Hi Harry,
It's not meditation what really matters. As you said in your blog, everybody meditates, even a merchant running a business.
What really matters is discipline and perseverance. Even the simplest monk have to pray three times in a day.
When you have a daily discipline you are actually, indeed, into the path, even if you pass some days.
Meditation is simple, it have some levels: Stilling, Focusing, Concentration, Meditation, Contemplation, Illumination, Ecstasy or Beatitude.
Stilling must be physical, meaning the posture, as well as emotional and mental. It is a matter of posture, physical as much as emotional and mental. Implies to hush the desire. Focusing is reached only after some basic stilling, and basically it is the direction that will be followed in the subsequent meditative process. Having a clear direction we will reach the necessary concentration to meditate in the required direction. This meditation can be invocative or evocative; and can be practiced with seed or without seed. Invocative meditation generally is a call, a burning aspiration for answer to that we can not see or perceive, and the evocative meditation has to be mostly with our memories and regards. Is a sort of recapitulation. And if it have seed or not is not important at all as it have a direction. Contemplation, o Samadhi, or Satori, or The Voice Of Silence, is a prize to an achievement, a hard work. Illumination and the consequent Beatitude are the culmination of the process, are beyond reach of the beginner and definitively, with no doubt, transitory states, leading us to a new cycle, a new birth in other much bigger reality. Like The Peace, they can only be reached in a temporary way.
As you meditate you will acquire a comprehension and every comprehension brings with it a vision. A clear sign of lack of comprehension is the critic. Critic is always the product of the lack of comprehension.
Patanjali defines it in the Second Book of the "Yoga Sutras" of Patanjali, where he describes the "Eight Methods of Yoga", namely, Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dyana and Samadhi.
Yama are the five commandment, Niyama are the five rules, Asana is the position -physica, emotional and mental-, Pranayama is the control of your vital forces, Pratyahara is abstraction, kind of concentration, Dharana is focused atention, Dyana is meditation itself, and Samadhi is contemplation, a a great achievement.
Some masters says that you will know the degree of development of someone by the velocity of his mind. As fast as they are, more primal.
At the end, the ultimate goal of meditation is to put your brain under the service of your soul; and spirit, becoming a channel for the spiritual will (Lord, your will, not mine).
