2026-04-18  ·  meditation · vedanta · buddhi · manas · yoga · moksha · abhyasa

A Bad Explanation of Meditation

A side-effect tour of the oldest technology for knowing God

HS  ·  Charika Mag

Somewhere in a meditation class, right now, someone is watching their breath and wondering if they are doing it right. The teacher has explained the benefits. Focus. Calm. Presence. A kind of softness around the sharp edges of daily life. And the student is watching their breath, and the breath is going in and the breath is going out, and their mind has drifted to whether they left the stove on, and they have pulled it back, and now it has drifted to a conversation from two days ago, and they have pulled it back again. And somewhere in the back of their mind sits a question that never gets answered: how is this working, exactly?

It is the same question I had for years.

When you walk into a gym and pick up a dumbbell, you can trace the chain. You force your muscles to do work they are not comfortable doing. The fibres tear at a microscopic level. The body repairs them stronger than before. You do this repeatedly, progressively, over months and years. You do not have to be a doctor to understand what is happening. The mechanism is visible, logical, almost mechanical. You can see the cause. You can see the effect. You can trace the path between them without a gap.

With meditation, I could never find that path.

I knew the benefits. Focus. Reduced stress. Presence. More of yourself in the room. All true. But when I pushed for the how, how exactly does sitting still with your eyes closed and watching your breath produce a calmer, sharper, more directed person, I kept finding more benefits listed where the answer should have been. The logical thread connecting the practice to the result was not there.

I spent a long time looking for it. In the foundational texts on meditation. In Swami Vivekananda's lectures and writings. In the talks of Swami Sarvapriyananda. What follows is what I found.

I am calling this a bad explanation, and I mean it. Because I am going to do the same thing: focus on the side effects of meditation rather than the real goal. But I will try to do it with a logical sequence intact, so that when you sit down to practice and ask how this is working, you have a thread to hold onto.

What This Is Actually About

Before we get to the mechanism, we have to be honest about the goal. Because the goal shapes everything.

Meditation is not for focus. It is not for peace of mind. It is not for better sleep, reduced stress, improved clarity, or the particular softness that comes over you after a long session. All of those things happen. But they are not the point.

The point of meditation, in the tradition from which it comes, is one thing: to realise God. To move toward Moksha. To close the distance between the individual self and the universal Self. Yoga, in its classical sense, means union. Union with Brahman. That is what the rishis and sages of this country were working toward when they developed these practices across thousands of years. They were not building a wellness toolkit. They were mapping the terrain of consciousness in its full depth, and finding a path all the way to the end of it.

Swami Vivekananda, whose commentary on Raja Yoga remains one of the most lucid accounts of meditative practice in any language, leaves no room for ambiguity on this point. "God alone is our goal," he writes. "Failing to reach God, we die." That is not a metaphor. That is the tradition speaking plainly about what it considers the only problem worth solving.

I say this not to make meditation sound inaccessible. I say it because when you know what something is actually for, you understand it differently. The practice makes more sense. The difficulty makes more sense. The reason it takes years, sometimes decades, makes more sense. You are not optimising your mornings. You are working on the deepest problem a human being can work on.

With that said: here is a bad explanation of how it works.

A Map of the Interior

To understand what meditation is training, you first have to understand what is being trained.

The human constitution, as the tradition describes it, is not just the body you can see. There are three bodies layered inside each other, each more subtle than the last.

The first is the Sthūla Śarīra, the gross body. The physical body. The one you can touch, the one that gets hungry and tired, the one that will eventually be returned to the earth. You are already familiar with this one.

The second is the Sūkṣma Śarīra, the subtle body. This is the mental body. It carries your thoughts, your emotions, your memories, your habits, the mood that arrives with no explanation on a Tuesday afternoon. It does not have a physical address, but it is the site of most of what you experience as your life. When the physical body dies, the subtle body carries forward.

The third is the Kāraṇa Śarīra, the causal body. The seed. The latent structure from which the other two emerge. We will not spend time here today.

Inside the subtle body is what the tradition calls the Antahkaran, अंतःकरण, the inner instrument. It has four parts.

Manas (मनस्) is the mind. The cogitating faculty. The part that receives sensory input, generates thoughts, carries doubt, swings between options, and cannot stay in one place for long. Manas is not bad. It is an instrument. But left to itself, it does what instruments do without a hand guiding them: it drifts, vibrates, and follows whatever pulls at it most strongly.

Buddhi (बुद्धि) is the intellect, but more precisely it is the will. Swami Vivekananda is deliberate about this distinction. Buddhi is not merely the thinking faculty; it is the determining faculty, the faculty that decides, directs, and sustains. It is the part of you that knows what you should do. That distinguishes right from wrong, the momentary from the lasting. That can see beyond the immediate pull of sensation to the larger arc of a life. Your intellect knows you should wake up early. Your intellect knows you should not eat the thing. Your intellect knows the work needs to get done. That is Buddhi. That is the will.

