Greetings vajra,

One could answer your questions with your own sentences, just slightly rearranged. I'll paraphrase, but it's the same thing:

In these times many people are cocooning themselves ever more heavily--there's alot to defend against! Even when we choose to participate in spiritual circles, we may come with our cocoons. Our egos may think that any spiritual development is a result of self-endeavor, rather than the grace of God coming through.  And
Meditation is a communion with God's Grace that will open the cocoon's gaps ever wider, but it takes time that many do not have or think they can prioritize .
We rely on words but cannot verbally explain the wonder revealed in meditation, so we resort to discussing the goldfish bowl.
Fortunately for us, whatever practices we do to exercise our spirit are helpful. 

Bets

I suppose, Vajra, that meditation is like many other activities, that the greatest benefit is derived when it is practiced regularly. Practicing anything regularly is a kind of discipline, and we are just not there yet where this kind of activity is respected as much as some others. It can be perceived by the non-meditator as a seemingly unproductive activity which requires a quiet place. That in itself is simply an annoyance to some. To become comfortable with silence...Dave said that is a lowest level experience in meditation, but to my way of thinking, to release all the chatter in one's mind is quite a leap of imagination...to let go...

It is like swinging on the trapeze until you are ready to make the voyage...?

Many people still have unexplained fears around meditation, also. And it really is difficult to lay out the benefits very well or coherently...it can sound odd or medicinal, somehow...and it doesn't really help anyone when we say things like "you just had to be there" which is all we can find to say sometimes to recommend the thing!

But it is fantastic, and health and happiness bringing to any individual, and methods are varied enough for anyone to find a way that works for them. This site has opened my mind to a bottomless well of seemingly endless experiences and advantages to purposeful and exploratory meditation. In that respect, this site is highly unusual for me along my own path.

love, blink

Thanks for the replies guys. It's maybe worth offering some suggestions for anybody that might have an interest in learning to meditate.

First off it was a life saver for me. It initially created some peace in a stressed out mind. (in my twenties and early thirties I thought I was a ruler of all I surveyed in the corporate world, by my mid thirties I was a stressed out wreck with chronic fatigue and convinced I was a failure....) It  subsequently helped me to get through quite serious illness with minimum upset. More recently it's started to produce some real opening and change, as well as making possible some experience I'd have been very sceptical about 20yrs ago.

I guess we're not all born gifted like many here!!

I'm personally convinced of the view that it's the (essential/only) tool to accelerate spiritual opening. Life does this  anyway, but meditation creates the space and openness needed for us to really learn from our life experience. Without meditation our perception risks remaining so focused on maintaining the ego's line   that we tend only too see what we want to see. We can learn and intellectualise all we like about spiritual stuff too, but it won't significantly change us - we remain theoreticians as opposed to practitioners.

Most who have experienced serious illness or been around death will have experienced the way the house of cards collapses and things often look very different after the immediate and overwhelming reality has forced us to drop the pretentious ego driven rubbish.

The easiest way to get going is probably to join a class. It's maybe best to go for one of the established traditions, as they teach proven methods. There's lots of varieties, but I can vouch personally for Tibetan Buddhism as mixing great compassion, wisdom and expertise with 100% absence of specifically religious teaching at this level.

Shamatha (calm abiding) is the basic form first taught in Tibetan Buddhism.

The Shambhala organisation http://www.shambhala.org/ is good in that it's initial training levels teach only method and it's style is contemporary, light and focused on living in the world. Zen is a little more forbidding given the Japanese style emphasis on formality. Either way don't be put off by the traditional iconography - it's no more than that.

Some reading is a good idea too - there's lots of books out there. Something like Josepth Goldstein's 'Insight Meditation, The Practice of Freedom' (Newleaf/Gill & McMillan) contains both sitting instruction and essential philosphical background. It's available as an audiobook on CD too. But be aware that as Dave says it's not really possible to convey the total reality, so most teaching focuses on physical posture and philosophical underpinnings and the like and tends not to say too much about internal experience.

Pema Chodron's CD 'Getting Unstuck' has some good stuff in the first few tracks on what the beginner meditator may experience, and how to relate to it.

Something like Daniel Goleman's 'Meditative Mind' (Thorsons/Harper Collins) describes the various stages of meditation that Dave mentioned in academic terms, but does not teach them - higher teaching really only become comprehensible to a trained mind - when the student has reached the stage of being ready.

I started to meditate from a book, and only after several years attended classes. The resulting independence has meant that despite several changes of tradition early on the meditation never stopped.

The game is to establish a regular daily practice as a part of your lifestyle. It requires a fair amount of determination to stick with at first, and eventually moves out to underpin your default state of mind in normal life.

It can produce results in weeks, but it's looking back over years where the real change becomes evident - you've somehow become something else without actually noticing the transition on a day to day basis.

In the words of the title of another Pema Chodrom CD title - 'It's up to You....