Book summary “How to meditate”: summary

Introduction

You often live with a sense of fragmentation. Your mind jumps endlessly from task to task, leaving you exhausted and disconnected from your deepest human potential. Modern life demands constant attention, yet it rarely offers a method to unify your focus or restore your inner calm. You might view meditation as a mystical escape, a soft relaxation exercise, or something reserved for monks in distant monasteries.

Lawrence L. LeShan demonstrates that meditation is none of these things. Meditation is a rigorous personal discipline that trains the mind to do one thing at a time, leading to greater efficiency in daily life and an alternative view of reality. The practice does not require exotic beliefs or rigid dogmas. It functions much like physical exercise, building mental muscle through consistent and patient effort.

The book guides you through the complex landscape of contemplative practice by breaking down its core mechanics and historical roots. You discover how meditation affects your body and mind, altering your physiological state while sharpening your awareness. The text maps out distinct routes to practice so you can find the approach that matches your personal psychological makeup. You learn specific techniques ranging from breath counting to advanced self-inquiry, equipping you with concrete tools for daily sessions.

Along the way, the book exposes the common traps that derail beginners and explains how to evaluate teachers and integrate your practice with psychotherapy. You learn how meditative awareness shifts your fundamental experience of existence.

This guide answers several key questions about the discipline:

• What exactly happens in your mind and body during meditation?
• Which of the major traditional paths aligns best with your personal strengths?
• How do you overcome the initial resistance and boredom of sitting quietly?
• What specific traps and illusions await you as your practice deepens?
• How does disciplined meditation translate into greater effectiveness in your everyday life?

1. Why We Meditate

You likely sense that human beings possess a greater potential for living than you are able to use. Artificial barriers keep you from experiencing your fullest humanhood. Meditation is practiced to recover a lost sense of human potential and unity with reality, often described by practitioners as feeling like coming home.

At a conference of meditating scientists, participants were pressed on why they meditated. One scientist stated that it was like coming home, which prompted universal agreement from the room.

This practice is directly analogous to physical exercise. Both require repeated hard work and must be adapted to your individual needs. Just as physical exercise tunes and trains the body for better performance, meditation tunes your intellectual, emotional, and sensory systems. No single program is right for everyone.

Western culture often misinterprets mystics as insane or detached from reality. True mysticism is characterized by high levels of efficiency, serenity, and good human relationships rather than impractical withdrawal from the world. Actual practitioners exhibit high efficiency in business and everyday affairs alongside a deep inner peace.

All mystical training schools share two major goals:

• greater efficiency in everyday life;
• the comprehension of an alternative view of reality.

Meditation trains your mind to do one thing at a time, which increases your general efficiency. At the same time, it allows you to develop an emotional and intellectual understanding of a secondary, complementary view of reality based on the principle of complementarity.

2. How a Meditation Feels

The untrained human mind naturally resists discipline, requiring persistent, incremental effort rather than sudden spiritual breakthroughs.

Breath Counting

Breath counting is a foundational meditation technique designed to train the mind in doing one thing at a time. The practitioner is instructed to silently count exhaled breaths up to four and then restart. You gently bring the mind back whenever it wanders, which tests the undisciplined nature of the human mind.

A fifteen-minute trial of counting breaths reveals how quickly the mind wanders and refuses to follow the will.

The Unruly Mind

The untrained human mind naturally resists discipline and acts like an unbroken horse or a ship with mutinous sailors. Writers like Saint Theresa of Avila and Plato used analogies of an unbroken horse and a mutinous ship to describe how the mind wanders whimsically. You only free the captain and navigator through consistent discipline.

Rejecting Sudden Enlightenment

Meditation does not produce sudden, dramatic spiritual breakthroughs. It involves slow, incremental personal change through sustained effort. The cultural myth that meditation brings sudden blinding flashes of light or permanent enlightenment acts as a trap. It leads spiritual athletes to constantly shift between fads rather than doing the hard work.

Thomas Merton satirized the misconception of the mystical life as a grand Wagnerian opera filled with dramatic sights and thunder. He mocked the idea of experiencing seven hours of an imagined operatic duet with God.

3. Psychological and Physiological Effects

Consistent meditation induces a hypometabolic state of deep relaxation alongside high alertness, forcing the mind to adopt a field-theory view of reality.

Field Theory

Ordinary perception treats you as an isolated individual navigating a separate universe. Meditation gradually dismantles this division through repeated practice.

Just as the Michelson-Morley experiment forced physicists to abandon classical mechanics for field theory when two plus two seemingly stopped making four, meditation presents the mind with insoluble paradoxes.

This process shatters ordinary perceptions of individuality and isolation. You experience a deep emotional and intellectual acceptance that you are interconnected with the entire universe.

