When You Meditate
When you meditate, you shift your focus. Instead of paying attention to the surface of the mind, which teems with constant change, you go deeper to experience silence. In and of itself, silence is pointless. Life is about action and response, not silent detachment. But inner silence is something far more profound: It is awareness being aware of itself, also known as wakefulness, or mindfulness.In its silent depths, your mind knows everything thats going on. Time collapses into a single focal point, where the one unshakable thing you know is I am. This isnt passive knowledge. It is the center of everything, the source of all the activity that springs forth as thoughts, sensations, and external events. Silence is the womb of creation.Once you have authorship of yourself, you come out of silence into activity to write your own story. There is no difference between sitting in meditation and living in the world. Both are expressions of awareness, the one silent, and the other active. Now you maintain two types of attention, one devoted to change, the other to non-change. This is the shift in consciousness that allows you to live from the level of the soul.Meditating 24 hours a day means you retain your alertness and wakefulness all the time.Adapted from Why is God Laughing? by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2008).
