“The important lesson learned through persistent meditation is that the process of uncovering your true self never ends so long as you are alive. The mind doesn’t stop; when it does, life ends. But when we meditate, the mind does slow down a bit. When it slows down, you can look around and see entirely new things. Imagine trying to sightsee from a train going 500mph. You can’t make out anything; you’re passing by too quickly. Slow the train down and your observations become more acute. Your entire mode of perception becomes clearer.
Lao Tzu wrote in his Tao Te Ching, ‘Do you have the patience to wait until the mud settles and the water is clear?’ This is a wonderful summation of the effect of meditation. You do not know what rests at the bottom of the pond if you’ve been spending your whole life shaking up the water. You also don’t know the depth of the pond itself. Hint— it’s deep.
We never quite get to the bottom of the mind. We never touch the Earth’s crust through the muck in the depths of the pond. We’re not supposed to. We’re just creatures, after all. We live a short time on Earth and then we disappear.
What meditation does is train us to look around just a little more carefully. It helps us see subtle associations and distant connections that otherwise might go unnoticed. This happens more and more over time and thus our understanding of life (and what lies beneath) completely transforms.”
medium.com, “Correcting the Mind,” Charles Ambler.