The Platform and the Trains: A Rational Case for Meditation
In this essay, I make the case for meditation — not as mysticism, but as method.
A method for what exactly? For reclaiming agency in a mind that never stops moving.
Read on, dear reader.
I’ll show what meditation actually is, what it’s not, and how to practice it — regardless of your background or beliefs — including two simple, evidence-based techniques anyone can do safely. Along the way, we’ll see how this connects to a larger theme I’ve explored before: growth through subtraction — including the illusion of control¹.
My motivation is simple: to clear away the religious and commercial fog that surrounds meditation and reveal the practical reality underneath — a learnable skill for standing steady in the unceasing and ever-present motion of thought.
Clearing the Fog Around Meditation
Meditation has ancient roots that span the globe.
Across cultures and centuries, we humans have turned inward in search of stillness, clarity, and understanding — from the desert mystics of the Middle East and the contemplatives of early Christianity to the philosophers of Greece and the sages of India, Japan, and China.
The Eastern traditions, in particular, cultivated this inquiry into a refined science of mind. Yogic, Buddhist, and Taoist lineages developed intricate systems of practice and philosophy over thousands of years, exploring the nature of awareness with extraordinary sophistication.
These traditional writings often used symbolic or poetic language to point toward direct experience. That language was never meant to obscure; it was the vocabulary of its time — metaphorical, evocative, experiential. Yet to a modern reader seeking practical guidance, these writings can sound abstract or mystical, leading to the belief that meditation is the sole domain of monks and mystics.
When these practices eventually migrated westward, they encountered a very different cultural ecosystem — one shaped by materialism, psychology, and commercial enterprise. Some teachers translated them skillfully, grounding them in scientific and therapeutic language. Others mixed them with New Age jargon, pseudoscience, and, inevitably, commercial hype. The result was a strange duality: meditation portrayed either as an exotic spiritual quest — a search for “transcendent experiences” — or as a quick fix for stress and productivity.
Commercialization deepened the confusion.
Today, apps, retreats, and glossy self-help books often frame meditation in mystical or flowery language designed to sell transcendence — whatever that means. When Headspace promises “10 minutes to a calmer you” or Calm sells “sleep stories” voiced by celebrities, they’re not exactly wrong — but they’re selling meditation as a consumer product for symptom relief, not as a practice for seeing clearly.
And at the other extreme, some have taken simple meditation practices and built cults and billion-dollar enterprises around them.
Complete with misappropriated authority, grandiose titles, promises of supernatural powers, celebrity endorsements, a dose of quantum woo-woo, and revenue streams built on repackaging freely available ancient wisdom as purchasable enlightenment — whatever that means.
But behind the marketing, most of these practices were — and still are — simple techniques for training attention and awareness.
Here, we’ll strip away that accumulated fog:
to examine meditation not as belief, but as method;
not as escape, but as practice.
What remains, once the metaphors and marketing are set aside, is something both humble and profound: a learnable way to see the mind in action clearly — and, in doing so, regain agency.
1. The Universal Problem
It is a curious aspect of the mind that it never stops.
Thoughts arrive unsummoned, multiply without consent, and depart as abruptly as they came. This isn’t a defect — it’s how the system works. It’s how our species survives. The mind’s job is to generate possibilities, simulate futures, examine multiple options, predict outcomes, and, often, revisit the past.
The problem begins when we treat every thought as a command to engage.
Each time a worry arises, we climb aboard and ride it to its anxious conclusion.
Each time anger appears, we let it carry us toward blame or resentment.
Every train of thought demands our ticket — and we, obligingly, hand it over.
This pattern of reactivity is universal — but so is something else: the capacity to notice it.
The question is not whether thoughts arise — they always will² — but whether we are condemned to ride every one to its terminus.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Vedantin, a Christian contemplative, a neuroscientist, or an atheist materialist. The machinery of thought works the same way.
This capacity to notice is the whole game.
2. The Core Insight
Here’s the simple but profound discovery anyone can make through direct observation — no gurus, app subscriptions, or expensive courses and “initiations” required:
We can notice what our mind is doing.
A moment ago, perhaps you were reading these words while half-distracted by a memory or plan. Then, suddenly, you noticed that you were distracted. That instant of recognition is the pivot point — evidence that something within you can observe the movement of the mind itself.
This observing faculty is distinct from the thoughts it perceives.
