Meditation - Topics - What is Meditation?

A review of some of the content of life experience versus experience of the non-living world can give us some insight into some ways to go about meditating.

Life experiences the world of forms and objects through perception. What it means to be an experiencer is to have a focus of self that receives the world of external content as an experience we own. For example, I can say I was there at some event, I know what I feel and think about it now, etc. However, this receiving doesn’t imply a passive process in any way, since we also perceive our own actions while we're doing them.

Being an experiencer means we have inner thoughts, feelings, and desires that lead a separate life of their own purely within us. Often other people can tell what our motives are based on our actions, but the true motives for our actions can also be completely different from those assumed by others. To really know, other people have to ask us what we feel or think. Our outwardly predictable actions and reactions can always be changed without warning because as living beings we can originate totally new directions from those we previously manifested.

As experiencers we encounter a world of content we personally didn't create. Yet even though we didn’t individually create the world, as experiencers and actors in the world we actively participate in transforming it in countless ways.
So while we can't arbitrarily decide what the contents of our external perceptions are, we can choose what they mean to us inwardly. The ability to decide what things mean to us is typically called contemplation, thinking, or intuition.