Deutomatization

Everyday life requires automatization to function smoothly, making intermediate steps of actions and perceptions disappear from consciousness.

Meditation leads to deutomatization, stripping away inattention to restore a brilliant, luminous clarity and freshness to everyday perception.

Drawing on psychiatrist Arthur Deikman, Lawrence L. LeShan explains that meditation reverses normal cognitive filters. You temporarily cast off automatic cognitive and affective controls to perceive reality more deeply, much like a crayfish sloughing off its shell to experience suchness.

The Hypometabolic State

Meditation produces a unique physiological state of deep relaxation combined with high mental alertness, acting as the exact opposite of the defense-alarm state.

Scientific measurements show that meditation induces a hypometabolic state characterized by decreased oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production.

• Unlike sleep or hypnosis, meditation significantly increases skin electrical resistance by up to four hundred percent.
• It lowers blood lactate concentration.
• It increases slow alpha brain waves to eight to nine per second.

4. The Basic Types of Meditation

Meditation practices generally fall into four major routes or classes: the path through the intellect, emotions, body, or action.

You should choose the path that aligns with your personal strengths and areas of security. Every path utilizes different mechanisms, but all ultimately lead to the same psychological and metaphysical integration.

• The path through the intellect
• The path through the emotions
• The path through the body
• The path through action

A Hasidic rabbi visits a small town, senses the extreme tension in the room, and begins humming, singing, and dancing with the townspeople until everyone is fully absorbed in the dance, thereby answering all their questions through bodily movement.

Structured versus Unstructured

Mental meditations are divided into structured types that rigorously train the intellect and will, and unstructured types that loosen and free the emotional life.

Structured meditations require precise adherence to strict instructions, such as counting breaths, forcing the mind to tackle impossible tasks and thereby strengthening personality organization.

Unstructured meditations focus on a specific subject and personal feelings toward it. They prevent emotional blockages without relying on free association. You can also spend ten to twenty percent of your time sitting silently after meditation to evaluate how you feel.

The outer way, the middle way, and the inner way offer alternative styles for this journey.

5. Structured Meditations

Structured meditations use specific external or internal anchors like breath counting, objects, or bubbles to train the mind in one-pointing.

The primary psychological benefits of meditation come from consistent and hard work, not from performing the practice well. Beginners should not expect to meditate without distraction for long periods. The initial effect of strengthening the personality structure results from repeatedly bringing the attention back to the task with discipline and compassion.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and Saint Theresa of Avila both responded to questions about avoiding distractions by pointing out that even advanced spiritual figures constantly experience wandering thoughts.

Contemplation of an Object

Contemplation of an external natural object trains nonverbal, active, and alert visual exploration without translation into language. The practitioner holds an object like a pebble or seashell at a comfortable distance and explores it dynamically with the eyes as if feeling it with the sense of touch. This requires binding the mind to a single focus while gently redirecting it whenever thoughts or verbal descriptions arise.

Christmas Humphreys uses brass doorknobs in his seminars, while LeShan uses paper matches. Beginners should maintain ten-minute periods for the first two weeks.

Counting exhalations provides a structured external focus that helps draw in the senses and quiet mental activity. The practitioner focuses entirely on counting exhalations up to four and repeating. A count of four is recommended for Westerners to prevent anxiety about higher numbers while avoiding self-competition. You should practice this for fifteen minutes at a time on a daily basis.

Bubble Meditation

Visualizing thoughts as rising bubbles helps observe the stream of consciousness without getting entangled in individual thoughts. In this structured meditation of the inner way, each thought or feeling is pictured as a bubble rising through the bottom of a clear lake over a period of five to eight seconds, observed neutrally without attempting to find connections between them.

The Meditation of the Thousand-Petaled Lotus connects a chosen center word to an infinite network of associations to uncover insights. Beginning with a positive word, the practitioner waits for associations, regards the connection for a few seconds, and then returns to the center word rather than engaging in free association.

LeShan illustrates this by choosing light as the center word, followed by associations such as sun, red, dark, heavy, umbrella, and bulb. You hold each association in mind for three to four seconds before returning to the center.

Mantra Meditation

Chanting a word, phrase, or sentence repeatedly helps anchor awareness in a single auditory task. Practitioners chant audibly or silently while maintaining a single rhythm, returning to the task whenever mental distractions or new interpretations of the phrase occur.

One practitioner used Thoreau's phrase I have heard no bad news effectively. You can also apply LeShan's Telephone Book Method across five to eight sessions to test your focus.

6. Advanced Meditations

Advanced methods like self-inquiry, movement, and safe harbor meditations guide awareness deeper into the core structure of the self.