It doesn’t need to be mystical to be extraordinary. A Vedantin might call this witnessing awareness pure consciousness. An atheist materialist might describe it as a metacognitive process arising from the brain’s neural networks.
Both views are fine — and both are irrelevant here.
What we call it doesn’t matter.
What matters is the functional truth: we can cultivate this stance of observation without the mumbo-jumbo.
This capacity is practical, not metaphysical.
3. The Train Station
The mind, left untrained, resembles a crowded train station at rush hour.
Thought-trains roar in and out, each labeled with a destination:
Anger, Worry, Resentment, Self-Doubt, Desire, What-If, Could-Have, Would-Have, Should-Have.
A thought of fear pulls in — we board it and ride until panic takes over.
A memory of loss whistles in — we climb aboard and revisit the grief in full detail.
A memory of a slight or injury arrives — we ride it all the way to resentment and anger.
We believe we are the passenger, perhaps even the engineer, yet the trains move on their own schedules. Most of us spend our days boarding whichever train happens to arrive first — helplessly riding to destinations we never chose.
Boarding feels like being swept up — suddenly we’re in the grip of the narrative, living it, believing it completely.
Watching feels like spaciousness. The thought is there, acknowledged, but we haven’t chosen to engage with it.
Meditation leads to the realization that we can stand on the platform — simply watching, without boarding every train that arrives.
Trains will still arrive; we can’t control that. But we don’t have to board every one of them. We can watch them come and go, note their colors and sounds, even appreciate their variety, without ever leaving the platform.
With practice, the platform becomes home base — Awareness Central, the stance of awareness itself.
Trains arrive at our platform, but we have the choice to board a particular train or let it go on without us.
Some trains still tempt us, but over time, discernment grows: we begin to see which lines serve our destination and which lead to destinations we no longer wish to visit.
The drunken monkey mind³ becomes less erratic — not because the trains stop, but because we’ve remembered what we are: not the passenger, not the train, but the witness of movement.
4. What Meditation Actually Is
In popular culture, meditation is a severely overloaded term — stretched to cover everything from relaxation audios to visualizations to chanting affirmations. The result is confusion — and, too often, disappointment. So let’s define it carefully, with the same rigor we bring to every other inquiry — through the lens of Rational Mysticism, explored in an earlier essay⁴.
A Precise Definition:
Meditation is the deliberate cultivation of meta-awareness — the capacity to observe mental activity as it arises, without automatic engagement through either identification or reaction.
It is not a mood, not an altered state, and not a belief system.
It is a trained perceptual skill that develops through two complementary processes:
1. Attention Training: repeatedly returning awareness to a chosen anchor — the breath, bodily sensations, or a simple sound⁵ — to stabilize focus.
2. Awareness Training: recognizing thoughts, emotions, and impulses in real time, and distinguishing between their appearance and the need to engage with them. Choosing when to engage selectively — not suppression, but discernment.
This isn’t a linear process.
Attention steadies awareness; awareness refines attention.
The two form a feedback loop from which authentic meditative benefits emerge — less reactivity, greater clarity, deeper equanimity.
Put simply:
Meditation = Attention Training + Awareness Training,
practiced with intention, repetition, and curiosity.
This definition is deliberately metaphysics-neutral.
Whether consciousness is a fundamental field or an emergent neural property is entirely irrelevant to the method. The effect is empirical: sustained meditation creates space between what happens and how we respond, replacing reflex with choice.
In this sense, meditation is a laboratory discipline — a rational experiment conducted on the bench of one’s own mind.
5. Common Misconceptions
Modern definitions of meditation often miss the mark.
The Cleveland Clinic⁶, for example, describes it as “a practice that involves focusing or clearing your mind using a combination of mental and physical techniques.”
Most other sources say something similar:
“Meditation is the act of focusing or giving one’s attention to a single object, thought, or activity, either as a spiritual exercise or as a way to achieve relaxation and calmness.”
Or worse:
“You need to blank your mind — clear it of all thought.”
On the surface, that seems harmless. In practice, it’s what causes most people to simply give up.
These definitions reduce meditation to concentration or relaxation, implying that success means keeping the mind still or achieving a blank, serene state. When beginners discover that their thoughts refuse to obey, frustration sets in.
They sit down to “clear the mind,” only to find it swarming with thoughts. They decide they’re failing — when, in fact, they’ve just succeeded. They’ve taken their first accurate reading of what the mind actually does.
A busy mind is not a barrier to meditation; it’s the playing field.
