03 Feb The three stages of meditation
Mystics relate how, during the inward journey we take through meditation, we experience three stages. The author, academic and mystic Eknath Easwaran writes about this eloquently in his book Passage Meditation. He acknowledges that this is a simplification as these overlap and the boundaries between each of stages are more fuzzy then they may appear in this description, but he assures us that these are generally true.
1/ The first stage involves us identifying less and less with our bodies.
Our bodies become more like a vehicle we use to make our way around in the world. How much we identify with our bodies can be heard through the language we use. We say “I am hungry” as if that is who we are. After much time meditating instead of thinking “I am hungry” we think “my body is hungry”
As children whatever our bodies desire whether it is ice cream, sweets or crisps we want it. As we get older we start to challenge and attempt to master our instincts. We dislike being bound by our bodies likes and dislikes. The Bagavad Gita challenges us to go beyond our likes and dislikes and to train our bodies to obey us rather than the other way round. We look at our body the way we would a horse we were riding around on. We see it as something we need to tame and to teach, train and feed and care for.
2/ In the second stage we identify less and less with our minds.
We spend time observing our minds during meditation. We observe our thoughts and emotions and the intricate dance they weave. We start to identify with what is observing our minds rather then our minds themselves. Whereas before we may have felt like a leaf being swept around by the winds of our thoughts and emotions, now we become more like a star following its own path through the cosmos too far for the wind to reach, to borrow from Hesse’s book Sidhartha.
We start to see our minds as something we must tame and train for our own good and the good of other people. We take a step back and start examining our thoughts and emotions in a more detached way.
3/ In the third stage everything becomes one.
Now we come to the third and final stage. This is when our sense of self starts to get fuzzy. The boundary that divides us from the world starts to melt away and everything literally starts to become one.
Many unhappy people suffer from a sense of alienation. They feel alone, isolated and separate. They feel that they don’t belong in this world and feel distant from everyone and everything.
In the third stage we experience the exact opposite. We see our sense of self as an illusion and we feel one with everything. We feel close to everyone and everything.
The above is a quick description. I hope in the future to go over each stage in much more detail.
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