(Depicted above is the Christ mosaic icon in the Church of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey)
People meditate for different reasons. Orthodox solitaries meditate to become one with Christ. Eastern yogis meditate to achieve an elevated awareness. While they differ in destinations, the journey is similar. In a nutshell, meditation is to clear the mind of distractions from the past so it can focus on the present.
Some people report seeing light with their eyes closed (whether during a meditation or not). This phenomenon is called phosphenes. The eye contains pigments that absorb light but can also emit light in the dark, since the black body is both a good absorber and emitter. Another theory is that phosphenes is caused by metabolic stimulations of the retina and visual neurons. This is like camera noise. There is nothing magical about this, but it can be a distraction from meditation.
Mind works like a computer in many ways. You think by traversing the connections from one piece of knowledge to another. Every time you access some knowledge, you bring it closer so it is easier to reach the next time. But your mind could be preoccupied by the clutter of knowledge that you have brought closer to your attention, even if you don’t need them anymore. This is like having many open tabs in your browser. You have to close them, or they take up valuable computer memory which slows everything down, and the tabs become harder to find.
Normally, sleep is the process where the brain performs a mental reset much like how computers do garbage collection. However, when the mind is too cluttered, sometimes people have trouble falling asleep. Or sleep could take too much time in the middle of a busy working day. If you are a working professional going from meeting to meeting, you only have a few minutes which is not enough time to sleep. Meditation can be as short or as long as you want, while having conscious control over the process.
Meditation is the process for the brain to consciously expunge concerns that no longer apply. It is like mentally crossing out items in a TODO list that are no longer applicable in the current context, even if they are not necessarily done. I’ve found that writing down things in my mind is a great way to put my mind at ease. Otherwise, these things can linger in the mind and cause anxiety unless you identify them and put them to rest. You get anxiety when there is something important you have to remember.
Because meditation is a memory-searching activity, there is a danger for the brain to get into a psychosis where the consciousness becomes so deeply entrenched in the memory and becomes detached from reality, like getting stuck in a bad dream. This can be triggered by finding or reliving a feeling or experience, to a point that the brain would get stuck and unable to make progress. This is like rolling a bowling ball down a cobblestone street, and it gets caught in one of the crevices. You have to give it a kick so it keeps moving.
If you allow yourself to indulge in psychosis, it induces a feedback loop in which certain memories are reinforced but in a pathological way. In a mild case, this can be like autism where the person becomes overwhelmed and irritable from any sensory input. In the severe case, it can be like a seizure where brain neurons fire uncontrollably.
Therefore, the key of the meditation is to find the memory and “let go.” It does’t mean forgetting it, but just acknowledge that it is no longer urgent and move onto something else. After the purge, you will be rewarded by being able to focus on what is truly important.
“And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.”——Matthew 6:7.