Meditation for Beginners | How to Truly Enter a Meditative State

AVAlexander Volchek

There is an interesting point when we discuss what meditation is, how to enter it, and what it gives a person. Let us begin with this: everyone already has their own sense of the word. The problem is that people associate meditation with an exercise. If you associate it with an exercise, you can simply change how you feel about that exercise. One person thinks pull-ups are a good exercise; another thinks walking ten thousand steps a day is good. These are substitutions made without a complete understanding of health, for example, or why you are doing it. Where do we begin? Just recently, someone told me she had been given a natal-chart reading as a gift. During the reading, the person preparing her chart asked, “Do you meditate?” She said, “Well, I don't know, but yes, I do.” “What do you do?” “I sit down, enter a particular state, or try to relax.” She described something, and the other person said, “You are doing the wrong thing.” When I asked what he had suggested, she said he offered to have her come to him so he could show her how.

Come to him, and he will show her how. But can you show someone how? You cannot. It is important to remember that with meditation, you cannot show someone how. That is surprising, but what we are examining today is that there is no such thing as “showing how” in meditation. Whenever you encounter “showing how,” you are encountering an exercise, a small part of something, without understanding the whole. You do not understand what health is; you simply encounter the idea that you need to walk twenty thousand steps a day, or ten thousand, or do pull-ups. People treat meditation as if someone had said, “You need to learn to do push-ups,” and everyone around the world started discussing push-ups. Yet it is simply an exercise. It is just an exercise. Again, people perceive meditation as an exercise rather than understanding the whole of what it is. That is why you cannot show someone how to “do” meditation. Yet all the discussion is built on this. Some people suggest putting on headphones and going for a walk by the ocean to meditate. Or going together to a club where a guide helps you meditate.

I live in Silicon Valley, California, a little south of San Francisco. There is a town here called Los Altos. In town there is a building with a sign saying “meditation,” something about bowls, juices, and other things. It says, “We help guide you in meditation.” What exactly do they help you do? What do they help you enter? Do they help you calm down, even out your breathing, restore your heart rhythm or blood pressure, acquire certain thoughts or remove them, change the range of your thoughts, encounter vision, or prepare for the next decade of your life? Start a process or cut one off? What exactly do they enable you to do? We see many different kinds of meditation and different techniques. They explicitly list a mindfulness technique: observe and simply notice everything happening. Watch your thoughts, breathing, sensations, emotions. Or concentrate on breathing, turning all your attention to inhaling and exhaling. Or continuously scan your body. Then there is what people call vipassana meditation, although it is actually a separate system of practices, seemingly not connected with meditation at all, aimed at seeing or reaching particular states during that event.

Or people use the term “transcendent meditation”—“transcendental,” even. What is interesting is that everyone uses the term in their own way. I, for example, use it in my own way. Some say it is a technique of silently repeating a mantra or a particular sound. This occurs in different cultures; in some places it is called a mantra. But if we go to a Russian village to have a wart removed, there may be an elderly woman who knows a particular charm. She whispers something and removes it. Is she whispering a mantra or not? “Mantra” sounds very beautiful. Very beautiful. The world loves beautiful words now. It is a question of words and names, and how people use them. “Charm” will not appeal to them, but “mantra” will. My main opening point is that meditation cannot be understood through a single, particular exercise. It can be understood by truly perceiving the meaning of the word, rather than the way it has been distorted over the past five hundred, seven hundred, or even a thousand years. People put very different meanings into that word. Very different meanings.

It is not push-ups. Imagine someone talking about push-ups when they mean jumping out of a plane and doing push-ups in midair. The concept can contain differences that large. That large. Another essential point is that meditation is often tied to health. My sister studies nutrition. She started at a certain point, and for many years I had been deeply involved in studying health in different cultures and through different approaches: the World Health Organization's approach, Ayurveda, Vedic astrology—not through its connection with Ayurveda but through astrology itself, Jyotish. Alongside those, you use various modern techniques someone has published, nutrition, or other comprehensive approaches to different areas. I remember discussing some aspects of this with my sister while she was studying. She said that stress strongly affects the gastrointestinal tract. When people investigate a digestive problem, for example, they say, “First of all, you may be stressed.”

