This blog post aims to take a closer look at which inner actions can be understood as meditation. How can you recognize whether you are currently meditating – or rather doing mental training?
To do this, we look at the inner processes (self-perception) during meditation: your basic attitude and self-designed impulses. On the other hand, it is about recognizing where you are being guided during guided meditation – i.e. distinguishing based on the introduction to the meditation and the words of the guided meditation itself:
Does the path lead to mindful, unintentional meditation or to goal-oriented, suggestively designed mental training?
Mental training: Goals, motivation and optimization
People are usually particularly motivated when they have a desirable goal in mind. Often these goals are not so easy to achieve, which makes them even more desirable. This creates the need to improve and optimize oneself and to make sacrifices in order to move towards a possible success.
The necessary skills are willpower, self-optimization and a belief that achieving the goal will improve life.
Many of the instructions and courses offered today as meditation build on exactly this motivation pattern. They specifically awaken longings for inner peace, personal development or a better life and package these temptations in seemingly logical causal relationships. In this way, they invite you to specifically improve yourself and your own life. In the typical If/Then formulations of these descriptions, mental training is often referred to as meditation in spiritual garb.
A few examples:
A longing target state such as: Inner peace, deep calm, connection, etc. is achieved if…
… you use a specific breathing technique
… you assume body postures
… you no longer have any thoughts
… you accept your past
… you repeat certain words
… you believe in something specific
… you connect with given ideas.
All these techniques are quite effective and useful in mental training or therapy procedures. However, they are often used suggestively – that is, they have an influencing effect and aim to specifically evoke certain thoughts, feelings or inner attitudes. Sometimes this also happens in connection with trance in order to achieve certain goals that are intended to strengthen the ego-consciousness. In contrast to meditation, a conscious transfer into everyday life is often strived for here.
Meditation: Presence and unintentional being
Although there is no uniform definition of meditation, many teachers and practitioners believe that the unreserved perception of presence and the omission of operative action can be understood as meditative practice: That is, being in the moment without wanting to change or improve it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti described it this way:
“Meditation means being aware of every thought, every feeling, never saying they are right or wrong, but simply observing them and following them.” (Krishnamurti J., Einbruch in die Freiheit, 165)
In this sense, not only one’s own inner processes, but also sensory stimuli from the environment are left unvalued, thus no goal is pursued to get somewhere, but the now is left as it naturally shows itself.
This is a significant difference to a state of consciousness of self-optimization, which requires constant control (right/wrong) – in order to check, as with mental training, whether the targeted path is still being pursued. In meditation, such control thoughts, which sometimes occur naturally, are recognized and left accepting and without evaluation.
Conclusion: Significant difference
The difference between meditating and mental training lies in:
- in the goal achievement often formulated in advance (these can also be so-called spiritual goals),
- in the operative consciousness control,
- and in self-optimization during the process of mental training.
Furthermore, the core of the meditative attitude lies in a deeper understanding of the ego-consciousness itself: Through the continuous perception in the mode of subject and object – i.e. the constant experience as “I here” versus “that there” – a separation arises between self and world, which stabilizes the ego-consciousness.
As long as these ego-active processes continue to be stimulated – for example through striving for goals, evaluation or self-optimization – the perception of separation remains. However, if they are no longer nourished or initiated in meditation, a state of consciousness of transcendence arises completely without intervention and quite naturally – often described as connectedness or unity experience.
This is precisely where meditation differs fundamentally from mental training: It does not aim to achieve something, but opens the space for what is.
This blog post is intended to encourage self-reflection to take a closer look at your own meditation practice in this sense.
