Answers During Meditation: What Is Really Happening?

AVAlexander Volchek

Here is a question: “How can you distinguish an inner experience during meditation from an illusion?” A young woman had been meditating every day for some time. During her first meditation, she asked questions that concerned her and often felt she was receiving answers. How much can those answers be trusted? How can you tell whether this is genuine inner vision, rather than your own expectations, fears, or illusions arising during the practice? To work this out, we need to take a very broad view of what actually happens in meditation. As you know, I keep saying that a meditative state is a state that accompanies your life. You can equally say that however often you sit down to meditate, your state in meditation is simply the ordinary state of your own life. This is very important. Again, I see a meditative state as something that should accompany you always, a state you should always be in, whatever you are doing. As I record this video, am I in a state of broad perception of everything that is happening? In the same way, when you come to a meditation and sit down, you are still the same ordinary person, living your ordinary life. Believe me, your ordinary self and ordinary life always take precedence over the state you experience there.

That is the whole point. If you learn to remain in a state of expanded perception and understanding, you do not need to sit down specifically for that, because the same thing happens during meditation. Your attention is simply directed toward it. Just as when you eat, your attention is directed toward eating rather than talking. Or in the shower, toward washing your hair. When you brush your teeth, it is directed toward moving the toothbrush and cleaning your teeth. 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 meditation, I direct your attention toward the things I convey. It is simply a matter of directing your attention. So when you ask whether you should trust what you came to know during meditation, 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 someone, and something they tell you brings an event to mind. Should you trust that or not?

Should you trust another person at all? How do you know the information they convey is their own? A great many people are acting as channels at a particular moment in terms of what they say. The question becomes more serious and important. You need to be very clear about this. If you single out the importance of observing certain states during meditation rather than throughout your life, you will be moving along a little at a time. Or you may become carried away by what happens during meditation. You can come to a meditation and have foolish, dead thoughts spinning in your head. “Dead thoughts” is a concept Rudolf Steiner introduced in anthroposophy. Of course dead thoughts can spin around, just nonsense going around and around. Sitting in a particular posture or being in a particular place does not mean sound thoughts must come to you. Moreover, a meditative state is a state of expanded perception. Expanded perception involves the influence of more than just the thoughts that come to you. It involves the influence of everything that happens on your life—for example, on causes and effects and the events in your life. Those causes, effects, and events do not necessarily have to be connected with your thoughts at all.

You sat in a particular place, and ten years later you had a child. How is that connected with your thoughts, desires, wants, the direction you are moving in, or anything else? The world is such that people begin to get carried away by certain things they encounter in meditation: someone told them something interesting about their past lives, or they heard what would happen in the future. Meanwhile, they missed the actual truth of what was happening. They did not see the truth or what mattered most for them at that moment. They were distracted. This is distracted perception. A person's usual perception is distracted: attention is always drawn to their own personality, ego, fears, psychophysical tensions, problems, nervousness, and circumstances, away from all the life around them. Yet all that surrounding life always takes precedence. It can prevail over your ego, fear, problems, over absolutely everything. It always will, because it is always greater, always more beautiful—if we can even use the word “beautiful.” It is always more beautiful than all those things. Always. But that does not interest people. What interests them is their own inner problems, their inner state, their importance and significance.

As long as people remain caught up in that importance and significance, they will remain in delusion and conflict: “Does what I saw matter or not?” I recently gave my editor an example. We were discussing a related question, not this exact one. I said, “Listen, Olya, yesterday I was going to bed. I have blackout curtains that make the room completely dark. When I pressed the button and the curtains closed, I saw a bright light in front of me, with spiritual beings standing in that golden light. I looked at them and thought, ‘There are spiritual beings in the room now. I will observe them.’ Then I went to sleep. I woke up in the morning. What did I do? Got up, went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, drank water.” It was simply my observation of the spiritual world and spiritual beings. Can you attach importance and significance to it? You can attach so much significance to it that you cannot 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 powerful experience of perception.

But it would still only be your social perception of what happened. You would still not understand what had actually occurred or the nature of the causes and effects involved. So when someone asks themselves, “Did I hear the truth or something untrue?” that is merely an echo of the reality of what is happening. Meditation is not for hearing something. It is for spending more and more time in a state of perceiving life. And perceiving life is not about knowing more so that you can then teach other people, see certain patterns, or make more money. Being in a state of perceiving the world matters in itself. Period.