Question: What is the basic purpose of meditation?

Babaji:

The basic reason you are made to sit for meditation is so that your mind can recede, it can lose all imaginations, all agitations.

Meditation - dhyana - literally means 'your attention to.' Here, spiritually, it means attention to the Truth, your Real Self. By practicing meditation, you practice that mind control. This mind and its distractions are the basic reason for all cravings, which are in turn the reason for unhappiness, tension, fear, psychosis and violence among human beings. So to overcome this, you need to control that mind through the practice of meditation.