17 Revolutionary Reasons Why You Should Prioritize Meditation

You’re about to find a whole lot of inner bliss

Scientists have been practically whacking us all on the head with their compelling research papers on the benefits of meditation.

Why don’t we listen? And if we do, why don’t we stick to it long enough?

It’s not because we lack resources, leisure time, or interest.

We lack role models: success stories that directly inspire us with the human mind’s possibilities.

Proof, direct and incontrovertible, that meditation is something serious enough to put on a pedestal in our lives.

I do not claim to be an inner role model. But I am literally writing to you from the middle of a forest!

I’ve got one of the last truly contemplative careers left, as a solitary wildfire watchtower lookout. Suffice to say, it’s impossible to be one without relying on the power of meditation.

The following is what I try to remember whenever I return to “the real world.”

1. Mindfulness develops the way a Redwood grows.

Moment by moment, until it’s utterly monumental.

Towering over all smaller phenomena, until a true sense of perspective is gained.

There is no “fast” switch, no button to upgrade it instantly.

It grows in the way all great things do: subtly and steadily. Which also reveals something huge: it’s so much easier than you think.

You just need to commit yourself to it, and keep doing so.

2. Inner dignity requires this.

If your inner world remains ruled by unknowing, any idiotic occurrence in the world can push it around.

You remain a slave to your environment, until you separate the witness from the witnessed.

When you know that you are the knower, and not the known, and can abide in that irreversibly, you can do anything.

Because it won’t affect what you truly are!

3. Don’t send yourself to jail.

When something terrible emerges from your mind, you get defiled by it — rather than purifying it with pure, detached, flaming wisdom awareness.

The moment we identify, we become an accomplice in the crime scene.

So let it liberate itself. Retain your innocence!

4. Do it for global warming.

The easiest way for us to attain a steady-state economy is simple.

Less delusional consumerism. Which can only happen if we finally tap into renewable inner joy — and then inspire others to do likewise.

5. Every great thinker converges here.

Pythagoras was convinced that reincarnation was real. So were early Christians, Sufis, esoteric Jews, and the whole of Dharmic & Daoist spirituality.

Even modern scientists have fairly damming anecdotal evidence that people return, and in rare cases, remember.

So the work you put into forging your awareness is never lost.

Your wealth, relationships, and belongings are. Every single time.

So what’s more worth investing your energy into?

6. Real meditation happens off-cushion.

Our inner garbage comes up to trigger us not because evolution hates us.

It’s because this life of yours is a training ground for consciousness. Each trigger is a chance to grow higher. To tackle the roots of mental illness, rather than sink. And the best way to prepare yourself?

Vaccinate yourself against them by experiencing how they arise, abide, and pass away during meditation.

7. Find the real ecstasy.

There are plenty of ways to experience bliss, calm, and stability. So why train attention to the point of altering the brain’s chemical behaviour?

Simple. You have a higher motivation to attain permanent well-being, not short-term psychedelic-style bliss.

Meditation trains you to notice the former. The world brainwashes you to chase the latter. Eudemonia vs. Hedonia.

To access inner jewels, you have to mine for them a little.

8. You’re sure to lose your mind one day.

Your coarse mind, anyways. It dissolves with your body after death, in this regard, there is no “reincarnation” of your unique personality.

Merely a subtle continuum of consciousness, containing the seed-imprints of all the actions you’ve performed, is what continues.

You may as well prepare for the one chance you’ll get, after your dissolution, for spontaneous awakening without obstacles.

And that can only happen if you’re familiar with how to let go of the mind’s chatter & abide in a station that is higher.

Meditation is the only way to prepare yourself for death.

9. In a pet store, don’t let your dog off the leash.

As soon as we emerge from our cushion, an array of stimuli beckon to restart our patterns of grasping.

This is in fact the greatest opportunity to progress that you’ll ever get.

Especially if your meditation hits plateaus often.

You can give the mind a task to do; an object to anchor on, so your mind’s rays do not scatter all their momentum built during cultivation.

Most of us simply let the puppy wander, and inevitably, it gets hurt.

