Whenever you aren’t manipulating your experience, you’re meditating. As soon as you meditate because you think you should, you’re controlling your experience again, and you’ve squeezed all the value out of your meditation.
Meditation means the mind is turned back upon itself. The mind stops all the thought-waves and the world stops. Your consciousness expands. Every time you meditate you will keep your growth.
In the Buddha's life story we see the three stages of practice: Morality comes first, then concentrated meditation, and then wisdom. And we see that the path takes time.
If you are a meditator, as your meditation goes on becoming more and more luminous, your intelligence will be growing to the last breath of your life. Not only that, even after the last breath your intelligence will continue to grow - because you are not going to die, only your body will be dying. And the body has nothing to do with intelligence, mind has nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence is the quality of your awareness - more aware, more intelligent. And if you are totally aware, you are as intelligent as this whole existence is.
If your mind is happy then you are happy anywhere you go.
When wisdom awakens within you, you will see Truth wherever you look.
Truth is all there is.
It's like when you learned how to read, you can then read anywhere you go.
If the traveller can find A virtuous and wise companion Let him go with him joyfully And overcome the dangers of the way. But if you cannot find Friend or master to go with you, Travel on alone.
"I do not want to get material life, do not want the sense-life, but something higher." That is renunciation. Then, by the power of meditation, undo the mischief that has been done.
Proper effort is not the effort to make something particular happen. It is the effort to be aware and awake each moment, the effort to overcome laziness and merit, the effort to make each activity of our day meditation.