Meditation Beyond Contentment

Meditation always begins with conscious contentment. At this initial level, meditation is an activity. We consciously choose to be content with whatever our experience happens to be. Whenever we notice ourselves wrapped up in some form of discontent, we make a deliberate choice to be content with that as well. This first stage of meditation is active. We are actively engaged in the ongoing process of choosing contentment, again and again.

As meditation deepens, something subtle but significant occurs. We begin to notice that even the activity of meditation itself—the noticing of discontent and the repeated choice to return to contentment—is also something we can be content with. At that point, we relax about the practice. We stop actively engaging with it and begin simply to watch our experience unfold. We discover that when we disengage, everything continues to happen exactly as before.

Contentment arises. Discontent appears. Some effort is made to release the discontent. And the cycle continues, over and over again. But now there is a new realization: we are not doing any of it. It is all part of a self-perpetuating pattern, a habit of mind unfolding on its own. We begin to see that we were never the doer. Everything has simply been happening. It is all the natural movement of mind.

At this stage, meditation may deepen into luminous absorption. We find ourselves sitting in quiet wonder, observing the process of consciousness as it unfolds. Gradually, we begin to forget where we are, who we are, and what we are doing. We slip deeper and deeper into pure awareness, a state without reference points, without identity, without narrative.

Yet there is another possible direction meditation can take.

This shift is what I have come to call the mystical turn. It is not something we decide to do during meditation; rather, it is an intention we bring into the practice from the very beginning. When we sit, we carry a gentle curiosity and an implicit assumption that there is a higher intelligence at work—something beyond the personal mind that is capable of guiding us.

With this quiet orientation, meditation no longer moves only as a straight descent into pure awareness. Instead, it takes a mystical turn and brings us into contact with higher dimensions of our being. We still forget ourselves as an Earthbound personality, but rather than dissolving into a state of awareness without self, we begin to move into—or perhaps remember—our soul self.

We find ourselves inhabiting a subtler sense of identity, one that exists beyond the material dimension. As we relax into this refined sense of self, we recognize that our experience is not merely happening on its own. It is being guided. We are being taken on a journey. There is an intelligence at work, an abiding and loving presence, offering us precisely the experiences we need for awakening.

Meditation always begins with conscious contentment and unfolds into a process of self-forgetting. From there, it may deepen into luminous absorption and pure awareness, or it may take a mystical turn and draw us into communion with a higher source of being.

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The image below is a depiction of my essay.