This is a very interesting issue. Which comes first? Which comes first? Is stress caused by a problem in your gastrointestinal tract, or does your gastrointestinal tract have a problem because you are stressed? That was the fundamental question. I have a close friend who is a doctor in Moscow. I have always liked his approach to medicine very much. I remember my mother falling and having a minor stroke. He said the central question was one nobody could answer: did she first fall, hit her head, and have a stroke, or did a hemorrhage cause her to fall and hit her head? That is what we have to proceed from and examine. The question is what causes different things to appear. When people working in health, in nutrition for example, consider stress, they often approach it like a test result. Suppose I measured my vitamin D level and it was fifteen instead of seventy, and someone said, “You need to take vitamins.” They approach stress in the same way, although they themselves have no methods for diagnosing the state of stress.

Today's methods for diagnosing stress use heart rate and HRV. I cannot simply tell you the Russian term for that. It concerns recovery and the difference in rhythm between inhalation and exhalation. Combining these parameters gives indicators of stress. But do they truly reflect a fundamental understanding of what stress is, or are they one part of a measurement? What does that measurement actually show? A person's natural state in terms of stress in the physical body, or stress in their spiritual bodies and the spiritual part of their life? This brings us to the main question about meditation. What is meditation to you? A system and exercises for getting through your day better? Or a system of development for studying life—your life—the world, knowing truth, and expanding your perception and its different aspects? What is it? How you approach it is a fundamental question. Even if you approach meditation as a system rather than a single exercise, is its purpose simply to calm down or supposedly get better numbers on a bracelet or fitness tracker, like the one I wear?

Or by measuring blood pressure, or through some supposed sensations of your own—

Supposed sensations. Still, modern bracelets can be useful if you use meditation as part of a comprehensive exploration of life. Several times I have offered to show my mother and my wife my bracelet's medical stress data, because they believe medical measurements. I can show them and say, “You know, I was completely calm at that moment. Without getting into other issues, I was as calm as could be. You can take my measurements and look at them, including during our conversation, if you think I was stressed or angry.” When we talk about anger, we are talking about a disturbance in the whole internal system of consciousness. Someone might object: “I can be angry or aggressive without disturbing physical processes.” Then we are not talking about physically calming down. We are talking about controlling energy. Can you be angry, shout, or be aggressive without changing the physical body's measurements—your pulse, its different rhythms and the intervals between them, and many other indicators concerning the brain, circulation, and the nervous system?

The question is what devices you need to wear to really measure this, and over what period. How long do you need to wear them? How long do you need to be with them, truly? We live among all kinds of statements, often based on medical data. For example, people say coffee or tea worsens a person's system, causes dependence for many people, creates stress, or worsens perception. I have a new, modern bracelet with artificial intelligence features. The advantage now is that you can establish a great many correlations within your own life. I wear it twenty-four seven without taking it off and record everything I do. It finds no correlation between coffee or tea and disrupted sleep for me, whether I drink them later, in the morning, or in the evening. The same applies to the heart and everything else. It has no analytical indicators of such a relationship. So I wonder: what did the people who reached those conclusions base their analysis on?

I am in no way promoting coffee or tea. There are nuances and questions, and each has its own energies. It is important to know those energies. There is a very good book, Antarova's Two Lives. In an episode in the second volume, I think, or the first, the characters arrive in Turkey, in what was Constantinople. They have coffee and then say, “Now we need to drink tea to balance the system.” That is very interesting. Ordinarily, why would you drink tea after coffee? That is not how people think. Or they say, “It is all caffeine. It is all the same,” or mention tannins: “It is all the same.” They use these terms. I, for example, am not particularly knowledgeable about those terms, but some people throw them around constantly. There are very famous medical and health bloggers who use endless terms about what happens in the system and how hormones change. They know all the hormones and use them in their explanations—an endless stream of terminology about what happens, what appears where, and which hormone is responsible for what.

