An Extract from: Meditating
From the Introduction

Meditation is the practical application of this simple idea: that satisfaction, happiness, absorption, is not the end-product of some gratifying thing or experience, but a way of going about things. Happiness is something we bring to life, not something life delivers to us. This may sound like a nice idea, but it is a profoundly strange one. It suggests that we can develop the state of absorption we call happiness independently of whether or not we find ourselves in happy circumstances. And this is where meditation comes in. We can discover happiness as a resource for the service of the life around us rather than devoting our life to the vain pursuit of problem-free happiness.

The purpose of meditation is not to free the self from an unsatisfactory world so much as to free the world. It helps us simply to inhabit the real world instead of semi-consciously inhabiting our own world inside the 'outside' world and muddling up the two. It is only in the full presence of the inner world that
the outer world can be fully present to us.

The experience of feeling disconnected from things, from other people, from a deeper appreciation of the world around us, is in reality the experience of a disconnected self. The faster our minds flick from one channel of our experience to another, looking for something sufficiently gripping to hold our attention, the more fragmentary and superficial that experience tends to be.

This vampiric searching for nourishment from the life around us is essentially unconscious. In Dracula, the sinister count is recognized as a vampire by the fact that he has no reflection in a mirror; his nature is that he never sees himself. He is also immortal – he has refused the gift of impermanence – but his fear of loss, of disconnection, actually disconnects him from life and light. And only two things will reduce him to a handful of dust: exposing him to daylight or driving a stake through his heart. To put it less drastically, the life drained of meaning that he symbolizes is vulnerable to the light of awareness, and the opening of the heart. And the two basic practices of Buddhist meditation I shall be introducing in this book are concerned with cultivating these qualities of awareness and open-heartedness.

Both are straightforward exercises for ordinary life. However, I have raised the image of Count Dracula in his life or death struggle with his old adversary, Dr Van Helsing, in order to emphasize that meditation represents something quite compromising, a radical change of direction for the psyche. At the same time, this profound change of direction involves a patient acceptance, an openness, a great tenderness towards our own states of mind as they start to reveal themselves to us in meditation. In traditional Buddhist terms, wisdom comes with an equally uncompromising compassion, which excludes no one, not even ourselves.