The Early Stage of Meditation

The core orientation at the early stage is that meditation is something that you do.

It's an activity, it's something that requires effort, it's something that requires

special time, a certain place, a certain set of conditions.

Awakening, if it's considered a talk, because quite honestly a lot of meditators never consider this

or even come across the concept of spiritual awakening. But if you do,

at the early stage you will consider awakening to be a future event that will come about through

hard work and perseverance and it seems distant, it seems sort of grand, it seems almost untouchable

and fathomable, it seems kind of mythic, it has a mythic glow, spiritual awakening.

There is a kind of dualistic structure, there is the concept of me, my practice and my progress,

so it's like the self is moving somewhere through a certain vehicle.

Some of the features of this stage is that insight is mostly conceptual, so for example,

in Buddhism they have the concepts of impermanence and emptiness. Now at the early stage you will

just tend to see these things as concepts, so the concept of impermanence says that everything

is always changing and we cannot build a house on the shifting sound of reality.

Because it's always shifting and changing and this will tend to be an abstract thing,

you know, it will tend to be related to life circumstances or politics or the economy,

this will frame how you interpret these things but it doesn't necessarily come down to the level

of experience. The same thing with emptiness, you might look out there and see, well,

you might see this sort of emptiness behind society, behind culture, behind the world around you

in that appearances are just appearances in the arising consciousness, but this again maybe

doesn't filter all the way down to your direct experience. There's constant evaluation of meditation

and this is really one of the things that most people fall into for a very long time and it's

what really all sort of the average view of society is built on this. It's basically built on the idea

that you can have good meditation where you feel calm and you feel sort of focused and you feel

like insights are coming and then you can have bad meditation on the other hand. You can have

meditation where you feel restless and you feel like it lasts forever and you feel that you're lost

in thought and you feel that you're thinking about what happened 20 years ago. So there's good

and there's bad meditation and the two are very clearly distinguished and they actually create,

you know, this is like a battle. The battle becomes how much good meditation can I have.

Thoughts are still believed so there's not really a clear separation between thought and awareness

yet and thus the mind continues to form a cage around you because you are not realizing that the

mind is just appearances, it's not reality, it's not necessarily truthful, it's just appearances,

thoughts are just what they are. This is yet to come and so you still fundamentally are even

relating to meditation and spirituality from the level of your mind and from your thoughts and

from concepts. Emotions are sticky at this stage so meditation is often used to manage

discomfort to make you feel better, to soothe, to get rid of anxiety, to

relax your nervous system and so on. There's not the clear, pure insight of emotions as just

empty horizons in the body that don't need to be cling to, they don't need to be rejected either.

They can just be seen through like ripples on a lake that have no substance to them whatsoever.

A spiritual identity forms so the person will start to create this identity around being a

meditator and they might start altering their behaviour in a certain way, they may begin to act

calm, when they don't feel calm, they may pretend to feel good all the time when that isn't true,

they may wear certain clothes that identify them as a meditator, they may speak differently

in a deliberate way because they're a meditator. So you see there's an identity of I am a meditator

and then that identity is reinforced through behaviour and through choices that will project to

other people that you are a meditator and it seems from this point of view that when you're

at the early stage you sort of have this idea that all I need to do is become more of that,

you know I just need to wear, over time I'll just be a better meditator, I'll have better

meditation sessions and I'll start waiting more, what's the word, but it's sort of mystical

clothing and I'll have a name and people will be able to tell right away that I'm a meditator.

There is comparison with other practitioners, there is subtle performance as I've mentioned

which basically means that you're trying to uphold the identity of being a meditator and you

comparing your own identity as a meditator with that of others and sort of trying to

and perfect the paraphernalia of it.