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Without the pomp and circumstance, the smoke and mirrors, I feel that meditation has one major purpose. To strengthen the will through the control of the movement of the body, and the control of the flow of perception and thought.

Crowley's Magick provides very useful tips on the technique of meditation, but is woefully misleading (perhaps purposefully so) on it's results. You could go batty trying to get to the so called "states" of Dhayana and Samadhi.

If you're waiting for your body to be transported to some other realm, or for some explosion of sensation, then you're doing it wrong. The ideal state of meditation, is that of non-interference. That is to say, the world shouldn't melt away as you meditate. The world should be pulled into sharp focus, without comment or distortion.

A very useful method of meditation, is doing so in public. Sit down in a place where people walk past. Find your comfortable seating position, remain still, focus on your breathing, and observe what happens inside and outside yourself. Don't crane your neck, but follow people with your eyes. Smile at them if they look. Answer if they interact. But let it come naturally. Don't try and silence your mind. Just listen to your thoughts as if they were words being spoken by someone else.

Insight comes when you perceive something that you hadn't seen before. When you watch people interact, interact with them, and interact with your self (without comment in all cases) you learn things. At first they seem mundane, but the longer you keep it up, the more mind-blowing these revelations become.

Meditation is the most directly reliable kind of learning you can experience. The direct perception of principles you read about are more instructive than someone else's linguistic and symbolic interpretation of them.

Meditation is not a singular process or thing. It merely denotes a form of mental exercise. There is a wide swathe of vastly different techniques, they differ in objective,method and experience. So if you speak about meditation as if its a specific "thing" that can be done right or wrong is going to be fairly inaccurate. No-mind form is not the same as introspective, which is nothing like the entire category of visualization.

Meditation as a term is similar to "exercise." Doing it right or wrong is meaningless without specific context and objective. And there are in fact many forms that are deeply mystical and intense in tenor. Some forms can take hours to recover from due to the alien state of being that one enters. Likewise it can be a casual softening of ones thoughts while they are getting a pack of smokes at 7-11.

Or we can say that mediation is a process by which we use our mind in a way slightly different in relation to physical and psychological terms.

For the purpose of energy channeling or so on, we use mediation to expand the control of our minds from our voluntary action and physical nervous system to our energy channels and the Ether around us. Indeed we can also say that it is used to probe our awareness into both outer and inner realms revealing our subconscious and psyche in more ways than can be done by mere analytic exercises. For to be aware of something is to be able to exert your will upon it.

We could argue then that mediation is an expansive exercise used inwardly or outwardly. Thus bringing the whole thing to a close saying that mediation can be best described as a method to use your mind in relation to your own awareness rather than your own objective reality.

I think this is a very interesting subject.

It is interesting to note that some places teach specific techniques for meditation, but some places teach a meditative absorption in whatever task you are undertaking. My thoughts are that our minds are constantly pulled here and there and we rarely reside in the present. Using meditation techniques allows us to quiet the frantic ramblings of our mind and come to a quiet place of residing in the present moment in its fullness.

On the contrary, the meditative states are very real, as thousands of practitioners can testify. They take many years of training to achieve, depending on the technique used. Some students can catch a glimpse the first state, Pratyahara, within a couple years. Others take several years. Most people either have bad training regimens or do not have the discipline to get this far, and that's why many meditators do not reach them.

You have to realize that the meditative states are talked about in virtually every mystical religious sect. Sufis, gnostics, tantrics, buddhists, hindus, theurgists/magicians, the daoists, many martial artists in Chi Kung, all have experienced them and wrote about them. They happen independently of religion. That's why so many Christian mystics, even - St. Theresa of Avila, Emanuel Swodenberg, etc. - all entered samadhi like states and had no idea what was going on. They had never studied yoga, but they entered those states.

The meditative states are very distinct phenomena. You have no doubt that something very strange just happened, even in the first stage. In Pratyahara, your senses withdraw from your body so that you cannot really perceive anything outside of your body, and your mind becomes almost impeccably still. The blood withdraws to the core of the body and the brain, so much so that if a person is poked with a needle on their limbs, no blood will come out. The heartbeat slows down so much that it is almost imperceptible. The body grows pale. The breathing becomes so slow that it is imperceptible, and someone who perceived you would think you are somewhere between dead and asleep. In my school, we are taught to only do deep meditations under a locked room at this point, since to any other person, you essentially look and feel dead.

In truth, you cannot even know what it means to meditate until you can enter dhyana. The later state, samadhi is the beginning of yoga and the beginning of magic. When you experience these states, you realize that the mystics weren't crazy, and that therefore, there's more to life than you ever imagined. If they were right about these states, you wonder, how much more could they be right about?

Meditation is about much more than will. In Samadhi, you "wake up" from the dream so to say, and see that everything is really just a meditation projected by one infinite consciousness. There is no differentiation between "you" and any other person, or any other thing in the universe; they all are just holograms created by "God." The reason meditation is so powerful is that it is the means by which your higher self projects your lower self into existence, and it is the means by which the infinite consciousness projects everything in the universe into existence. To meditate is to imitate the gods.