Meditation Techniques

What meditation technique is most useful for spiritual enlightenment?

Enlightenment has four doors. Each door is associated with a practice or core idea. All doors lead to the same goal, so you can pick whichever one you like.

1. The front door. This is the path of attainment.

Focus on a meditation object to stabilize your attention. When you arrive at spacious clarity, abide there. Gradually, you will realize this is your true nature, your true home.

Each shovelful of earth is the full treasure, and love also deepens with practice.

2. The side door. This is the path of acceptance.

Accept the present moment exactly as it is. You don’t have to accept unethical behavior or preventable tragedies. Merely accept this moment, without trying to change it or yourself.

Extricate yourself from your hankering to get somewhere or achieve some state or condition.

Sitting, to the marrow free of seeking, is a dandy way thus to find that which can only be found by sitting, free of seeking.

- Jundo Cohen

3. The back door. This is the path of surrender.

Give the whole hot mess to God or the supreme being of your understanding.

A passenger on a train keeps his luggage on his head by his own folly. Let him put it down: he will find it reaches the destination all the same. Similarly, let us resign ourselves to the guiding Power.

- Ramana Maharishi

4. The doorless door. This is the path of realization.

Realization is a heavy term, but it indicates something simple and fundamental - an aha moment of total relief, like duh, I left my car keys in the freezer.

All doors are the same door, and there is no door, as we are already inside.

You speak as though you are here, and the Self is somewhere else, and you have to go and reach it.

But the Self is here and now; you are always it.

It is like being here and asking the way to the ashram, then complaining that each one shows a different path.

You are That which alone is and has always been.

The state we call realization is simply being one’s self, not knowing anything or becoming anything.

We loosely speak of realization, for want of a better term.

- Ramana Maharishi