when I speak quickly or slowly? What do they feel? What is happening? Or there are meditations in which you stay silent. What happens then? Is it necessary to speak and explain something? Could a video like this be a much higher-quality meditation than forty minutes of beating a gong and sitting at a retreat? Imagine we were sitting in a particular state now. Could this video be more powerful than sitting somewhere else in a particular state? Of course it could. Any moment of your day can have a much greater influence on the development of your whole system, your consciousness, perception, causes and effects, and freedom—

Compared with any other event. Any moment, wherever you are: buying coffee, working at a computer, sitting down to rest, watching a show, talking with your child, stretching on a pull-up bar, or entering a so-called meditative state. “So-called” matters here. Any moment of the day can be far more effective. Once we understand that, we can ask: effective for what? At least we begin to understand why, and what we mean by effectiveness. For example, influencing, changing, or activating a particular state within you. You can spend an hour in meditative states every day while fading in terms of the spiritual world. Can that happen? Of course. It all depends on what you mean by a meditative state and what you do in it. If you sit down to rest, you are resting. Everyone rests; everyone sleeps at night—or a huge number of people, most people, sleep at night. Most also sleep for a substantial number of hours.

Even if you lie in bed for an hour without sleeping, you are also at a certain stage of a meditative state. Consider it a meditative state instead of simply lying there. What is the difference?

Once we understand that there are different organs of perception, we can ask whether we can use all of them to perceive everything simultaneously. It is important to understand that you cannot always perceive everything at once. It is impossible. Humans are not made to perceive everything simultaneously; they cannot perceive everything. Their task is to develop their perception and understanding of what is happening, to expand their perception and knowledge of themselves, particularly their whole spiritual system. This is an endless process of learning. It does have certain limits, which I discuss in other videos. Given the endless process of knowing yourself, and the impossibility of perceiving everything at once, sometimes you need to concentrate and focus more closely on a particular experience. For example, you are unlikely to learn to play the piano while drawing, talking with four children, and studying mathematics at the same time. It is practically impossible, unless you have an extraordinarily powerful system of consciousness and perception. And you would also be observing your whole physical and spiritual system, how different worlds, states, and energies affect you, experiencing and scanning the past and future—everything that is happening.

It is quite a complex process. Can you be engaged in a broad system of knowing, learning many things simultaneously? Yes, but you need the ability to do it. Look closely: people cannot type messages on their phone and listen to someone else at the same time. It is a very simple action, listening while writing something or dealing with something else, but generally people cannot do it. Some individuals can, but generally they cannot. People cannot even listen to one other person. They get distracted and forget to listen and try to understand what the person is actually saying. Sitting in a university lecture, they drift off into their thoughts. They cannot do that single thing: listen to the instructor and try to grasp what is being explained. If they have thoughts, they could follow what is being said while observing those thoughts. If their physical body hurts or changes, they could observe the body too. Then an intuition arrives that something will hurt tomorrow, or that they will get sick—

Perceive that as well, remain aware of it. Then a bird flies into the room. You need to perceive the bird too. Your classmates are sitting nearby, and you need to perceive their states because each has their own, and those states can affect you. Sometimes the effect is obvious: someone walks into the room naked, for example. That usually affects everyone. Or someone shouts or lunges at you. Sometimes the influence is not obvious and comes through energies. You need to be able to remain aware of all of this simultaneously. So it is perfectly reasonable to limit your own perception during certain practices.

That is why I sometimes say, “Be sure to sit with your eyes open.” Why? So that as your spiritual being experiences various spiritual states, your entire psychophysical system participates in that learning. Your whole system and all your spiritual bodies connect; your entire structure continually connects, and energy flows and exchanges properly. At other times, you need to close off visual perception to engage more deeply with the experience. People see a great many spiritual worlds; they simply do not understand that those are spiritual worlds. They do not know what they are. The world has told everyone they are hallucinations. People see them all the time, but if they start talking about them, they will be told they belong in a psychiatric hospital. When someone closes their eyes, they often cannot quiet the stream of images before their eyes or the stream of thoughts. Well, if you are healthy, calm down and make it so you have zero thoughts. Zero. Everyone says they are healthy, so let us demonstrate it at any moment. We meet at any time, and you say, “I have zero thoughts right now,” if you control your thoughts and your psychophysical system.

Or, “I am calm right now.” What does zero thoughts in space and time mean? I am recording a video right now. Can I enter a state of zero thoughts? I can. I just entered it while speaking; I even conveyed that state. But as soon as I enter a state of no thoughts, I also have to return, because I am talking about it. Or do I not have to return? Do I need to come back from it at some point, or never come back at all? A person's whole life is only a flash, on the one hand. On the other, it contains a great deal of time and events that cannot be recaptured or described. You will never be able to tell the whole story of your life; you will not have enough time. Telling your life story always takes longer than the life itself. How could you describe all your states, everything you see and perceive? People cannot even describe everything they perceive.

If I started describing just what is in my room, it would take hundreds or thousands of hours. I still would not describe every speck of dust, every grain of sand, every element, visual detail, or tiny feeling. I never could. That is why I say when to limit perception in my meditations and when not to, when to let yourself perceive more broadly. Often I explain things and say, “Observe. What stream of thoughts do you have now? Is there one? Have thoughts appeared or stopped? If they appeared, what are they about? Why did they arise? Observe that.” Is there a technique for stopping thoughts? On the one hand, yes; on the other, no. Part of your system will enter an experience of absence. Such spaces of silence exist. Meanwhile, another part of your system will generate spaces in which information reaches you, and you will be experiencing that information. Can you intensify one state or another? Yes. The question is why.

The question is always why. Then comes another question: does it frighten you? Most people I have seen who entered a state of silence did not particularly want to go further into that silence. More precisely, while they were in it, they enjoyed being there. But when those states begin to arise spontaneously, their personality structure—and something very close to what we call ego—starts resisting strongly. It does not need that. Why would the ego need silence or the possibility of a person gaining control of their life and truly understanding the whole system? Control of your life is not freedom. It is understanding causes and effects correctly, but it is not freedom, not social freedom. In terms of social freedom, a person thinks, “I want to control my life. I have decided to be rich or poor, to live in the United States or Belarus, to have fifteen children or none. I have decided my eyes should be wide or narrow, my skin this color or another, that I should have wrinkles or none.” That is what people mean by controlling their lives.

From the spiritual world's perspective, control of life means understanding causes and effects and not competing with them. An ordinary person does not compete with the sun coming out. Of course, there are scientific fields and systems that try to compete with that, to alter it or make use of it, but an ordinary person does not compete with the sun appearing. Some people try to compete with the need to sleep, to change their system a little, or with their sex, for example. They try to fight these things instead of living and observing what happens. But freedom lies in living and observing, not competing. So what is the point of closing or opening your eyes? It helps you focus as fully as possible on particular states as you experience them. It is an aid. To drive forward, you put the car in a forward gear rather than reverse. It is help with moving forward, experiencing and sensing things, and seeing certain states for yourself.

Always understand why you are doing it. If someone tells you to close or open your eyes, you either trust that person or you do not. You either approach them as a student or you do not. Then the question will not arise at all. It makes no difference to you. If you are told to stand for two hours, you stand for two hours. It makes no difference. That is the only possibility there is.