Ahamkāra (अहंकार) is the ego, the I-maker. The part that takes ownership: my body, my thoughts, my feelings, my life. It is the function that identifies the eternal, witness-like Atman with the limited, temporary instruments through which it operates.

Chitta (चित्त) is the storehouse. Memory, impressions, the accumulated residue of all past experience. Vivekananda calls it "the sea in which the various faculties are waves." Every thought, every action, every habit leaves a trace in the Chitta. Those traces, over time, form channels. And the mind flows naturally through whatever channels are deepest.

For the purpose of understanding meditation, the two that matter most right now are Manas and Buddhi. The mind and the will.

And the best way to understand how they relate is in the Katha Upanishad, one of the ten principal Upanishads, in a passage that has stood as the central map of human psychology in the Vedantic tradition for thousands of years.

आत्मानँ रथितं विद्धि शरीरँ रथमेव तु ।
बुद्धिं तु सारथिं विद्धि मनः प्रग्रहमेव च ॥

ātmānam̐ rathitaṃ viddhi śarīram̐ rathameva tu
buddhiṃ tu sārathiṃ viddhi manaḥ pragrahameva ca

Know the Atman as the lord of the chariot, the body as only the chariot, Buddhi as the charioteer, Manas as the reins.

The full mapping: Atman is the rider, the silent witness sitting in the chariot. The Sharira, the body, is the chariot itself. Buddhi, the will, is the Sārathi, the charioteer. Manas, the mind, is the Pragraha, the reins. And the Indriyas, the senses, are the horses. The roads those horses travel are the objects of the senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell.

The rider does not drive. The rider witnesses. The charioteer drives. And the quality of the journey depends entirely on the charioteer's relationship with the reins.

Steering, Not Suppressing

There is a distinction here that is easy to miss, and it changes everything about how you practice.

The relationship between Buddhi and Manas is not one of suppression. It is not: the will subdues the mind, the higher faculty clamps down on the lower. If you sit down to meditate and try to force the mind into stillness, push each thought away as it arises, you will find very quickly that this does not work. You are not supposed to fight the horses. You are supposed to steer them.

The word for charioteer in Sanskrit is Sārathi, and a Sārathi does not fight the horses. A Sārathi does not put a vice grip on the reins and try to hold the horses absolutely still. A Sārathi steers. The distinction is not minor. A charioteer who tries to physically restrain four horses will be thrown from the chariot. A charioteer who steers, who responds to where the horses are pulling and redirects, who builds over time the sensitivity and strength to guide them with a light but firm hand: that is a skilled charioteer.

Think of it in a more modern frame. When you drive a car, the steering wheel does not fight the engine. The engine is running, the car is in motion, and the steering wheel is the mechanism through which you direct where all that energy goes. A driver who fights the engine goes nowhere. A driver who steers skillfully can take a very powerful car exactly where they need to go. The power of the engine is not the problem. The absence of skilled steering is the problem.

This is how Buddhi, the will, relates to Manas, the mind. The mind is not an enemy to be defeated. It is an instrument that needs a skilled hand on the wheel. The same capacity for vivid imagination that produces anxiety produces creative insight. The same associative power that generates rumination generates depth of thought. The energy of the mind, properly steered, is an enormous asset. The question is not whether the mind is running. The question is whether the will has a hand on the wheel.

When the will has no hand on the wheel, the mind defaults to wherever the deepest channels in the Chitta lead. And those channels, for most of us, lead toward sensation, toward craving, toward whatever offers the fastest relief from discomfort. The senses pull the horses, the horses pull the reins, and the charioteer watches from the seat without the ability to redirect anything. The result is a life that moves in circles: chasing the same pleasures, avoiding the same fears, returning to the same patterns. It does not feel like captivity because the chariot is always moving. But it is not moving toward anything you actually chose.

Depression is what the chariot looks like when it is frozen. All four horses pulling in different directions, none of them winning, the whole vehicle locked in place. Addiction is the chariot running full speed in one direction, one horse stronger than all the others, the charioteer long since thrown from the seat. Anxiety is the charioteer gripping the reins so tightly, so desperately, that every small movement of the horses becomes a crisis.

In all three cases, the problem is the same. The will has lost its steering relationship with the mind. And in all three cases, the work is the same: restore that relationship. Strengthen it. Learn to steer again.

The Rep

When you sit down to meditate, you choose an object of focus. It could be a deity, the breath, a mantra. The tradition has strong reasons for preferring certain objects over others, and those reasons are worth exploring separately. But for now, the object of focus matters less than what you do with it.

