In Jean Klein’s Advaita teaching, meditation is not primarily a technique or a graded path, but a name for the natural, effortless recognition of ever-present awareness. Rather than a willful activity aimed at attaining a future state, it is a relaxed, choiceless “listening” or “seeing” in which sensations, thoughts, and feelings are allowed to appear and disappear without grasping or rejection. In this global openness, the usual sense of a separate meditator trying to achieve something is gently exposed as unnecessary. Meditation, in this sense, is less a doing than a transparent being, where awareness quietly knows itself.

At the same time, Klein acknowledges a preparatory and purifying dimension to what is conventionally called meditation. Quieting the mind and softening psychological agitation create conditions in which self-inquiry and non-dual understanding can unfold more easily. He points out that if meditation is held as a goal-oriented practice, it remains within the realm of doing and can become another form of subtle seeking. Its true function is to decondition habitual identification with the body–mind and thought, so that the inherent stillness and receptivity of Being can reveal itself.

Klein often made use of gentle body awareness, refined listening, posture, and breath-related exercises, but not as techniques to reach a distant realization. These invitations to relax and open the body–mind serve to dissolve tension and cultivate a transparent, non-grasping attention. As this relaxation deepens, the background of awareness is more readily recognized as the constant factor in all experience. Meditation thus supports a shift from identification with changing phenomena to the recognition that both the apparent “I” and the world arise in, and as, awareness.

From this non-dual perspective, there is no real progression toward a goal, only the repeated recognition of what has never been absent. Meditation, understood rightly, eventually dissolves into effortless being, where the distinction between meditator, meditation, and object of meditation no longer holds. In that dissolution, what remains is the simple, unconditioned presence that Klein points to as one’s true nature, untouched by the coming and going of experiences.