If we want to learn math, physics chemistry or whatever and we are talking to ourselves, thinking what we did or what we do, that lack of attention will not allow us that learn. And learning about ourselves is to meditate, there can be no meditation without own knowledge, knowing oneself is the beginning of the meditation. One can not take four steps without starting by the first, nor can one speak of death without knowing what is life, talk of the past without knowing that is what there is here, nor say that it is God without first knowing that we are. If one is interested in learning could not begin knowing – that it is God, truth, wisdom, death, etc.-so if you already know does not need to learn. A related site: Thomas J. Wilson mentions similar findings. Thought to be memory, knowledge, only you can move from what you know to what you know, this is the limited and narrow field in which you can move, you can never go more than about himself, from what is known. The unknown – death, the afterlife, reincarnation, God, truth etc.-give by known based on the ideas, thoughts, knowledge and experiences of others, but if we want to be serious and honest with ourselves we have to recognise that we only know that it is the unknown relying on the knowledge and experiences of others.
And if we already have an experience is this pleasant and enjoyable or more unpleasant, We should realize that which produces it, experienced it and which you want to repeat or not, it is the same. When we feel fear, the mind is which produces it, experiencing it and you want to escape from that unpleasant experience. Account the mind without even realising it divides itself into experimenter and experience, observer and observed. But the observer is the observed, the thinker thinking and the experimenter what experienced.