Ram Das has produced a wonderful audio on the meditative way

For me to live in a contemplative way is to invite the experience of meditation and contemplation. There is opening that occurs in this. Experiences arise that are not knowable as we have come to know ourselves and our worlds to be, as we let go of our rigid ways of coming to structure our world and our experiences. There are often experiences that arise That have been blocked by our conditioning that can be precognitive and that are buried under the layers of our conditioning and identity that are created around them.
To open to these experiences can feel overwhelming at times because it is a confronting of sensations that inevitably have bern difficult for us to cope with and that led to habitual and avoidant patterns of acting. This is how we have coped in the past.
And difficult times will arise, but there is a practical benefit in returning to the meditative way which seems to enable an emerging  into a more expansive experience, eventually coming to be without the same sense of difficulty that existed before.

For me to live in a contemplative way means that life has become one big retreat and it is always involves coming back to presence. The biggest thing about that has been learning to be with the vulnerability and to cope with the hardship in a new way that involves being  present to it.
What occurs in the meditative way seems to  bring me  back to a truth that emerges from presence. Sangha or a group of like-minded individuals can be helpful but in the end it is us that must come to see beyond the barriers that we and others around us created.

“I don’t know” is my motto. Your experience is your experience completely unique  to you.
That is the benefit of the individual self that we have come to believe is us. We can entertain our own perceptions and thought based creations in this way. This is a creative gift. Meditation can help us to se as well that it is “a creation”. Our world is a relative reality created by a collective consciousness that has its limitations. But there is more to us that is part of a deeper connection that is unknown in ways we have come to understand things and phenomenon.

At the same time it is known.

We learn from opening to each other and from opening to the limited self and to life in a way that is not known. Dialogue and sharing are important in that.