But the causes are deep. What are the deep causes? The causes of a person's depression, real depression. For my gastrointestinal tract to work better, I need to be free of stress or depression. But if the next seven years of a person's life are supposed to involve a very difficult state that leads them as far as possible into depression, can they really observe it? Or will it happen to them anyway? It will definitely happen. Some people find it quite easy to sit on a chair in meditation for forty minutes. It has never been an issue for them. Others find even two minutes very difficult—simply sitting on a chair. Some people enter spiritual vision and perception without even realizing it during ordinary conversations and everyday life. Others will sit in meditation for tens of thousands of hours and never come anywhere near those states. I lead many sessions, and I know people who enter such a state instantly during a session. That is transcendence: a complete transition into the spiritual.

It is not you who entered the world of inspiration or intuition. Your spiritual being entered spiritual vision; your spiritual being entered a truly meditative state. Your entire spiritual system entered it. You have long since ceased to be there. You are no longer there. So what does a person have in mind when they want to sit down to meditate? There is a very big difference between restoring the physical body—wanting things to calm down, your breathing or pulse to settle—and knowing the world. It is very important to distinguish those purposes. Most people in today's Western world, and in the new generation of the modern Eastern world as well, practice meditation as a technique for improving particular aspects of their lives, including a certain social status that comes with doing it. Look at how many gurus and others list the hours they have sat in meditation, the number of days, or the number of meetings they have led. Essentially, all those measurements merely indicate that the person is not in a state of vision and perception. That is all. Any measurement describing quantity, any quantity—sometimes it is used for marketing because marketing calls for it.

But sometimes, if you listen closely, you can see how people themselves think about and perceive this. Are these marketing metrics, or do they show how the person thinks? “I have done this.” I am about to take a long trip to Eastern countries for spiritual exploration, and I recently had this exchange. Someone told me, “I am in this country now, and there is a guide here. He guides people through these places. He sees everything, perceives it all, and wants to take us there.” Interesting. So being born in a particular country makes you its guide. If a super-guru is discovered in Belarus tomorrow and becomes the world's most famous person in spiritual development, I can simply walk into Silicon Valley and say, “I am a guide. I am Belarusian.” And if that guru says only Belarusians, only people born in a certain year, are guides, I will say, “I am a guide,” and everyone will start believing me because of certain parameters. We like that. The Western world has always liked Eastern wisdom in its visual forms, clothing, and culture.

It is enough to arrive in Nepal, Tibet, or India and see someone in a monk's robes, without even understanding what particular bands mean, what color they should be, how the person should look, what they should do, or whom they should speak to. Or go to the Altai Republic in Russia and head out somewhere. It is almost all taiga. Drive away from Abakan or any town, and someone dresses up and says, “We have a shaman here.” Everyone immediately becomes intensely involved, without finding out, for example, that real shamans will not work with anyone outside their own clan. That is their approach. If this person has a different approach, let us look at what they actually do. Seeing someone dressed as a monk in Nepal, people do not understand that this is the same as someone walking into a church in Moscow. It is simply a culture and a form of dress. Some very good people become monks; they are simply kind people.

Others are very angry people who go there to hide and avoid everything. Becoming a monk says nothing in itself. In today's world, people become priests for political and socioeconomic reasons, through connections and social conventions, rather than because they are connected to God. Look closely at the pope: the pope is Christ's representative on Earth and is supposed to be connected to the Lord. He is God's representative, the one who hears, knows, and sees absolutely everything. Do people truly comprehend that level? Whenever they encounter this person, do they understand it? There is a very good illustration in the Orthodox world, and in the Catholic world too. Orthodox Christians attend church, and there are various holy days. Take Christmas: do people really believe in Christ's birth, or do they regard it as a holiday? Or Christ's Resurrection: do they truly, absolutely believe in the Resurrection? Do they say, “Of course, there was an energy that rose again”? Or is it a comforting myth?

In other words, they truly believe in it, in the real Resurrection. They do not merely believe: they know and understand it as certainly as I know I have two eyes right now, something no one can take away. Or is it faith, or—

Or simply, “Okay, I agreed with it”? You can easily see how people with no problems do not go to church. As soon as someone dies, a problem arises, a criminal case is opened, or someone suddenly falls ill, they go. Everyone stands in church. Women put scarves over their heads, men put on serious faces—very serious faces, of course—and everyone stands through the service, listening and watching. But what motivates them? What is the true meaning? What is it? A person kisses an icon. What is that? What exactly happens inside them at that moment? What is the primary impulse at work? When we consider meditation, we need to understand it as a state of expanded perception, unless we mean meditation as physical sport, the way yoga has been turned into one. Ninety-nine percent of yoga is physical sport, with no connection to any of this at all. Yoga exercises are not fundamentally the basis of spiritual development, formation, or knowledge of truth or the world.

