In Nisargadatta Maharaj’s teaching, what is commonly called “meditation” functions as a provisional tool rather than the ultimate way. Traditional, formal techniques are acknowledged as helpful for beginners to steady the mind, yet they are not regarded as central or final. The emphasis falls instead on insight: the clear seeing that the separate, personal self is illusory and that one’s real nature is the awareness in which all states appear and disappear. Any practice that reinforces the sense of being a separate doer, or that chases particular experiences or powers, is treated as a distraction from this recognition. Thus, meditation is valued to the extent that it supports disidentification from body, mind, and habitual patterns, not as an end in itself.

The heart of his instruction is a very specific kind of “meditation on the Self”: sustained attention to the bare sense “I Am,” prior to all attributes and stories. This is less a technique than a deliberate abidance in the felt fact of being, before thought qualifies it as “I am this” or “I am that.” By remaining with this unadorned sense of existence, the mind’s usual movements gradually lose their grip, and the underlying, timeless awareness becomes evident. In this way, meditation serves to exhaust the mind’s tendencies and dissolve identification with thoughts, feelings, and bodily identity. The role of meditation is therefore to stabilize attention in this pure consciousness until it becomes clear that even the meditator–meditation distinction is a conceptual overlay.

Nisargadatta repeatedly stressed that such abidance in the “I Am” should not be confined to special sessions or postures, but carried into the midst of ordinary activities. Formal sitting has less importance than the continuous remembrance and returning to the sense of being throughout the day. When this remembrance matures, meditation as a deliberate effort naturally gives way to a spontaneous, effortless state of being, in which there is no longer a practitioner trying to attain something. At that point, the purpose of meditation has been fulfilled: it has led beyond itself, to the recognition of the ever-present awareness that was never truly absent and never in need of attainment.