"Without the help of meditation you cannot attain Knowledge of the Self. Without its aid, you cannot grow into the divine state. Without it, you cannot liberate yourself from the trammels of the mind and attain immortality. Meditation is the only royal road to the attainment of freedom. It is a mysterious ladder which reaches from earth to heaven, from error to truth, from darkness to light, from pain to bliss, from restlessness to abiding peace, from ignorance to knowledge. From mortality to immortality." Swami Sivananda
"We know the outer world of sensations and actions, but of our inner world of thoughts and feelings we know very little. The primary purpose of meditation is to become conscious of, and familiar with, our inner life. The ultimate purpose is to reach the source of life and consciousness." Maharaj "Meditation will bring you more and more intelligence, infinite intelligence, a radial intelligence. Meditation will make you more alive and sensitive; your life will become richer." Osho
"Just sit silently in a relaxed state, doing nothing... and awareness will start happening. Not that you have to pull it up from somewhere, not that you have to bring it from somewhere. It will shower on you from nowhere. It will well up from within your own sources. You just be silent, sitting." Osho “Japa (chanting) is when you sit and meditate on a mantra and you spend days and days and days in constant repetition of God's name and God progressively calms the ego. The more mild the ego is, the more your finite Infinity starts seeing the Infinite Infinity. First you do things to be secure on Earth. Then you start seeing things beyond Earth, and what is beyond Earth is called higher consciousness..." Yogi Bhajan
"If you go on doing meditation blindly, it reaches nowhere."
Notwithstanding the importance of meditation, my Guru from my lifetime in India, always insists in his teachings, that meditation alone is not enough - he says that meditation is like placing a lamp in a table: it will give light but it won't clean the house. Therefore, he insists about the importance of cleaning the psyche, the old and acquired concepts and ideas, the conditionings from our parents and society.... otherwise meditation becomes a useless tool... that will probably bring very little or nothing, for all of us trully interested in growth and conscious living.