They are certain accompanying elements of a person's life. In the same way, proper nutrition is an accompanying element for anyone. Simply proper nutrition. If we asked an ancient yogi, perhaps he would call proper nutrition a yoga exercise, or proper interaction with people, proper work and conduct at work, right action—not say that these physical exercises lead to knowledge of the spiritual world. A huge number of people sit on mats performing actions that, of course, have no connection with meditative states. I remember something that happened in 2012. Two friends came to my house. I was discussing business with one, and the other was listening. We sometimes discussed aspects of spiritual development in our business conversations. The second friend picked up on something and started asking questions. I said, “Would you like to try a simple exercise? Go sit on the couch for thirty minutes. Just sit like this with your eyes closed and your back straight. You do not have to do anything at all. Just sit.” He said, “Of course. That is easy.”

He went over to sit there. Naturally, he felt as though he had sat for three hours. He drew an enormous number of conclusions. When someone sits with their eyes closed for thirty minutes, they experience different kinds of heaviness, different flows of thought, thoughts disappearing and appearing, heaviness lifting and returning, and so on. Certain flashes occur that have no significance. Thoughts disappear and come back. This does not bring you any closer to spiritual development. Not at all. Sitting down to meditate does not bring someone closer to it. How could simply sitting down to meditate bring a person closer to spiritual development? Again, if you regard a person as a physical being, sitting down to meditate can bring about a change in some state. Just as drinking from this cup changes my state depending on what I am drinking. If I drink too much, whatever is in here—if I drink ten liters—I obviously will not be able to keep sitting here. My stomach will hurt, I will need the bathroom, or something will happen.

I cannot pour this into myself endlessly. Everything has its own clear effects. If this is coffee and I drink a great deal, it will have one effect. Vodka will have another, and plain water a third. Whatever I drink will affect me, but it is simply an effect. The same applies to meditation. Sitting in meditation in the rain is one thing. Sitting in the middle of a fifteen-lane highway is another: you could be run over, splashed with dirt, or taken away by the police. Sitting in a closed, dark room for fifteen minutes will produce different sensations. Likewise, lying down to sleep in a place where a snake is crawling around differs from sleeping in an enclosed place with nothing there. Clearly, you will fall asleep faster where there is no snake, or at least where you know there is none. What people call entering a meditative state, if we regard the world as exclusively physical, does not contain that aspect. But if we regard the world as spiritual, the first thing we must tell ourselves is that being in meditation does not lead to spiritual development.

Being in meditation as an exercise is just an exercise. It is no different from doing push-ups or sitting on a chair for twenty minutes. This is very important for everyone to see. I put on headphones, listen to music someone called meditative, walk by the ocean, and tears flow. It is no different, no different at all, from simply going for a walk and looking at the ocean. Or walking there with a dog, a son, in a crowd, or alone. What do I mean by no different? There is no pattern or dependency governing the result if we regard it simply as an action. I can sit down now, close my eyes, and say, “I have closed my eyes. What should I do?” My own processes begin. I constantly perceive different worlds, so even if I prepare myself the way people usually do—sit down, follow the instruction to straighten my back, straighten it, all right—then I am told to draw the crown of my head upward. Should I draw it upward, or can I relax?

Can I relax, or must I sit straight? Now we return to “it does not matter.” I remember someone very close to me, a Brahmin from India. We were talking about yoga, and I asked, “Could you show me an exercise and help me get set up?” He said yes. I said, “There is just one thing. I cannot sit in the lotus position, and you will never be able to put me in it. Given the structure of my body, I think it is impossible.” He said, “Then no, I will not teach you.” So you mean that is a prerequisite? What kind of yoga are you refusing to teach me? It is like saying nobody can teach me to do a one-arm pull-up on my left arm. I have a contracture in that arm and have dislocated it several times. I probably cannot do a pull-up with that arm alone. I do not know what would have to be done to me. Most likely, trying to get there would kill me. Most likely, I would destroy my health. I am unlikely to do it.