What you do is this: you try to hold the mind on that object. The mind wanders. You bring it back.

That is the rep. Every time the mind wanders and you bring it back, you have done one rep. What exactly is being exercised?

When any sensory input arrives, Manas registers it. Before the will has a chance to respond, the mind is already moving: it compares the input against the Chitta, finds a relevant channel, and begins to flow. A sound from outside and Manas has already started constructing a story around it. A small discomfort in the body and Manas has already begun rehearsing a complaint. This happens faster than deliberate thought. The mind's first movement is reflexive, not chosen.

The lag is the distance between when Manas first moves and when Buddhi, the will, recognises that movement and redirects it.

At the beginning of a meditation practice, this lag is enormous. The mind wandered six minutes ago. It is now deep in a memory from three years ago, replaying a conversation, rewriting the ending, feeling the feelings all over again. And then, eventually, the will shows up: wait, I was meditating. The distance between the mind's first movement and this recognition is the gap the practice is working to close.

Every time you close that gap, even slightly, you have done a rep. You have exercised the will's capacity to notice. Each rep makes the noticing faster, more reliable, more sensitive. The will begins to develop what you might call peripheral vision for the mind's movements. Where it once needed minutes to recognise that the mind had wandered, it now needs seconds. Then moments. Then something even smaller than moments.

This is Dhāraṇā (धारणा), the sixth limb of Patanjali's Ashtanga Yoga: the binding of consciousness to a single point. It is described in the Yoga Sutras (3.1) as the fixing of awareness to a place. This is the deliberate, somewhat effortful act of putting the steering wheel back in your hands after it slipped. The act of gripping the wheel again, firmly, and redirecting.

The practice is Dharana. The rep is Dharana. And every time you do it, the will's relationship with the mind changes.

Abhyāsa: The Doctrine of Practice

Patanjali addresses this directly in the Yoga Sutras.

Yoga Sutra 1.12: Abhyāsa-vairāgyābhyāṃ tan-nirodhaḥ. The restraint of mental modifications comes through abhyāsa, practice, and vairāgya, non-attachment. Two things. Just two.

Yoga Sutra 1.14: Sa tu dīrgha-kāla-nairantarya-satkārāsevito dṛḍha-bhūmiḥ. That practice becomes firmly grounded when it is carried on for a long time, without interruption, with devotion.

Read that again. Long time. Without interruption. With devotion. These are not motivational suggestions dressed in ancient language. These are the mechanical conditions under which the practice yields its result, stated with the same precision a physicist uses when describing the conditions required for an experiment to work. Remove any one of the three and the result changes. Remove all three and the practice goes nowhere.

"Long time" means exactly that. The lag we are talking about, between the mind's first movement and the will's recognition of it, has been built up over years of conditioning. The channels in the Chitta are deep. Every time you gave in to a distraction instead of redirecting, that channel deepened. Every time you let the horses run instead of steering, the steering mechanism weakened. You do not close a gap that took decades to build in a few weeks of practice. This is not pessimism. This is the tradition being honest about the scale of the project, which is enormous.

"Without interruption" means that gaps in practice are not neutral. When you stop practicing, the channels in the Chitta that the practice was redirecting do not stay redirected. The will, not exercised, loses the sensitivity it had built. A consistent daily practice of thirty minutes will build more genuine capacity over a year than an intense forty-day retreat followed by eight months of nothing. The will strengthens through regularity, through the accumulated pressure of small daily repetitions, in the same way physical endurance does. There is no shortcut to this. The tradition does not offer one.

"With devotion" is the part the modern wellness industry finds most inconvenient to carry forward. Patanjali is not using devotion as a synonym for enthusiasm or consistency. He means it in the full sense: practice done as an offering, done with the orientation that the practice serves something larger than your personal outcomes. Practice done because the goal is worth doing it for. This is where the classical tradition and the mindfulness industry part ways most sharply. One is working toward God. The other is working toward a clearer morning. Both involve the same posture, the same breath, the same pulled-back mind. But the orientation shapes the depth of the practice over years in ways that compound quietly and then become enormous.

What happens when abhyāsa works? The rep count accumulates. The will's sensitivity grows. The lag shrinks. And something gradually changes in the texture of the practice itself.

Dharana, the effortful act of holding the mind on the object, begins to give way to Dhyāna (ध्यान), the seventh limb. Patanjali describes Dhyana in Yoga Sutra 3.2 as an unbroken current of awareness toward the object of focus. Where Dharana was an act of will, Dhyana is a state. Where Dharana required repeated redirecting, Dhyana is what emerges when the redirecting happens so quickly, so naturally, that it ceases to feel like an act at all. The will and the mind are no longer in opposition. They are moving together, toward the same thing.

