I meditate, once a week in a group with a fine teacher, and every day in the early morning and early evening, dawn and dusk, those two times I have always thought magic and not to be missed.
The religious traditions of West and East recognize these as sacred time, times of prayer, the fading of dark and the coming of light, sunrise; the fading of light at end of day, sunset, homecoming, the hearth where we tell and listen to stories.
Frederick Buechner, in the following passage, draws a distinction between diffused and focused consciousness, and identifies the latter with his experience of meditation. In my own experience, meditation draws upon both kinds of consciousness, or perhaps better said, upon a range of ways of being in the world. I do enjoy Buechner's likening the mind to a balloon, and the experience of meditation is often as he describes — oneness, pervasive lovingkindness, no watcher, no watched, all subject, no object. There is only a rose, a fire, and then "the fire and the rose are one."
Ultimately there is only one, called by many names and none. T.S. Eliot, at the end of his masterpiece, Four Quartets,
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Meditation
When not focusing on anything in particular, the mind skitters around mindlessly among whatever thoughts happen to present themselves. To think is to direct the mind in a more or less systematic way along a specific sequence of thoughts toward a specific end. To meditate is to open the mind to a single thought until it fills the mind so completely that there is no room left for anything else. If you compare the mind to a balloon, meditation as a religious technique is the process of inflating it with a single thought to the point where the balloon finally bursts and there is no longer even the thinnest skin between what is inside it and what is outside it. The thinker and the thought become one in much the same way that if you concentrate long enough on watching a fire burn, after a while the distinction between you as the one that is watching and the fire as the one that is being watched disappears, and you yourself burst into flames.
Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations