Vedantic meditation begins with inquiry rather than trance. The starting question is direct: who am I?
Anything that can be perceived - body, role, biography, thought, memory, emotion, sensation, even subtle states - is examined and set aside as an object of awareness.
The inquiry becomes sharper as every identifiable layer is seen to be known, and therefore not the knower itself.
The method asks whether the witness can ever be reduced to what it observes. Likes, dislikes, reasoning, moods, achievements, and wounds all come and go.
The one to whom they appear is constant across change. Meditation here is the stabilization of that discrimination.
Vedanta names the method neti neti - not this, not this. It is a disciplined exclusion of the non-essential.
When every objective layer is negated, what remains is not emptiness in a nihilistic sense, but the unqualified witness that cannot be turned into an object.
That recognition is why Vedantic meditation is inseparable from liberation-oriented knowledge.
Modern phenomenological language sometimes echoes this movement, but Vedanta develops it further into a full account of Self, world, and liberation.
The point is not temporary calm. It is clarity about the basis of experience.