I recently started meditating, using the method in "Mindfulness in Plain English". So far, I've been able to meditate for between 1 to 3 hours at a time, every day. I do feel quite a bit of calm afterwards and during the deep parts of the meditation, and have also experienced some occasional hallucinations (like a feeling of intense bliss, like my arms are floating, like my chest is a hundred feet from my head) when I am deep in meditation. Also, I've found that when I need to do some chore in my daily life, if I start focusing on my breath, it helps me to not feel so bored or resentful.
I am looking forward to hopefully being able to enter deep states of calm more readily and spontaneously as my meditation practice deepens. However, the effects I describe above are somehow not enough for me. I am a seeker, and naturally curious. I want to find out what (if anything) lies beyond our ordinary perception of the world. Is what we normally take to be the "real world" (or "objective reality", "external reality", etc) actually an illusion like Buddhism and Hinduism claim? If so, can the techniques of Buddhist or Hindu meditation really reveal the "true reality" beyond the illusion of the ordinary world? I would like to find out.
Today, I found an interesting article[1], which argues that the kind of meditation taught in "Mindfulness in Plain English" (which is the kind most people today think of when they think of the word "meditation"), while "it has obvious benefits [such as health and calm]... does not lead to liberation from suffering".[2] This is because, the author argues, this type of meditation practice tries to avoid painful experiences (by focusing back on the breath), and therefore leads to "the attachment to aversion to suffering".
The type of meditation the author advocates is quite different. I encourage you to read the article for details, but essentially it seems to consist in observing whatever happens in your mind without trying to control it, without trying to avoid it, curiously and observantly following wherever it leads.
This method of meditating sounds interesting, and I look forward to trying it in the future.
I am also interested in finding and trying other methods of meditation. I know there are lots of them, from focusing on the breath, to focusing between the eyebrows (the so-called "third eye"), to focusing on various external objects such as candle flames, mandalas[5], or even corpses. Some forms of meditations utilize mantras[6] or other techniques for maintaining focus.
One other type of meditation that I did try briefly was kinhin[7], or walking meditation, which is described in some detail in "The Three Pillars of Zen" (a book I highly recommend, though with a grain of salt, as it seems to have a bit of a bias towards a particular tradition of Zen). It was quite interesting, and may be a good way to start and end a sitting or zazen[8] form of meditation.
[1] - http://ronsharrin.com/writings/mindfulness.pdf
[2] - The author uses the term "suffering", probably referring to the Buddhist concept of dukkha[3], which is often translated as "suffering" (and is the first of the so-called Four Noble Truths[4], as in "life is suffering"), but may be better translated as "dissatisfaction" or the "problematic" aspects of life.
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dukkha
[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Noble_Truths
[5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala
[6] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantra
[7] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinhin
[8] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zazen