Meditation means consciously resting

Chapter 3 - Samadhi 

Day 17 

By doing something you cannot experience, you cannot achieve this awareness. You cannot bring up the intelligence and the alertness in you by effort. It can be done only without effort, with relaxation, means the practice of resting - conscious relaxation and rest.

Unconscious rest is sleep which we are force to do by the nature. You are not resting voluntarily, you are forced to. When you are tired, it feels as if nature is pulling you down and forcing you to rest. You are not resting voluntarily. It is only in meditation that you really rest because you are consciously resting. You allow rest. 

Otherwise, your rest swallows you. Sleep is putting yourself to rest and meditation is resting on your own. This is abhyasa. For some people, this comes through old samskaras, impressions. Some people have to do a lot of practice in order to be calm and equanimous, in order to bring up more awareness in them. 

For some people it happens due to some old impression of past- lives. Some people start opening up right from their birth or they do so at a particular period in their lives. Some people suddenly open up to some spiritual experience after they are 30 or 40 years old. Then, they have more awareness but unfortunately, most of these people get misguided. 

They get a little experience and then they go on with all kinds of prophecies about the end of the world, etc. They may have read about some prophecies somewhere in the Bible. Then, an experience becomes so real to them that they see visions.

And they begin to make prophecies. This is because they have no knowledge of the root of Yoga. They may see a white light coming down, and they will exclaim that something would be happening. People get misled by such evangelic experiences. 

But, someone who knows the roots will be aware of all about such experience. We should know that they ar all from samskara shesha - some samskara from the past. That is a different type of Samadhi.

Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji 

PATANJALI YOGA SUTRAS