Meditation: 

In the first phase of meditation one often discovers they are not the body.  In the second phase, they discover they are not the mind.  In the third stage, they discover their universal nature, or in other words, the unity of all life.  Mystics have long believed that it is the goal to remove what covers our original goodness so that we can reveal more and more of the divine in our own lives.

One of the purposes of meditation is personal transition.  You can’t make radical changes in the pattern of your life until you see yourself exactly as you are now.  The “you” that goes in one side of the meditation experience is not the same “you” that comes out the other side.  Meditation changes your character by a process of sensitization, by making you more deeply aware of your own thoughts, words, and deeds.

Meditation sharpens your concentration and thinking power.  It (Vipassana) is an ancient and codified system of training your mind.  It is a set of exercises dedicated to the purpose of becoming more and more aware of your own life experience.  It is attentive listening, mindful seeing, and careful testing.  We learn to listen to our own thoughts without being caught up in them.

The object of meditation is to also learn to see the truths of impermanence.  It’s also about learning to live.  The goal is to be totally aware of everything that is happening in your own perceptual universe, exactly the way it happens, exactly when it is happening – total unbroken awareness in present time.

Don’t wait:

There is a story about a person that kept putting off life’s deeper questions in order to do one more ‘thing.’  Time after time he/she told themselves they’d meditate, seek answers, change their life next week, next month, maybe next year.  Then one night they dreamed they were going to die.  There was no chance to change their direction.  Time had run out, and all their plans for making a new start in life could never be fulfilled.  It was a terrifying experience, and as they struggled to wake up, they vowed passionately not to postpone for a single morning more.  But when they tried to sit up, they found it was no dream; they were on their deathbed.