Meditation can flower only in deep relaxation: relaxation is the right soil for meditation to happen. Remember, meditation is not concentration. Concentration is a strain: it can’t be relaxed, it is tension. It cannot be restful. Concentration means that you are focusing your mind’s energies onto one point, excluding everything else.
It is a great effort, and tiring. It is useful in science. Science functions through concentration because science never goes beyond mind. And mind functions at its highest peak and pitch when it is concentrated naturally, because all the energies become pooled at one point.
Religion is an effort to go beyond the mind, so concentration is of no help there. Hence concentration and meditation are not synonymous. Not only are they not synonymous, they are polar opposites of each other.
Meditation means a totally relaxed state, so relaxed that the mind melts. Just as in concentration it becomes stronger and stronger the more concentrated it is, the stronger it is relaxation it becomes weaker and weaker because nothing is excluded, all is included. There is no strain, no tens there is no need. There is no need because you are not trying to focus yourself. You are simply available and open. That availability, that openness to existence is a very restful, relaxed background.
So whenever you have time, relax. And just be alert about all that is happening around: the dog barking in the distance, the neighbors quarreling, the traffic noise… Nothing should be taken as a distraction. In meditation nothing is a distraction; distraction can only be there if you are trying to concentrate. Of course, if you are trying to concentrate, then anything that disturbs you is a distraction. But in meditation there is no possibility of distraction because in the first place we are not trying to concentrate at all. So nothing can disturb, and nothing can distract; all is absorbed.
In that openness, mind slowly starts disappearing, evaporating, and a few glimpses of no-mind start arriving. Those are great experiences, and slowly, slowly, one day it happens that you know you are out of the mind; completely out of the mind. You have gone beyond.
