Your Mental Meditation Equipment

Meditation begins with our perceptions and judgments of the world. 
We perceive the world through five senses: sight, sound, taste, smell, and tactile feeling.

The limitations of these physical senses necessarily limit our ability to gather information about the world. Using the mind, we judge the world based on what we perceive; we think about the facts and make decisions. Integration depends on things we cannot perceive with the ordinary senses.

We live within the unified system we call the body, and this system is connected to other systems. (For example, you are one member of your family system.) We depend on, are affected by, and respond to many factors within the body that we can't experience through the ordinary senses. (Pulse rate, for example, is something we can readily experience, but generally, blood pressure is not.)

How can we relate to these factors? 
We have three methods of gathering information beyond the senses.

1. We use tools and machines to take measurements for us. We don't need meditation for this one, although meditation in some form was probably involved in the creation of the tool or machine.
2. We use our minds to gather information through thought. Once we have gathered the sensory data, we engage in a thought process designed to make sense of the data—to put it in order or organize it in a useful way. Much of our day-to-day problem solving involves this mental process of examination and sorting. Critical evaluation can then occur.
3. We also gather information through contemplative practice, or the resting of the mind. The process of meditation often focuses the mind on one thing— mantra (words) or yantra (visual image) or the breath—to the exclusion of other thoughts. A sort of ritual process is used to get the mind to go in a specified direction. Some meditative practices deliberately clear the mind of thoughts as completely as possible. 

 While we are all familiar with basic ways to let machines gather information and register it in useful ways, we often forget that we can simply relax and allow our minds to scan remembered information and reorganize it. Even less are we able to use our minds to gather information from outside the stores of "normal" memory.

We think of scientists as using method number one (1) from above, and philosophers as tending toward method number two(2). The third method(3) is often ignored. Yet Ken Wilber, a leading writer in the transpersonal psychology field, makes a case that all three methods are valid in their own ways.

Each of the three modes of knowing, then, has access to real (experiential) data in their respective realms—to sensible data, intelligible data, and transcendental data— and the data in each case is marked by its immediate or intuitive apprehension.

 We all learn the first way to relate to the world; we use our senses or we gather sensory data from machines. Most of us also learn some theory and philosophy of subjects that interest us, so we are familiar with the second method as well.

However, relatively few of us are taught how to gather and evaluate transcendental data. 
Western religions tend to "can" such information and spoon-feed it to us as though it were scientifically proven fact, when it is no such thing. In Mission of the University, Spanish author and philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset states,

"There is no cogent reason why the ordinary man needs or ought to be a scientist."

He suggests that we should learn about the physical scheme of our work, themes of organic life, processes of the human species, and finally the plan of the Universe.Note that he presumes there is such a plan.

Many religions tell us that the plan can be understood through contemplative practice, but you do not need to engage in organized religion in order to gather information about the world.

Ken Wilber addresses the question of purpose in our lives in the following way:

The basic Nature of human beings... is ultimate Wholeness.
This is eternally and timelessly so—that is, true from the beginning, true to the end, and most importantly, true right now, moment to moment to moment. This ever-present and ultimate Wholeness, as it appears in men and women, we call Atman (after the Hindus), or Buddha Nature (after the Buddhists), or Tao, or Spirit, or Consciousness (super-consciousness), or ... God.