3.3 That same meditation when there is only consciousness of the object of meditation and not of the mind is realization.

Let's get into some deep philosophy. When I mean deep, I'm talking the middle of the ocean with lead weights on your feet deep. Getting deeper into meditation has one purpose, and that is to realize that the mind, body and thoughts are separate from pure awareness. Yoga is the process of stripping things away one by one until there is only one thing left. What is left is always going to be pure awareness, but what can get murky is what exactly does this Sutra mean by "object of meditation"?

I struggled with this concept when I first began my yoga practice and it is still a little fuzzy to my today. So, using the concept of "fuzzy" as an example, I'm going to break it down for you Star Trek style, by using the tribble.

If we were to meditation on specifically a tribble, we see that it is just a fluffy bunch of cute reproducing fur. They're great until they start multiplying out of control and get all up in your star ship. What happens if we meditate on a tribble? The meditator notices the qualities such as the fuzziness, what it looks like and the cute purring noises it makes. These are all sensory qualities that our mind associates with the object. The next level is how does the tribble make us feel? I laugh a lot when I see "The Trouble with Tribbles".

All of these feelings and sensory perceptions mask the true nature of an object. During the process of meditation, the Yogi works to strip these away, so nothing but the pure essence of the object remains. Yogis use mantras, idols, candles as objects of meditation as well. It gets confusing trying to figure out what can be used as an object of meditation. It takes practice and dedication, but in the end it really does not matter. Whatever you settle on will get you to the end of the road, so use a tribble in the mean time,