The easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening.

If you simply close your eyes and allow yourself to hear all the sounds that are going on around you.

Just listen to the general hum and buzz of the world as if you were listening to music.

Don't try to identify the sounds you're hearing. Don't put names on them.

Simply allow them to play with your eardrums. And let them go.

Let your ears hear whatever they want to hear.

Don't judge the sounds. There are no proper sounds or improper sounds.

If I am talking to you right now, I want you to listen to the sound of my voice just as if it were noise.

Don't try to make any sense out of what I'm saying, because your brain will take care of that automatically.

You don't have to try to understand anything. Just listen to the sound.

You will very naturally find that you can't help naming sounds, identifying them, that you will go on thinking.

It's important that you don't try to repress those thoughts by forcing them out of your mind.

That will have precisely the same effect as if you were trying to smooth rough water with a flat iron. You're just going to disturb it all the more.

As you hear sounds coming up in your head, thoughts, you simply listen to them as part of the general noise going on.

So look at your own thoughts as just noises.

And soon you will find that the so-called outside world and the so-called inside world come together.

Your thoughts are a happening, just like the sounds going on outside. And everything is simply a happening. And all you're doing is watching it.

Where do the sounds come from?

Let them tell you the truth.

Now in this process, another thing that is happening that is very important is that you are breathing.

As you start meditation, you allow your breath to run just as it wills.

Don't do at first any breathing exercise. Just watch your breath breathing the way it wants to breathe.

You say in the ordinary way, "I breathe," because you feel that breathing is something that you are doing voluntarily.

But you will also notice that when you are not thinking about breathing, your breathing goes on just the same.

The curious thing about breath is that it can be looked at both as a voluntary and an involuntary action.

You can feel on the one hand, "I am doing it," and on the other hand, "It is happening to me."

That is why breathing is a most important part of meditation, because it is going to show you that the hard and fast division that we make between what we do on the one hand and what happens to us on the other is arbitrary.

As you watch your breathing, you will become aware that both the voluntary and the involuntary aspects of your experience are all one happening.

Am I just the puppet of a happening, the mere passive witness of something going on completely beyond my control?

Or am I really doing everything that's going along? Well, if I were, I should be God. And that would be very embarrassing.

You can see that everything is happening to you. And on the other hand, you're doing everything.

It's your eyes that are turning the sun into light. It's your eardrums that are turning vibrations in the air into sound. In that way, you are creating the world.

But when we're not talking about it, when we're not philosophizing about it, then there is just this happening, this... And we won't give it a name.

When you breathe for a while, just letting it happen, you will discover a curious thing: that without making any effort, you can breathe more and more deeply.

Breathing out is important because it's the breath of relaxation. That's when we say "whew" and heave a sigh of relief.

You get the sensation that your breath is falling out. Dropping, dropping, dropping out.

The same sort of feeling you have as if you were settling down into an extremely comfortable bed. And you just get as heavy as possible and let yourself go.

When it's thoroughly comfortably out and it feels like coming back again, you don't pull it back in. You let it fall back in.

Letting your lungs expand, expand, expand until they feel very comfortably full.

Your breath gets quite naturally easier and easier and slower and slower and more and more powerful.

With these various aids... listening to sound, listening to your own interior feelings and thoughts, just as if they were something going on, not something you're doing, but just happenings.

And watching your breath as a happening that is neither voluntary nor involuntary.

Don't worry about the future. Don't worry about what progress you're making.