If you do not do any analytical meditations, then whatever you hear will be like a person telling you stories. But if you use it, it will be an effective spiritual practice. If you want it to help you, you have to do the work. That is: analytically try to understand and draw the conclusion and then concentrate on it, apply concentrated meditation. Both are necessary: concentrated meditation is absolutely necessary, analytical meditation is absolutely necessary. Without it you can never get a spiritual development.
Once you are able to get some points that you found by analyzing, then concentrate on them. When you do that, each point merges with you; you and that point will merge together; it becomes almost oneness. When it becomes that, then it works, then you are moving in the right direction. Until then, we are simply going around it, but we are really never getting into it. Every point that you really get is a spiritual development. In order to make it become a spiritual development the individual has to merge into it. The moment you merge that within the individual, it affects the person. And that is your spiritual development. I believe this is how one should move.
Concentrated meditation alone can give you harmony, make you peaceful, wonderful, can reduce your emotions, reduce your anger, attachment, hatred, but then you’ll have fallbacks. Sometimes you can go into depression a little bit; all these funny little problems can come up. If you do analytical meditation alone and you don’t do any concentrated meditation, then you become a very talkative informer. You know what I mean? Some people have a lot of information in their brain and they go, “Tuptuptuptup… So and so said such and such, I read about it tactactactac…” but actually it has no effect on the individual themselves or the people they talk to at all.
~ Gelek Rimpoche, The Three Principles of the Path, 1994, p. 48