The purpose is not to silence thought but to see thought — to recognize its arising, its movement, and its passing — without engagement. The instruction to “blank the mind” is like telling the ocean to stop making waves. The waves aren’t the problem; being swept away by each one is.
This is why concentration alone isn’t enough.
Yes, focusing on breath or body helps stabilize attention, but that’s only one part of the practice. The larger work is cultivating meta-awareness — the capacity to notice distraction and return, gently, without judgment. In that moment of returning, awareness strengthens.
So when someone says, “I can’t meditate; my mind is too busy,” the accurate response is: Perfect. That’s the mind you’ll be studying.
Other misconceptions:
Misconception 1: Meditation Requires Belief
It doesn’t. You don’t need to believe in chakras, universal consciousness, unified fields, or reincarnation. The practice is empirical: you’re observing your own mental processes in real time. Whether you interpret what you find through a Vedantic lens, a neuroscientific one, or none at all is entirely up to you. The method works regardless.
Misconception 2: You Need a Teacher or Guru
A skilled teacher can help refine technique, but the fundamental practice requires no special authority. You already have all the equipment necessary: a mind that thinks and the capacity to notice it thinking. The instruction is simple enough to start immediately. Beware anyone who suggests otherwise — or who charges thousands for what can be explained in paragraphs.
Misconception 3: Results Take Years
You don’t need years to notice a difference — you need consistency. Most people begin to detect changes within weeks⁷: a slightly longer pause before reacting, catching yourself mid-spiral, recognizing a thought as just a thought rather than gospel truth. The deeper transformations take time, yes, but the practice begins working from session one. You’re training a skill, not waiting for grace to descend.
6. What Meditation Is Not — The Relaxation Confusion
One confusion deserves special attention: equating meditation with guided relaxation.
Much of what passes for “guided meditation” today is, in fact, guided relaxation — a soothing voice, a mental beach, a body scan, perhaps ambient music. These practices are valuable; they calm the nervous system and ease stress. But they are not meditation in the strict sense.
Relaxation achieves a pleasant, temporary state.
Meditation trains a durable capacity.
Relaxation keeps you immersed in content — imagining the beach, feeling the warmth, following the story.
Meditation teaches you to observe how content moves through awareness — how a thought appears, persists, and dissolves.
Relaxation is like getting a massage — it feels wonderful and fades.
Meditation is like strength training — sometimes tedious, occasionally frustrating when the mind won’t settle, but it builds lasting stability that no relaxation technique can match.
Both matter; only one transforms the baseline.
7. Practicing the Observation — The Method
Before we begin, a note on safety:
The practices described here are gentle and widely accessible.
However, if you have a history of psychosis, schizophrenia, severe trauma, or dissociative disorders — or if you’re currently in acute psychiatric crisis — please consult a qualified mental health professional before beginning any meditation practice.
For most people, these techniques are safe and beneficial, but it’s wise to approach any inner work with care and self-respect.
So how does one begin? Forget incense and mantras. You don’t need them.
There are hundreds of meditation methods, but it isn’t necessary to chase them all. Here are two simple techniques that together cover the essentials — one based on the breath, the other on sound.
Awareness of Breath
Here’s the plain and simple version:
1. Sit comfortably — chair, cushion, park bench — anywhere you can remain alert and at ease. The spine should be upright⁸ and relaxed. Close your eyes. For beginners, it’s best to avoid background music or other distractions.
2. Bring gentle attention to the breath. Notice where you feel it most naturally — the cool air at the nostrils, the rise and fall of the chest, or the expansion of the belly. Follow the inhalations and exhalations there. Focus lightly — you aren’t wrestling with the mind or forcing anything.
3. When you notice you’ve engaged with a thought — stop. That moment of recognition is the meditation. You’ve just demonstrated the capacity to observe your mind. This is success, not failure. Declare victory — acknowledge the thought without judgment, let is pass, and return attention to the breath.
4. Repeat for ten to twenty minutes. Consistency matters more than duration. Five minutes every day builds the skill faster than an hour once a week.
No mantra required. No guru. No fee. No secret techniques. No initiations.
Just the repeated act of noticing and returning — again and again.
Awareness of Sound
The second technique uses sound as the anchor. Instead of narrowing attention to the breath, open awareness to the entire field of hearing — the hum of the refrigerator, a distant car, a bird call, even the faint buzz of electricity.
