Underlying purpose of Meditation

What is the purpose of meditation? For this discussion, I view meditation as having two purposes, or rather a purpose and a goal. The purpose of meditation is to calm the mind. But what does calming the mind really mean? My definition here is specific to the task. Calming the mind means cutting out physical vibratory interpretation. In other words, for example, our eyes are lenses that capture specific frequencies that are transformed in the brain (according to science) into visual interpretations. Our ears capture other vibratory frequencies that we interpret as particular sounds. The calming process of the mind is our learned ability to tamp down those inputs in order to put them noticeably 'out of mind', so the physical body can be distanced from our conscious thought.

The underlying goal is to calm, to quiet the mind enough that we can refocus our consciousness away from the physical body, for the overt purpose of allowing it to fall into a sleep state.

Why? For the purpose of this forum, we do it in order to transition our consciousness into a lucid dream/obe; in the strictest sense for this forum, it would be the lucid dream using the WILD or similar method, since we are discussing meditation.

However, I believe that most people are missing the forest for the trees, as they say. What is it that is being missed? What are we actually doing when we calm the mind enough to tamp down the physical input? What I believe is really happening, that which is a bigger potential purpose of calming the mind, is that we are allowing ourselves to perceive the higher (subjectively interpreted), subtler frequencies: the frequencies of the Astral, for a lack of a better term. I don't prefer the term Astral, but I know that most people will at least understand, in general, what I am referring to when I use it.

I came to this perspective while considering how we perceive our environment while lucid dreaming or during an OBE. We obviously don't use our physical senses. We perceive with our whole selves, with our consciousness. We can perceive energy, energy at more subtle frequencies. But I don't believe that we must be in a lucid dream or OBE in order to do so. That is simply what almost everyone focuses on.

I feel that people who are born with the ability to lucid dream, the naturals as they are usually called, and others who show psychic talents, are those with a more naturally calm mind. They readily tamp down their physical senses without conscious effort and pick up the subtle vibrations that are constantly around us (within us?). But like an artist who can't describe how he draws or paints or sculpts a perfect tree, they don't understand how what they do is different from what everyone else does, because they have no point of reference. For instance, you can't tell the difference between orange and red if you have never experienced red. There is no reference point for red. It's just a noise in your head.

So, what is the purpose and goal of meditation, within my discussion guidelines? The purpose is to quiet/calm the mind. The goal is to perceive the subtler vibrations that surround us but which are being drowned out by the noise of normal, daily physical vibrational input. Doing this is critical, I believe, to expand our perceptions to the point where lucid dreaming/OBE and other psychic functions such as 'clairvoyance', for lack of a better term, are possible, and, yes, readily available to each of us.

Meditation clears away the dross, allows for perception of and interaction with subtler reality. And if you meditate regularly, you develop your own natural talent to readily calm the mind. And, for the record, I'm talking about "single-point meditation", not vipassana or similar. It's the 'focused', point meditation that clears the mind. Vipassana and such have other helpful purposes but are not directly relevant to this discussion.

I hope my rambling made sense to a few of you at least. Thanks for reading.