My reason for attempting to reintroduce meditational practice into philosophy is that it has the capacity to transform its subject-matter. To attempt to do philosophy in this way depends upon developing degrees of concentration or absorption which are themselves modifications of the consciousness whose structure one is concerned to investigate, and which are also supposed to determine disclosures of reality not otherwise available. An analogy may be found in the activity of attending to or becoming aware of the breath in meditation. This has a tendency to alter the pattern of breathing that is attended to, and makes a difference to the quality of the attention.

Meditational thinking is a concentrated activity of reflection which itself thereby emerges as part of what is there to reflect upon and understand. This is not the claim that reflection must also reflect upon itself, but that meditational thinking brings about a transformation of the phenomena to be reflected upon. The processes of concentration involved in such thinking determine the self, and its access to reality, that are, in general, the subject-matter of philosophy.

Augustine (1991) writes that

If this were read empirically we should have to ask what grounds there are for the claim that we are thus restored to an original unity we have lost, and from which we fell. But, on the other hand, it may be true that different degrees of the contrast suggested can be encountered in the process of concentration, a contrast between energies gathered into a unity, and energies scattered and dispersed.