An imaginary conversation discussing a real post
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Meditation Involves all Three Podcast
Pip: Sat Sangha Salon — where the questions are ancient and the answers keep arriving fresh, usually before breakfast.
Mara: Today we’re working through a piece by Purushottama on what meditation actually is — how concentration, contemplation, and dhyana relate to each other, and what it takes for awareness to find its own ground.
Pip: Let’s start with how those three stages fit together.
Meditation Involves all Three
Mara: The post opens with a distinction Osho draws between concentration, contemplation, and meditation — but the real claim here is that all three aren’t competing alternatives. They’re a sequence, a natural progression that unfolds within a single sitting.
Pip: And the writer lays out exactly where each stage lives. Here’s the spine of it: “This watching without any involvement at all is what I am referring to as dhyana, as meditation. In this watching there is more self-awareness than identification hence I am able to watch without involvement.”
Mara: So the upshot is that dhyana isn’t a separate technique you switch into — it’s what concentration and contemplation are building toward. Each stage increases self-awareness and loosens identification until the watcher can simply remain on the bank.
Pip: The river metaphor does a lot of work here — you’re not stopping the current, you’re just refusing to jump in. Which sounds effortless until you’ve spent twenty minutes narrating your own grocery list.
Mara: Right, and the post is honest about that friction. Contemplation is described as “a continual movement from being aware to being lost in thought, remembering and again lost into the stream of thought.” The re-membering — spelled out with a hyphen — is doing something deliberate there: rejoining awareness, piece by piece.
Pip: What strikes me is the practical instruction buried in the final section. You don’t start from some ideal state — you start from wherever you actually are. Chaotic and scattered? Begin with concentration. Already thinking hard about a problem? That’s contemplation — you can work with it.
Mara: And the post follows that logic all the way through. When watching becomes truly non-involved, thought doesn’t get suppressed — it subsides on its own. The interference itself, the grasping and rejecting and judging, is what keeps the stream moving. Remove that, and the witness is what remains: “awareness aware of itself.”
Pip: Three stages, one ground. The architecture was always there — the sitting just maps it.
Mara: What stays with me is the idea that you begin from wherever you are — not from some prepared, settled place.
Pip: Awareness finding its own address. We’ll keep following that thread next time.
Here you can listen to the podcast on Youtube.
and Here is the original Post from Purushottama, Meditation Inovles all three.
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