My system is simply not built that way. It is not, whatever the circumstances. I will not do it. It simply will not happen. So, again, when someone sits down and is told to perform an action, they have simply been told to perform an action. What does that have to do with spiritual development? Does my leading this meeting have anything to do with spiritual development? Can I enter a meditative state during it? Throughout this meeting and recording, I am constantly in meditative states of different kinds. What is a meditative state? A state of conscious perception. Then the question is what conscious perception means and what its different kinds are. When I list clairvoyance, intuition, inspiration, and imagination, understand that these words have different meanings. What are they really? What do people in the material world mean by intuition? Recently, during a private session, I asked someone, “Can you see it now?” He said, “No, I do not see anything spiritual at all.”

“I feel it,” he said. I asked, “What does feeling it mean?” He said, “Well, I feel that a ship has just moved from here, or a world has moved from there.” I said, “That is knowledge.” He told me, “I do not see it.” I asked, “What does seeing mean? You see with your eyes. Of course, spiritual vision is something different.” Spiritual vision has hundreds or thousands of combinations of perception. You can group them under certain terms, such as clairvoyance, inspiration, imagination, and intuition. You can. But that grouping is really something of an abstraction, because the combinations of perception are so different. Can I perceive things simultaneously while I am here? I can see hills; I live among these hills. I see lots of small houses, mostly one or two stories, standing among the trees. I can perceive all the houses and the people inside them while I am speaking these words. Simultaneously. Or simultaneously hear interactions with other people. Or simultaneously hear new systems being created. Or experience the present space itself and what is in it. Or simultaneously register the state of my body. Do all of this at once, while also thinking about what to say.

At the same time, watch what energies arise. At the same time, watch and maintain the purity of my energies. Look at where I am expressing thoughts from. Am I expressing them from the soul, or activating a layer of dead thoughts through the basic workings of the brain here? Or am I drawing them from a particular world? Where am I at that moment? Am I strictly, as fully as possible, in physical matter, or in some isolated world? What world am I in? Am I in a world of spiritual beings? Which beings, which specific hierarchies, which specific spaces and worlds? Are these worlds isolated from all the others, or connected with them all? Are movements and connections taking place? Do I see the people who will watch this video, or not? I lead a great many meditations on my channel. I often say that some people are present live, listening to the meditation here and now. Most meditations are recorded at some point, and there are usually people there. They are in front of me or attending online. Or, within the meditation, I see people's energies. For example, I say that the energies of the people watching the meditation have joined in a single space, just as the energies of those watching this video now have joined in a single space—

As a distinct layer of its own. I have just done it. There: they have joined in a single space. Which people have joined? I am making a recording right now. Literally one other person is here listening to me. Who has joined? The people who will watch in the future? When in the future? Or spiritual beings who are present now, or souls who are present now without watching? Who has joined? Who is here now? Can you hold all of this simultaneously? The fundamental question I have been discussing is being in all these spaces simultaneously. Is that not a meditative state, a continuous meditative state, a real, true meditative state, when we mean true meditation rather than simply using the term? Let us look it up together now. Without going too deeply into it, let us open a reference source and see what meditation is. We will type in exactly that and see what comes up first. This is always very important. “Meditation is work with consciousness in which a person tries to achieve deep concentration and inner peace. It is based on a desire to be consciously present in the current moment, to detach from anxiety and unpleasant thoughts.” Pay attention. The whole statement is not about being present in the current moment.

The whole statement is not about concentration and peace. It is about freeing yourself from anxiety and unpleasant thoughts. Am I right, then, that people who are free from anxiety and unpleasant thoughts do not need meditation? And here, bingo, we blow the whole thing apart as a complete lie. A complete lie. If we look at people who have practiced meditation for a long time, even truly saintly people in various states whom everyone learns from, they say, “I do not have bad thoughts or anxiety at all. I have no problem with that. I do not perceive thoughts as bad.” What are bad thoughts? Bad thoughts are thoughts you perceive as bad. Someone sees a snake and has bad thoughts; someone else does not. One person sees a snake and thinks, “It could kill me,” and has bad thoughts. Another person does not. So is seeing a snake and thinking it could kill you a bad thought or a good one? That is your own mind's discussion about whether it is bad or good. And what is anxiety? If someone does not become anxious because of it, if they do not have anxiety or bad thoughts, does that mean that this person, this particular person, should not meditate?

