These two games/apps might be what I need to build the habit.
Thanks!
Edit: Did the first meditation on Playne. Also set a reminder to do it every day at 8pm.
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Not really satisfied with my response to this question.
Both my meditation journey and my current practice of meditating with Terminus subliminals are strongly guided by intuition. So, I think that makes it harder to respond.
I feel that there is something to it; and I’m aware that something is happening, but I can’t pretend to have a clear and organized sense of exactly what.
So, it’s something of an ongoing adventure.
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You have the sub playing on headphones and then you just meditate? Whatever it is that you do during the meditation?
I’ve been doing short meditations with Playne now. 20 minutes is a bit much still, but I do feel like I am progressing. There are moments when I don’t think about anything, just watching the colors and shapes that are there when I close my eyes. Sometimes there is a short flash of really sharp and detailed pictures but they dissapear as soon as I pay attention to it.
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What instructions have you learned so far for meditation? What do you currently understand it to be?
Knowing that would help me to explain it better.
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Just quiet the mind. Nothing else. There are some nature sounds on the background. And anytime there is a thought, press the mouse button.
In the beginning, there isn’t much more. Just simple deep breathing and that’s it.
Edit: So I’m not trying to see any visuals, just to quiet the mind.
Okay.
The subjective experience of quieting the mind is a side effect of practice rather than the goal of practice. I say ‘the subjective experience’ because objectively the mind is never quieted.
It’s more that’s it gets ‘defragmented’, and so it ‘runs more quietly’ like an engine that has been well-tuned.
But the actual goal, in most cases, is to pay really close concentration to something. A particular style of paying attention is the goal. Quiet. Focused. Relaxed attention.
It’s a bit like lightly jogging with relaxed easy breathing. At first, you can only do it for 30 seconds, but gradually your endurance grows until you can jog for longer and longer times without losing your breath, and at faster and faster speeds without losing your relaxation. If someone keeps jogging like this for a long enough time eventually they may be able to jog for hours while remaining relaxed and breathing lightly.
By the time someone gets to that point, their blood pressure will be lower and their heart rate will be slower. But the blood pressure and heart rate are side-effects or consequences. They were not things you had to try to make happen. They’re just the natural effect of jogging like that over a long time.
Same with the quiet mind of meditation.
You don’t need to worry about or even think about the quiet mind. It will happen by itself. All you need to do is to direct relaxed, stable attention to an object or set of objects. Over time as you do that the concentratedness and stability of your attention gradually and automatically increases. It’s the changes in the ‘endurance’ of attention that produce the benefits and consequences of practice.
So, meditation is basically attention-training.
It actually doesn’t matter at all if your mind is busy or even if you make a lot of noise. Is all about the training of relaxed focused attention.
And when I say relaxed, I mean relaxed like an athlete’s body. Not weak and limp, but rather at the optimal balance between tension and relaxation that will allow the most efficient movement for the longest period of time.
How do you react to this definition?
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With rage? 
Okay, that sounds pretty simple. Like staring at a candle for extended times? And forgot to mention that you are supposed to just concentrate on your breathing. But now it’s obvious when you describe it like that.
Most beginners learn to focus on their breath leaving and entering their nose. There’s a sensation where it enters your nose where the air passes the skin. You can do that.
You can also combine it with a microcosmic type of meditation. As you breathe in, let your focus move from your perineum up your spine to the top of your head, as you breathe out, move your attention down again along the from side of your body.
If you’re into it, you can do it in parts, moving from chakra to chakra.
Or you can breathe into an area of the body. Many people like breathing in through their heart. Just imagine you’re pulling the air in through there, collecting in your heart. And on the out-breath imagine the air dispersing throughout your body from your heart,
The important part is to find something singular. Just one thing you can focus on, even if it is a thought (like an image of a lake or a pretty woman). When something else pops up, don’t act on it, just become aware of it and then re-focus on your one thing. Over time, your mind gets the message.
When you get better at visualization, you can even put all those thoughts that pop up into a little box in front of you and you’ll notice they stay there until you’re done. It’s what Monroe does I believe.
But, back to the beginning, I usually simply feel the air moving in and out of my nose. After a while you’re barely paying attention to it anymore but it still keeps the other thoughts away most of the time. And that is the quiet mind state everybody talks about.