You’re not listening for anything in particular; you’re simply noticing sound as sound — arising, changing, fading.
1. Sit as before — upright, comfortable, alert.
2. Close your eyes and bring attention to the sounds around you.
3. Notice how some are near, others far; some steady, others fleeting.
4. When thoughts arise (and they will), notice them the same way you notice
sounds — as events in awareness that come and go. Then return to hearing.
5. Let awareness include both outer and inner sounds: the breath’s rhythm, the pulse in your ears, perhaps even a faint inner tone if you notice one.
6. Start with ten minutes daily. Again, consistency matters more than duration.
This practice cultivates open awareness — a receptive stance that includes all experience without preference. Over time, you may notice that the distinction between “inner” and “outer” softens; hearing itself becomes the meditation.
Both methods are complementary. Breath training builds focused attention; sound training builds open awareness. Together, they develop the core skill: noticing what arises without automatically engaging with it.
These two methods provide a solid foundation. Many other forms exist — walking meditation, body scans, loving-kindness practice, and more — but they all work with the same fundamental principles: training attention and cultivating awareness. Start here. Explore later if you're curious.
8. What to Expect
If you try this, the first discovery will probably be discouraging: you’ll spend much of your time noticing that you’ve forgotten to notice. The mind will sprint ahead — rehearsing conversations, replaying events, inventing scenarios.
That’s not failure. That’s the exercise.
A typical session might go like this:
You sit down, close your eyes, and bring attention to the breath (or to sound).
A few breaths later: Yesterday, Lucy criticized my work in front of boss man Tom. She’s always been pretentious. I should have said…
Catch. Return to breath. Don’t board the Lucy train.
A few breaths later: Dad’s appointment is tomorrow. What if it’s bad news? What will I…
Catch. Return to breath. Don’t board the worry train.
Each time you realize you’ve boarded a train of thought and gently return to the platform, you’ve strengthened awareness. That returning is the repetition that builds the muscle.
Progress is subtle, not dramatic. Some days you’ll feel calm; other days, you’ll wrestle with restlessness or sleepiness. None of it indicates failure or success.
Meditation isn’t about producing particular experiences; it’s about changing your relationship to all experience.
Over time, small but unmistakable shifts appear: reactions slow down, emotional spikes pass more quickly, worry loses some of its grip, and decisions become clearer as the mental noise softens.
These are not cosmic revelations. They’re practical outcomes, observable in daily life.
Neuroscience research corroborates this⁹: regular practice reduces stress hormones, enhances attention regulation, and increases gray-matter density in regions associated with emotional regulation. Most such studies examine mindfulness-based practices, which train the same underlying capacities — sustained attention and non-reactive awareness — as the simple techniques described here.
9. Why This Matters
We clean our bodies daily, yet rarely clean our minds. We maintain physical hygiene as a matter of course — brushing, bathing, stretching — yet our mental world accumulates debris unchecked until crisis forces a cleanup.
Meditation is mental hygiene.
It’s the simple, daily act of noticing what’s clogging our mental space and letting it pass through instead of letting it calcify. It’s not self-improvement in the productivity-optimization sense — yet another technique to squeeze more output from ourselves. It’s self-maintenance in the human sense: basic care for the system you live in.
Every moment we practice strengthens the gap between what happens and how we respond — the space where choice becomes possible. Without that gap, we’re mechanical, reacting automatically to every trigger. With it, we can act deliberately, with clarity and compassion.
The benefits ripple outward: a calmer mind listens better. A steadier person argues less. A thoughtful pause can prevent a thousand avoidable harms.
In this sense, mental hygiene isn’t only personal care — it’s civic practice. A population of people who can pause before reacting, recognize their own mental spirals, and distinguish a thought from reality — that’s not just individual wellness. That’s social infrastructure. No unified fields of consciousness required.
10. The Bridge Between Powerlessness and Agency
The Buddha once compared suffering to being struck by two arrows.
The first arrow is life itself — pain, loss, change, the ordinary shocks of existence.
Inevitable. Unavoidable. It lands whether we like it or not.
The second arrow is the one we shoot into ourselves: the rumination, the resistance, the story we spin about what happened.
The first arrow is outside our control.
The second is not — if we know how to stop firing it. This is what meditation actually does.
People meditate for many reasons — as a spiritual discipline, to seek insight, to reduce stress, or to pursue altered states of consciousness. All of those reasons are valid.