That is the paradox. In fact, this is a violation created by Luciferic forces. It is Lucifer's violation, a very serious violation by Lucifer. It is an incredible cheat code. That is precisely why people often enter meditation from negative motives. What do I mean by negative motives? When parents in the Eastern world say, “If you do not do this, you will have problems. I do not know: you will die the wrong way, have the wrong wife or husband, or have a bad job, so you need to sit in these states. Or you will get seriously ill or be in a bad state. Or, if you want lots of money, practice these states.” Look at the enormous number of wealthy people who say, “I already have money. And what have I come to? I have come to meditation and a proper understanding of life.” It is an utterly empty, manipulative story with no connection at all to how money relates to their meditation or inner peace. Then look at how peaceful that person is over time. Look at their peace over time.

Not at the moment they make the statement, but over the ten years before and the ten years after. We live in a world with a huge number of recordings. We can see what state a person is really in, what they convey and say, what their beliefs and true approaches are, and all the details. There is a great deal to see and track. A great deal to track. Basically, a person entering a meditative state comes from some suffering, some negative aspects, rather than considering something else. I often tell people: the more you immerse yourself in real spiritual exploration, in truly getting to know the spiritual world, the more time you spend in conscious perception, the more you will want to be in conscious perception. The more you will want to do it. While recording this video, I spoke about what I perceive simultaneously. I do not know how many different spaces I showed—fifteen, perhaps. Perceiving people in different houses is actually a fairly particular thing. It is not easy. You also pick up different triggers, see the differences between houses and their different spaces. It is like driving along a road and seeing cars.

I often tell people I am driving with: you can perceive all the cars simultaneously, what is inside them in terms of energy. Simultaneously. Send an impulse to all these cars at once. Hi! Hi. A greeting. We can raise a hand, right? We can put some kind of light on the car to send a signal to everyone. There, click: sent it to everyone. Everyone who is watching. I sent a greeting to absolutely everyone in the spiritual world. Can we do that? And, as much as possible, to those in the physical world, too. Okay, why not? Yesterday I was at a children's concert at school. About 250 or 300 children were singing and performing, a sixth-grade choir. The sixth graders were performing. There is a great deal of music in children's education, in the US public school system, especially in good schools in good areas. Can you add a particular impulse to all these children's space? Look, every person in that space carries a certain impulse. Yesterday, those 200 children—or however many, 250—were onstage, and there were about 400 parents in the audience. Maybe 300; I do not know.

Some number of parents were sitting there. The teachers began getting them involved in doing things. Everyone stood up and did something like “kiwi, kiwi,” singing along. One teacher said, “You know, this is very beneficial, because science has proved that when people do this together and sing together, their heartbeats synchronize.” Then she added a very interesting phrase: “And that is healthy.” Of course, you might ask, “Who told you I want to synchronize my heartbeat with everyone else's? My heart rhythm is fantastic. Why should I match theirs?” When we talk about making things the same, it always involves someone who is doing poorly and someone who is doing well, and everyone becoming the same. Right? So what she said depends very much on the circumstances. She was talking about breathing and so on. But this is a very particular matter, because everyone takes their own number of breaths per minute. Even if singing has regulated it, the number still differs, and their hearts beat differently.

Of course, a particular room can be in a particular state. But here is the question: are there people in that room, or the room itself, the space, the teachers, or children who express a particular energy from their spiritual beings and cover the whole room with it? One child sits there and covers the whole room. Some children clearly stood out. There are always children you notice. There were 250 people. You do not remember them all, but I remember about fifteen from yesterday. Why do I remember those particular children? Why did I see them? Notice: as soon as you see someone and make contact with them, you establish an energetic connection, guaranteed. There was a boy who clearly stood out. He walked around and did things while the other children were very quiet and still. He moved and jumped around. He also looked distinctive, visibly different. Obviously, the whole audience was watching him. He drew attention to himself. What energies was he expressing? And can some parents cover the room with a different type of energy? Can you send this sort of pink energy into it?

