A few questions about meditation

_Do you need silence to meditate?
-how can I achieve astral projection? ( i know there's a post but I couldn't get the link)
-how can i manifest my rage and fears into posative physical power?
-is it normal to "talk" to people when meditating?
-does it gain an "instant" effect as I do it more(by this I mean can you attain the meditation state quickly and at will?)
-how do I control my ki and what/how is it used?
-one more question, I tried meditation one time and visualized bright yellow energy flowing from my heart to my arms and legs, and head. then my hands started to feel warm, my legs did to as well as my head. The cool thing was is that i visaulized each part with the energy individually, and when one part was warm the others weren't! was this really my energy?

thanks for any post

Sounds to me like your trying to get more out of meditation than it can deliver. It's just meditation, it's not majic, the only thing it does is calm your mind and body to so you can relax. Too many people try to make into something that it's not.

I have to agree. You seem to be aiming way over the top. Plus, if I may be so blunt, your expectations seem rather mundane. You seem to be striving for an effect right here in this very instant.

Meditation is a skill aquired the same as any other, through dedication and constant practice. Short of that you may as well try "tuning your chakras" with crystals and pyramids and such. Harmless enough but it just isn't going to work.

Meditation will however allow you to choose the direction of your spiritual growth. That is to say, it provides the tools for diagnosis of the self and trains you in the awareness required to take advantage of the unfolding here and now.

How is that? Each new thought, each reaction to stimuli impart new qualities into your being. The skills acquired through meditation will free you of the habitual self-narration we all tend to perform. You learn to see unfolding events without delusive mental filters. It will, in effect, disillusion you about yourself. You'll neither praise nor hate yourself, but see yourself as a work in progress. The flaws will each be taken in stride and gradually honed away moment by moment. The virtues will be identified and incremented in similar fashion. In the course of years you will become a different kind of person.

I encourage you to make the effort. Sit calmly and observe the breath. Don't try to do anything else. The first thing you'll notice is that it ain't easy. You will fail. Everyone fails. Take care to observe how it is that you fail. Not analytically, just feel your way through it, like how you know how it is that you lift a finger. It can't be described but still you can observe for yourself how it is that you do it.

This will be the first of many, many uncounted incremental realizations. Thoughts will arise unbidden. When this happens just let them go. Don't squash them. Just let go. Return to the breath...until the next unbidden thought. Then let that one go also. And the next and all the uncountable ones after that. Over weeks and months the gaps between thoughts will gradually widen.

Being thoughtless is not the goal. Being aware of how thoughts arise and pass away is the goal. Knowing the difference between thought and being is the goal. In the gaps between concious thoughts you still have being. This is your being. Get to know it. Cease to identify thoughts. Thoughts are merely things that happen. They are not the self.

When you can learn just how to let a random thought go then you can apply that skill to deliberately letting a passion go: anger, hatred, jelousy, hurt, et cetera. Once you know how to let even an intence passion go then you can learn how to stop one before has even arisen. And so by increments you can become utterly free. There cannot anyone yank your chain or rattle your cage ever again. No mere circumstance or misfortune can undo you. You will be master of yourself. This is the goal of calm abiding meditation.

Do not confuse dispassion with indifference or disinterest. Rather it is equanimity, a different thing. You will still care. But the caring will not impose itself as a burden. You will have the skill in means to apply yourself toward the ends you care about.

In fighting, when fighting is the cirumstance which is thrust upon you, there will be no chinks in your equilibrium for an opponent to expoit. Your discernment will not be unhinged by passion. Your increased awareness will also serve. But this is just the smallest and most insignificant side benefit to mediation. The same exact skills will serve you equally well in life. And life goes on throughout the day while fighting only occurs but seldom, if at all.

There are futher kinds of meditation as well. Each is aimed at overcoming some specific fault or obtaining some virtue or gaining some specific insight. But each is a labor at which the beginner will aways fail, and in failing learn how it is that they fail, and having leaned that overcome even the subtlest obsticles so that in the end they surely succeed.

Respectfully,

Gan Uesli Starling
Kalamazoo MI USA