Self-Inquiry

Self-inquiry systematically challenges and rejects every surface answer to the question of identity to find the core essence of the self. When an answer arises in the form of a name, sensation, memory, or image, you reply in the present tense that this is only an agent or attribute. You persistently search for the deeper identity behind it.

Practitioners call this ancient process Neti, Neti, meaning not this, not that. It strips away the superficial layers to reveal the Atman.

Movement Meditations

Movement meditations integrate the physical body and utilize group rhythm to transcend fatigue and achieve deep coordination. Standing in a circle with clasped hands, you lean backward and forward while alternating between chanting Ya Hai and Ya Huk at a steady group pace.

Participants maintain a tempo of ten to fourteen pairs per minute. This physical synchronization bypasses ordinary mental chatter through steady kinetic effort.

Safe Harbor

The safe harbor meditation uses nonverbal guidance and sensing to allow consciousness to drift toward an internal state of security and wholeness. Rather than using a verbal map, you act like a radar. You sense subtle internal signals to guide awareness toward a personal sense of a safe harbor.

Traditions sometimes call this the way of sweet repose. You can practice this approach in twenty-minute periods once a day for two weeks.

Unstructured meditations require active exploration of a chosen concept, relationship, or problem within defined limits rather than passive daydreaming. You select a subject aimed at personal growth, such as how you love or how you would act if you fulfilled your potential. You actively direct your thoughts to comprehend the subject and your feelings about it.

7. Alluring Traps in Meditation

Meditation paths carry hidden hazards. You can easily mistake poetic tools for literal reality. Meditators frequently fall into traps such as confusing metaphors with literal facts, seeking sensation, or searching for a guru instead of doing the work.

Concretistic Thinking

Concretistic thinking turns useful metaphors into physical objects. You might treat concepts like chakras or energy currents as tangible facts.

Taoism initially used body currents as metaphors, but eventually located them in specific body parts as real things. A meditation leader insisted that letting fatigue drain into the earth was a literal physical fact rather than a metaphor.

Sensation-Seeking

Unusual perceptions can easily seduce you into chasing thrills. Striving for exciting phenomena, visions, or high ecstatic states distracts you from your real goal of inner growth.

Zen master Dogen told a student who saw a great white light with the Buddha behind it to simply concentrate on his breathing and it would go away.

Paranormal occurrences like Extra Sensory Perception often emerge during meditation. Treating these occurrences as your primary goal stalls personal development and turns into a seductive trap.

Eileen Garrett, a renowned sensitive, made only one exception to her rule against acting on paranormal information: delaying a flight if one experiences sudden, inexplicable anxiety about boarding a specific plane.

The Guru Trip

The constant search for a perfect master often stems from resistance to long-term discipline. You might look for a quick fix to enlightenment without doing the necessary mental work.

Sri Chinmoy noted that people will do anything for advancement except work for it. Oscar Ichazo pointed out that thinking of oneself as a guru inevitably sours human relationships due to a lack of negative feedback.

Withdrawing from active participation in the world to pursue personal inner development is a self-defeating path that fragments human wholeness.

A medieval monk praying in his cell for a vision of the Virgin Mary left his prayer when the monastery bell rang to feed the poor at the gate, and the vision told him it would have fled had he stayed.

8. Choosing a Path and Teacher

Practicing alone or with a small group requires realistic planning and follow-through, while evaluating a teacher demands looking at their human relationships.

Evaluating a Teacher

A teacher can significantly help with specific meditation routes. Having no teacher is better than having an unskilled one who runs a guru trip.

Teachers should be evaluated based on their human relationships. They must encourage your independence rather than demanding blind obedience or secrecy.

Arthur Deikman designed the Deikman Test of Spiritual Advancement with the single deadly question regarding a teacher: "How does he get along with his wife?"

Guidelines for Solo Practice

Practicing meditation alone requires realistic planning and unwavering follow-through. You should expect gradual evolution rather than revolutionary change.

You must plan your time based on your actual life complexity. Avoid talking your practice to death.

• Commit to an initial trial period of two to three weeks for specific meditation programs;
• establish a minimum planning window of three weeks for your meditation schedules;
• finish every planned session;
• expect difficult and discouraging dry periods.

Thomas Merton described the inevitable let-down and desert-like inner state when a meditation life gets serious and the mind refuses to work.

Group Meditation Benefits

Working with a small group of like-minded people provides mutual encouragement. It helps you navigate dry or difficult periods without falling into competition.

Sharing the process helps prevent stopping. Members can solve each other's problems, provided they avoid setting up hierarchies or standards of what experiences to have.

Finding others who share the same search and working together once or a couple of times a week offers great advantages.