The charioteer and the horses have learned to move as one. This is not a metaphor for a nice feeling. It is a description of a real change in the will's relationship with the mind, built through thousands of reps, across years of consistent practice. The will that once chased the mind now leads it. The reins that once felt like they were barely holding back four wild horses now feel like an extension of the charioteer's own intention.

This transition from Dharana to Dhyana is, as far as this bad explanation goes, the central achievement the practice is working toward. Not a side effect. The mechanism itself maturing.

What the Side Effects Actually Are

Now that we have the mechanism, the side effects make complete sense.

Focus improves because the will's response time to the mind's wandering has decreased. When your attention needs to stay on a task and the mind drifts, the will recognises it faster and returns it faster. The mind still moves. The horses still get distracted by the road. But the charioteer catches them sooner, with less effort. To an outside observer, this looks like better focus. It is actually a faster, more reliable response loop between the will and the mind.

Anxiety decreases because the will has a more reliable steering relationship with the mind. Anxiety is what happens when the mind enters a channel of worst-case scenarios and the will cannot interrupt the spiral before it gains speed. A will trained through meditation catches the beginning of the spiral earlier and redirects before it has run away. The anxious thought still arises, as it always will. The will catches it. This happens faster and more reliably than it did before the practice. The experience of anxiety does not disappear, but its grip on the chariot weakens measurably.

Emotional regulation improves because the same mechanism applies to reactive emotions. A sharp word from someone and Manas reacts immediately, the old channels of anger or hurt open up. A trained will catches this movement earlier in the process, before the chariot has followed the channel too far to turn around easily. The reaction still arises. The will puts a hand on the wheel sooner. This is not the suppression of emotion. It is the restoration of steering in the presence of emotion. There is a meaningful difference.

These effects are real. They are worth having. If all meditation ever produced was these downstream effects, it would still be worth a lifetime of practice. But they are downstream effects of a will that has learned to steer the mind. They are what happens when the charioteer gets good at their job. The purpose of a skilled charioteer is not to keep the horses calm. The purpose is to reach the destination. The calm horses are a consequence of skill, not the reason you learned to drive. You are fixing the chariot, not for the chariot's sake, but to get somewhere.

A Poetic Sidenote on Where This Actually Goes

There is something important to say about the limits of this entire explanation, and I want to say it carefully.

Everything described in this article, the will strengthening its steering relationship with the mind, the lag closing, the transition from Dharana to Dhyana, the charioteer and the horses moving in harmony: all of this is still happening within the Antahkaran. Within the subtle body. Within what Advaita Vedanta calls Maya, the phenomenal world, the world of instruments and appearances.

In Advaita Vedanta, Buddhi itself is an instrument of Maya. Even the most trained will, the most refined capacity to steer, the most perfect harmony between the charioteer and the horses: it is all still part of the dream. The chariot, however perfectly it runs, is still a chariot. Adi Shankaracharya puts it in the Vivekachudamani: "In the cave of the Buddhi there is Brahman." Buddhi is the gateway, not the destination. You cannot reach the destination by perfecting the gateway.

Moksha is not a perfectly trained will. Moksha is the recognition that the rider was never the chariot. That the Atman, which has been watching all of it, the wandering mind, the effortful practice, the gradual strengthening, the eventual harmony, was always already free. Always already whole. Always already Brahman. Before the practice began. Before the chariot was built. Before any of this.

The practice is real. The mechanism is real. But the practice prepares the ground for something that the practice itself cannot produce. A still, clear, well-directed mind is the condition in which the recognition of one's own nature can arise. It is not the recognition itself. The cleanest window in the world does not generate light. It lets the light through.

This Has Been a Bad Explanation

I told you at the start that this would be a bad explanation. I said it would do the same thing every other explanation does, focus on the side effects, not the point. And it has.

The side effects are real. The mechanism is real. The chariot metaphor is real, drawn from the Katha Upanishad and carried forward by Vivekananda and teachers since. The Abhyasa doctrine is real, and the conditions Patanjali sets for it are not suggestions. All of this is true, and I hope it has given you a thread to hold when you sit down to practice and wonder what is happening inside you.

But it is still a bad explanation because no explanation can take you all the way to the end. The end is not in the explanation. It is in the practice, carried on for a long time, without interruption, with devotion.

The side effects will come. The focus will improve. The anxiety will loosen its hold. The charioteer will get better at the reins. All of this will happen if you do the work.

And then, somewhere further down that road, if you keep going and do not stop at the side effects as if they were the destination, you might encounter what the practice was actually preparing you for all along. What the rishis were working toward. What Vivekananda points to when he says the goal is God. What the tradition has never stopped insisting on, no matter how many times it has been repackaged into wellness content and morning routines and productivity hacks.

The chariot is not the point. The chariot is how you travel.

This has been a bad explanation of meditation. I hope it helps.

HS