There are many forms of meditation.
Some of which use mantra, and some that simply focus on presence,
the sole property of the breath, or even observation of thought.
I personally have tried many of these
and to be totally transparent,
I still didn’t think I was doing it right.
That is, until I found mantra.
Mantra works like this:
Lets say your mind is a boat,
floating on the sea of consciousness.
You begin your meditation
And your boat just continues to float along aimlessly
In the sea of your thoughts.
One thought runs into another and you seem
to have gone down the rabbit hole of fruitless thinking.
However, if your boat had an anchor, you’d stop floating along.
You would be able to concentrate and focus on a central point and on the ideation of oneness.
THAT ANCHOR IS MANTRA.
The anchor of mantra keeps your mind steady during meditation.
If you begin to float away, you can come back.
You can come back to the mantra.
Its inevitable that your mind will wander.
THIS IS TOTALLY NORMAL, don’t beat yourself up.
BUT when using mantra, you can come back to the breath and the centered focus of your meditation.
Here in lies the tool to meditation.
Furthermore, the mind is totally incapable of thinking about nothing.
Therefore, we need a central point of ideation,
where all other thoughts melt away into that ocean of consciousness.