Can you send in this sort of blue energy? Or this sort of green energy? I am just naming colors, but each energy has its own structure and type. Could you open a portal behind the children, a portal of light—whoosh—white, blue, green, or from extraterrestrial worlds? I am showing all of this right now, by the way. Many people will see it clearly. They will clearly see the shifts in consciousness and state, because that is clearly what is happening within this recording. The recording itself is a person's meditation. What is meditation? It is the expansion of a person's perception. Perception can be expanded in different ways, of course, in entirely different ways. We will continue the series of videos and lectures on the channel, along with the meditations here: dozens of meditations with different kinds of immersion. This is the expansion of perception. Again, perception can be expanded in different ways. Through something external, for example: watching another meditation or watching a person. What makes a video different because of what it is called? Here is a video, and someone has called it a meditation.

The older it is, the more robes the person wears, the more millions of people have watched it. Or someone has been named in connection with it. “This is a meditation,” they say. A meditation. Or is any video you watch a meditation? That is meditation, too. So what is meditation? What is the difference between this video and that one, apart from what someone called it? Of course, when we talk about working with consciousness, people generally have no idea what that means. It is a completely unclear thing. Then comes “to achieve deep concentration and inner peace.” What is concentration, anyway? Is it silence, a world of silence?

A world of silence. But I could say to you: let us enter a deep silence that can cause fear. There are hundreds of states of silence. Here is one: a light breeze is blowing, gently stirring something. And here is another state of silence, a more serious silence. A little frightening to a person—fundamentally, very frightening. If you enter it more deeply, the silence becomes frightening. Many of you have experienced being alone in a room when it falls silent and the silence frightens you. Is that meditation or not? A bad meditation? You might say, “No, that was a bad meditation. You did not achieve peace.” Or did you, on the contrary, enter silence, true silence, that ringing silence? Is silence when you isolate yourself from everything and stop hearing your inner dialogue? Or when you remain with everything, including that inner dialogue, and begin consciously perceiving it all? What is it? What is peace? Is it a pulse of fifty, a hundred, seventy, or eighty? In which person? Or forty? What is peace, anyway? What is it? What are we paying attention to: the peace of the physical body? Any truly deep person knows that, in spiritual vision, there are layers that cause fear entirely beyond comparison with the fears of ordinary aspects of life.

These are very serious things, very serious matters involving fear. Losing your life here and now is one thing, the greatest fear a person has. It is a different feeling to lose thousands of lives, or to have your spiritual system, your soul and spirit, all your spiritual structures, fall into dependency. Losing your I is practically impossible. But overall, there is an enormous difference, a great difference. So what have we come back to? This meeting is, of course, a meditation, because meditation is directed toward expanding the spiritual state. If we look at people in the world who convey true information, whatever subject they speak about, we will see that they carry an incredible meditative flow that expands your perception. But I want to point out that some people expand your perception while manipulatively putting enormous amounts of very particular energies into it. They take you over while giving you perception. All the ancient treatises say that, at certain points, you can receive incredible perceptual power from dark forces. But you must understand Lucifer's level in the hierarchy: he is a fallen angel. An angel is above the human being's spiritual hierarchy.

Lucifer has an incredible level of influence and capability. He can pour so much kindness into you that you will not even realize he is the one who gave it to you: goodness, an opening of consciousness, a perception of love. And he can plant a virus in that state. So an enormous number of different spaces, kinds of music, and places people visit are sources of dependency. You can enter some caves, and you cannot enter others. The dependency will be permanent. You will not be able to undo it all. You will not. There are movies about this. People enter pyramids, conduct excavations, seek out certain states, touch extraordinary artifacts, and release some sleeping demon. It immediately takes them all over and uses those very people completely. It says, “Ha! Thank you for coming. I was just calling you.” And takes everything under its control. This is a fairly complex story, an explanation of things that can happen in different meditative states. See you at our next meetings.