But in my view, the simplest and most practical reason is enough: to learn how to avoid the second arrow. The first arrow — pain, loss, change — is inevitable. The second and third and fourth are optional, if one develops the awareness to see them coming and step aside.
The train not taken is the anger/pain/suffering avoided. That alone is reason enough to practice.
This connects directly with the broader Undoing framework I’ve written about before. This is the Second Unlearning¹⁰ in action: growth through subtraction, not acquisition.
Meditation is a practice of subtraction, not acquisition.
It’s not about acquiring special states, powers, or knowledge, but about removing the layers of automatic reaction that obscure clarity and peace. Every time we notice a thought and choose not to follow it, to engage with it, something unnecessary falls away. Each act of seeing without reacting is a small undoing — a release of what no longer serves.
Between the illusion of total control and the despair of no control lies a bridge: the genuine agency of choosing your response.
Meditation is how you build that bridge — not metaphorically, but literally. It is the crossing mechanism between two ways of living.
On one side of the bridge — apparent powerlessness:
• Thoughts arise unbidden.
• Emotions sweep you away.
• You react automatically.
• Life feels like it’s happening to you.
• “I can’t help it — this is just how I am.”
On the other side — genuine agency:
• You observe thoughts without obeying them.
• You notice emotions without becoming them.
• You respond deliberately.
• You participate in life as a conscious agent.
• “I see what’s arising, and I choose how to engage.”
The powerlessness side correctly observes that you can’t control which thoughts or feelings arise. But it draws the wrong conclusion from this fact.
It mistakes “I can’t control the content” for “I have no control at all.”
Above all, it misses the crucial point: you don’t have to engage with the content — the same distinction I explored more deeply in my essay The Illusion of Control¹.
The agency side accepts the same facts but perceives the hidden choice point that powerlessness overlooks: you don’t have to board every train.
Meditation is the practice of crossing that bridge — one noticing, one breath, one return at a time. Each time you realize you’ve been carried away and gently come back, you take a step toward the far shore. Do it ten thousand times, and you find yourself standing in a different landscape: present, steady, free.
This is why meditation matters beyond stress relief or productivity optimization.
Agency — real, earned, reliable agency — is what transforms a life from reactive to intentional, from mechanical to conscious, from lived-through to lived.
11. The Invitation
There’s nothing exotic here.
No mantras, no robes, no need to believe in anything or buy anything.
Meditation, in its essence, is practical mental training — as accessible as breath itself.
Try it for thirty days. Ten minutes a day. Same time, same place if possible — consistency builds the habit.
Notice what changes. Notice what doesn’t.
You may find that nothing dramatic happens — no fireworks, no mystical revelations — just a subtle widening of perspective. But that widening is everything.
The trains will still come and go.
The mind will still chatter, plan, remember, and invent. And endlessly revisit.
But you’ll know the difference between being the passenger and standing on the platform.
And once you know that, you can never quite forget it.
The platform is always there, waiting.
We just have to remember to stand on it.
If you try this experiment in awareness, I’d love to know what you discover — what it’s like to stand on the platform and watch the trains go by.
You can share your reflections — publicly in the comments or privately at undoing_raaj (at) proton (dot) me.
Footnotes:
¹ https://www.raajshinde.net/the-third-unlearning-control-is-an-illusion/
² For most of us, this is simply how the mind operates — a continuous stream of unsummoned thoughts and associations.
³ Buddhism has likened the mind to a drunken monkey - both lurch from one thing to another, seemingly without rhyme or reason.
⁴ https://www.raajshinde.net/rational-mysticism-the-enlightenment-rebooted/
⁵ The anchor can be different, depending on the type of meditation
⁶ https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/17906-meditation
⁷ Often, these early shifts appear in less time; consistency is the key.
⁸ Traditional yogic texts recommend sitting upright so the diaphragm moves freely, allowing natural, unforced breathing. Lying down often leads to sleep — pleasant, but not meditation.
⁹ Numerous studies support these findings. For example:
– Hölzel, B.K. et al. Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), 36-43 (2011).
– Tang, Y.Y., Hölzel, B.K., & Posner, M.I. The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16(4), 213-225 (2015).
– Davidson, R.J. et al. Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation. Psychosomatic Medicine, 65(4), 564-570 (2003).
¹⁰ https://www.raajshinde.net/before-the-learning-the-undoing/
With quiet gratitude to Jahanzeb Ahsan on Unsplash for the image.