EDIT: I’ve actually done that meditation with a woman before, while she was meditating opposite me. I was visualizing her, she was visualizing me. After about 5-10 minutes we could definitely feel something. There are people who can do that while cultivating a sexual intent. That one’s fun. But it only works if you can maintain your focus without getting carried away by said sexual intent. 
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That is kind of awesome.
The point above is a kind of subtle distinction but it leads to a lot of frustration for beginning meditators. They think they’re supposed to be stopping their thoughts. That’s impossible and not even desirable.
The truth is actually easier.
So that’s the most important point to make clear.
Once you know that it’s attention training, you’re in the door.
Then under that umbrella of attention training, similar to physical fitness training, there are hundreds (literally) of different possible directions to follow depending on what you are specifically pursuing.
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Literally any object or process (a process is also a type of object) can be a suitable focus of attention.
The breath is a very popular one for many good reasons. It’s cheap. It’s portable—in fact, as long as you’re alive you’ll be carrying it with you wherever you go. Its pace and its rhythms calibrate our physical and mental excitation and relaxation. So there are many good reasons to start out using the breath as an attention training object.
But it’s not for everyone.
And the truth is you can pick anything. As long as you think you’ll be able to stick with it for a long time.
This is just because you’ll need to stay with whatever it is long enough to build some attentional endurance.
I told @James once that death metal would be a possible meditation object. I wasn’t joking. I probably wouldn’t recommend it for most people though, because for most people it would probably present some unique challenges.
But I can guarantee you: if you find me a top-rate death metal musician and we view them at 30 minutes into their performance, they will definitely be meditating. Literally. This is not a metaphor. (I’m assuming that the person is performing more or less continuously during that time.)
I like to remove the stereotypes from meditation and look at the truly essential elements, rather than some cultural trappings or cosmetic features.
One more interesting example:
There’s a very effective form of meditation that is done out loud with two people. It’s called ‘dyadic verbal noting’. The people are talking for the entire time, and it predictably brings about deep states of meditative concentration.
There are a lot of ways to do this.
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I have that with some people in my life. They talk all the time and I just zone out. 
I remember that thing with JCast.
My Muse has a meditation where it reflects my heart beat back to me as drums, so I can hear it go faster and slower. It can also just do music going louder or softer depending on how busy it perceives my mind to be. Biofeedback can be fun, but it also is not for everybody.
PS Hoppa, I recall Fox explaining more techniques as you reach certain levels.
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Yes, just need to keep doing it.
Thanks @Malkuth for the answers. I think I need to… meditate on this
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At any rate, hopefully this may make it clearer how the subliminals might fit into a meditation practice. They could either be the specific object, they could be one element of a larger meditation object (e.g., all ambient sound), or they could be a kind of adjunct stimulus that supports attention to some other object.
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I’ve done mantra meditation while listening to an ultima through headphones. Not much to report, but it makes sense to combine them for me.
It is for me although it does help if the lyrical content is focused on whatever it is a person is feeling. Difficult to meditate to lyrics about satan or serial killers. I tend to seek out that which tackles introspection over fantasy
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I haven’t done Monroe but I have run the IAwake PMP briefly but didn’t feel much from it. Back in 2004 I did run Awakening Prologue by Holosync . I enjoyed the relaxed feeling and the endorphin rush. I tried running that again recently and I didn’t feel anything running studio headphones but when I switched to my bone conduction headphones it was as if I was starting the program all over again. I unable to devote adequate time to the program at this time as other things take priority. Right now just getting shit done is all I care about.
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That precise difficulty is the point of such practices. Definitely not the f**k on my plate either at the moment. Some things I need to titrate carefully.
I’m not doing those right now either; although sometimes some of those things will arise naturally in my practice for some period of time. Then it’s ‘buckle the seatbelts and ride through it’-time.
Those particular practices are more on the Buddhist side of things. There’s actually quite a large old book in which various mental characteristics are matched up (by the ostensible Buddha) with the type of prescribed meditation object that would be most expedient.
In other words, very angry? meditate on this
Overwhelmed by lust? meditate on this
And so on.
But Buddhists did not invent meditation and don’t have a monopoly on it.
I do love it though.
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@Malkuth I have heard of corpse meditation. When I first read about it I honestly thought it was a pre death ritual someone made up
Yep. Kind of in line with the whole memento mori thing. Earlier actually.
But when I reflect on it, this is literally one of the main reasons that people need or choose meditation.
Anyway, it’s one of the crayons in the box.