Last Friday, our instructor and experienced practitioner David Dunphy gave a very interesting introduction and guided meditation session on how our attention works over time in creating a permanent and lasting effect of meditation. While we all are familiar with what meditation can achieve for us during a session of meditation, what about the lasting and permanent effects of meditation on us?

It’s quite an interesting question that we get asked all the time and one that’s extremely important to a meditator. 5 minute and 10-minute meditations are quite popular these days. Those who offer meditation are desperate to make money in a highly competitive market where the options and choices are endless. But quick and easy is what sells and gets views on Youtube or likes on social media, which explains a plethora of quick “recharge yourself” offerings. Then there is upselling to yoga mats and other products that enhance your meditation experience.

It goes on and on….commercial intent without any consideration for the optimal time that your personal, individual journey to self-improvement and better health requires. But how long you should meditate and how much time you spend on it is something you should control and determine, rather than allow marketing professionals to dictate this.

And the point to focus here is what realistically is the time needed for meditation to be effective and beneficial for you? Some answers we give will surprise you.

Virtually, every meditation sign and poster today says one thing – Feeling Stressed? Try our meditation. Or something similar. But did you know that meditation’s very simple, yet most powerful benefit can be to give you a complete detailed insight about yourself?

What if you knew every bit about your strengths, drawbacks, emotions and feelings, reactions and more importantly, the root causes of these? Or if you were able to trace your health problems back to deeper problems at the core of your being? Best of all, even get advance warning of problems in your life?

And what if you had instantaneous, day-to-day feedback about this – an inbuilt power and intricate sensory perception deep inside your being that relayed everything to you with startling accuracy? Revelations that you know in your heart of hearts are true and cannot run away from?

Welcome to the high definition view of yourself, that is accessible by powerful meditation constructs and techniques provided by Sahaja meditation.

In the last part of this article, we wrote about how Sahaja meditation is all about developing precision skills with your attentional control and using it for effective meditation experiences. The most interesting part of how this works in Sahaja is that it is part cognitive and part spiritual, primarily because of the elevation of our attention to a unique, higher state of consciousness.

This higher realm is entirely spiritual but not completely unknown to researchers and psychologists. Carl Jung spoke about it relatively vaguely and from a theoretical perspective, for instance, and called it the Collective UnConscious. However, Sahaja is a one of a kind practice of meditation that helps materialize and experience this higher state in a tangible manner to unleash a host of powerful benefits. And it gives us living and real proof of this higher realm in a much nuanced manner.

The first part of this article also described the steps of attention control during a meditation session. You can read about it here.

To recap,

– The power of our attention is the primary vehicle for meditation and spiritual evolution. Our states of consciousness are manifested through the power of our attention.

– In Sahaja, the attention is raised to the unique, higher spiritual realm of Collective Consciousness (the same as Jung’s Collective UnConscious). This works spontaneously by the rising of the Kundalini energy. But it also requires some level of cognitive effort and awareness when our attention drops down or is dragged back to the usual state of awareness.

– Precision meditation is about knowing exactly where our attention is and making it a witness to everything going on inside us – our thoughts, the lack of them, when they rise and fall and more importantly, the quality and duration of true thoughtless awareness or our existence in the higher state.

– Last and not the least, our ability to stay in the higher state with ease and without much effort and struggles is directly dependent on how well our Kundalini energy can rise through our Central energy channel. More precisely, how many strands or threads of it can rise and also how wide our central channel is.

That last step has a disproportionately positive impact on our meditation and our overall spiritual progress. We could continue on for years, merely scratching the surface with regard to the power of our subtle instrument, feeling tepid experiences and seeing weak results.

And so, by the above definitions, precision meditation is also knowing about scenarios in our life that enhance the spontaneous rise of the energy within us, so we can focus more on these.

Now we discuss how this important step can be enabled within us – the habits, tendencies and choices in life that help aid the spontaneous rising of the energy. Or at least, for the most part, keep its pathway for rising clear enough to get a deep meditation experience.