9. Integration with Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy and meditation offer complementary benefits where therapy explores content and meditation strengthens personality structure.

Traditional psychotherapy focuses on exploring content and meaning to improve structure. Meditation strengthens the overall personality structure so content automatically reorganizes itself in a healthy way. You can combine both methods to support personal growth. The psychotherapeutic approach and the meditative approach work together without conflict.

Content versus Structure

The two methods operate through different mechanisms. Therapy examines the specific details of your life history and emotional conflicts. Meditation trains the mind to maintain focus and build general resilience.

Effective meditations are simple and straightforward. Overly complex methods are generally less useful due to accumulated unnecessary additions. You should discard complex meditations that lack a simple rationale. Skilled teachers achieve ends with minimal artifice.

Five Values of Meditation

Meditation brings several distinct advantages to the therapeutic process. These elements help you build inner stability and reach personal growth beyond mere baseline normalcy.

• increased ego strength;
• exploration of problem areas;
• centering;
• valuing the totality of the self;
• experiencing transcendence.

These values help patients build resilience and lower anxiety through centering techniques. Transcendence experiences open new perspectives on existence.

10. The Social Significance

Humanity experiences reality in two distinct modes, and cultivating the unitive side is essential for navigating life stages and psychological wholeness.

The World of the One and the Many

Biological survival requires operating in the everyday world of identity and separateness, known as the world of the many. Neglecting the unitive mode, or the world of the One, leaves humans stunted and unfulfilled. When you suppress your capacity to perceive the universe through a unified mode, you pay a price. This repression brings:

• loss of joy;
• increased anxiety;
• heightened aggression;
• deep alienation.

Paranormal abilities such as Extra Sensory Perception or ESP are potentials shared by all humans. Repressing these potentials carries a heavy psychological price. In a research seminar, the author set up training seminars in a specific paranormal ability. About eight out of ten participants who had never had a psychic experience learned it to a functionally useful level. Descriptions of reality provided by sensitives, mystics, and Einsteinian physicists are isomorphic and describe the world in identical terms. All three groups converge on a view where relationships supersede isolated identity. Time and space are seamless, and distinctions like good and evil dissolve into universal harmony.

Stages of Life Development

Human life has distinct developmental stages, requiring a shift in focus during the second half of life toward cultivating the unitive side of existence. Neglecting this transition around midlife often leads to regret and psychological distress. Embracing it brings confidence and acceptance when facing death. Between the ages of thirty-five and fifty lies a typical age range for a second adolescence where life orientation turns toward self-growth. Carl Jung noted that he had never seen a patient over thirty-five whose problem was not basically a religious one and who was not cured when that problem was solved.

When individuals reach their sixties and seventies, they frequently start to experience the painful symptom of forgetting recent details. This common symptom can be a misunderstood sign of an ignored developmental sequence shifting toward general relationships. Focus naturally transitions from mechanical minutiae to broad meaning and relationships. If unrecognized, this shift is mistaken for a cognitive loss.

Esoteric Schools

Esoteric mystical schools that were historically hidden are now actively seeking students because humanity faces a critical imperative to change. Teachers from traditions like Sufism argue that their preserved knowledge must be utilized now to help the human race find and live its unused potential before it is too late. Historically, it took three to five years to locate an underground esoteric training school and gain admission. Today, the urgency of modern existence brings these teachings into the open.

10 Key Ideas

1. Meditation is a rigorous personal discipline that trains the mind to do one thing at a time, leading to greater efficiency in daily life and an alternative view of reality.
2. The practice functions much like physical exercise, building mental muscle through consistent and patient effort.
3. All mystical training schools share two major goals: greater efficiency in everyday life and the comprehension of an alternative view of reality.
4. Meditation produces a unique physiological state of deep relaxation combined with high mental alertness, acting as the exact opposite of the defense-alarm state.
5. Meditation practices generally fall into four major routes or classes: the path through the intellect, emotions, body, or action.
6. Breath counting is a foundational meditation technique designed to train the mind in doing one thing at a time by silently counting exhaled breaths up to four and restarting.
7. In the structured meditation of the inner way, each thought or feeling is pictured as a bubble rising through the bottom of a clear lake over a period of five to eight seconds, observed neutrally.
8. Meditators frequently fall into traps such as confusing metaphors with literal facts, seeking sensation, or searching for a guru instead of doing the work.
9. Teachers should be evaluated based on their human relationships, ensuring they encourage your independence rather than demanding blind obedience or secrecy.
10. Neglecting the unitive mode, or the world of the One, leaves humans stunted and unfulfilled, bringing a loss of joy, increased anxiety, heightened aggression, and deep alienation.