How can such a thing ever grow enough to be able to liberate us?

10. Build muscles to row upstream.

Up all your streams that have ever existed! Evolution is noticing outwardly; involution is controlling the mind, enough to upgrade inwardly.

And it takes repetitive practice. Just as you can’t learn how to infuse the right emotions into a sonata or speak to someone in a tone you’re not used to.

But what could be more worthwhile than consciously influencing yourself, rather than unconsciously getting conditioned?

11. Get past the waves, and you’ll notice the ripples.

There is so much you can feel after you actually reach that level of sensitivity to your inner state that you can control it (somewhat).

I won’t spoil it for you. But just know that the joy of eating healthy and exercising is like a speck of dust in the face of mental cleanliness, and inner bliss on tap. When you overcome the addiction to strong, coarse emotions, a whole universe of subtler enjoyment becomes possible.

12. How much does your mind actually hold?

The brain’s capacity to retain date is in the Petabyte range. But that fancy word is impersonal.

Let’s just consider how entire libraries were memorized by ancient scholars in India, which transitioned from a memorized-oral culture into a written one only with the arrival of the Buddha.

Even long after that, in Tibet, monks and nuns would memorize long texts of philosophy from a young age. Not for contests like the Western “spelling bee.” But to awaken their human potential.

Meditation forces you to memorize the instructions for it.

The steps to get there, all the tricks to keep it going, and deepen it.

Most importantly, it trains you to recall what you need to know, exactly when you need it.

If being a high-functioning living supercomputer is the goal, meditation is its operating system!

13. Why sell weapons to your enemies?

When your awareness gets trapped in passing events— worry, fear, hatred, lust, laziness, or rumination — the emotions get strengthened.

If you egolessly observe it, from the higher perspective of the witness consciousness, the seen remains the seen.

The seer finally has some dignity. And that gives rise to the bliss of freedom!

14. There’s a cleansing you can never buy.

Few people know the bliss of eudaemonia that can be summoned at will. Simply because they consider an imbalanced mind to be “normal.”

The great Tibetan teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche once said: to succeed in meditation, simply stop tolerating the mental imbalances.

Commit to inner cleanliness: a steady, radiantly vivid calm of mind.

One which can’t fall into excited distraction, or lazy sinking.

No treatment or spa can perform this purification for you. And the feeling of wellness that comes with it isn’t a one-time deal.

Because at every step, you learn to make a different inner choice!

15. There’s a bliss you can never sell.

What if you had access to energy that inspired such creativity it flooded all corners of your life with abundance?

The floodgates are the same things preventing your meditation from going well — the tendencies to contract consciousness.

This is the secret which few fully take to heart, let alone fully apply.

16. Your sleep could cause enlightenment!

There is no difference between thoughts and perceptions bubbling up, whether we’re awake or asleep. They are subconscious contents that grab us, coloring the lens of our witness awareness.

This is why the great yogis of the past have explained that ordinary people ‘sleep with their eyes open.’

But if you commit to keeping the light of awareness on whilst your body & mind drift off, something big happens!

The dream becomes clearer. Until you recognize it for what it is. And this carries forward into the waking state, too.

But the only way to make sleep conscious is to infuse more awareness into your mind — primarily by growing it during meditation.

17. The stars were a mystery, until we looked deeply.

What makes you think your mind is a mystery, that awareness can never be known?

Millions of meditators across the history of India, Tibet, China, Mongolia, Indonesia, and Japan succeeded. And so will you.

All you need to do is get familiar with the process.

Even the word for meditation in Tibetan means to familiarize! Because you can’t know something unless you look at it long enough.

Why should studying consciousness, the frontier inward, be any different than exploring the galactic space outwards?

Society, as a whole, has not transformed.

Even when faced with doomsday reports.

The reason we can’t take wisdom to heart is because we’ve been brainwashed into keeping knowledge in our heads.

And meditation is the one thing you simply can’t do by living within the mind.

So if you want to help the world, in the specific way your gifts allow you to, there’s no choice but to become an efficient catalyst.

You start that by making your mind the most frictionless tool at your disposal!