The Late Stage of Meditation

What you realize at the late stages is that there is no awakening to achieve. You cannot achieve it in any way.

The whole idea that awakening is this project and this sort of goal and this kind of like destination,

you realize that that is a complete illusion and it was an illusion based on ordinary perception

and that idea of a self separate from experience and not realizing that all experience is you and always has been

and everything that you think that is outside yourself is you.

This is where it is deeply paradoxical because even talking about this requires me to disown my experience.

It requires me to take subject to an object seriously, which it is possible to realize that subject to an object are themselves in illusion.

But anyways, you realize there is no one to become awakened because you realize that the self is not a thing, it is everything but it is also nothing at the same time.

And that might sound very sexy but it basically means you cannot locate a self in experience. There is no permanent thing there that you can call yourself as separate from experience.

And of course when you talk about these things you inevitably tire yourself in knots because it is actually very obvious experientially but trying to put it into words is very challenging.

It does not mean there is no self per se, it just means that the way you look at what self means is very different.

You can still live as a self, you know, I can still do what I need to do but it is not taken in the way it used to be.

It is kind of like seeing it seeing through an optical illusion. It is not that the picture changes necessarily because you look at the individual dots and everything, it is just the perspective on it changes.

It is like the way you look at it completely flips around and this is what awakening is like. There is no self improvement project because you realize nothing is outside of you.

And that is a shocking thing to realize but once you reown all of your experience you kind of question the need to improve yourself because often improvement is first of all based on the idea of a permanent self which you realize isn't true.

And it is based on separation between self and other but it is based on trying to sort of improve self against the world.

But if you realize that there is nothing outside of your experience and there is nothing outside of your sense of self well what is there really to improve.

Now I am very cautious of saying this because when I reflect on my life I can see that I am improving in a lot of ways and I can see that I need to improve in a lot of ways to improve my happiness and my functioning and I am constantly working on myself.

It is just your relationship to it. Again it is like seeing for an optical illusion you do not have to not do anything to improve yourself because of course being attached to the idea of not improving is also kind of just another attachment.

It is just you are not so invested in the idea because you realize that there was nothing ever separate from you and there never is and never was.

And so there is not that big sort of contrast. There is not that kind of past, future, you know, self in the past versus self in the future because you realize that the self is just always the self is ever present and omnidirectional, shall we say.

Anyways, what does this late stage look like? What is going to more details here? Identities function but are worn lightly.

So it can basically think as a late stage that late stage meditators are in the mountain somewhere and they do not speak and they do not know anyone, they do not have any friends but see this is like an early stage fantasy.

This early stage, the early stage minds of projecting and imagining what it must be like to have insight.

And it is quite the opposite really. I mean of course there will be plenty of late stage people that they may be living this way but there is no reason why this has to be the case.

In fact, I would argue that the most embodied awakening happens when there is no, you're not trying to sort of what's the word siphon it off and divide it and create this kind of like partition of the awaken self living in a

awakened life. It's just life as it is but you fully reintegrated it and you fully realize that there is no escape. And this is like, it's just like in the

battle of your bones, it's like right down to sort of the core of your moment to moment perception. You realize there is really nowhere to go.

And so you can wear all these different masks, you know, you can be a partner and you can be a friend and you can be a business owner.

And it's not, you don't have to take these things seriously but you also have to don't have to reject them because again that's, that's not very balanced.

The middle way is the Buddha, Buddhism teaches is very, it's a good teaching in this particular context.

Thoughts and emotions arise without ownership. I just want to clear up this point because it might sound like dissociation.

It's actually such a profound re-owning of your thoughts and emotions that you realize there is no need for a self to experience them, that they just arise on their own.

You can fully feel them, you can fully let them arise in your consciousness in your moment to moment experience but there's no need.

You see through the labeling process, you see through the process of ownership and you just let them be as they are, right?

So not owning them doesn't mean like you're creating a, like a sub personality or you're creating like a, you're trying to like push them out of awareness.

It's such a profound owning that you realize that you don't have to resist them whatsoever because resisting is really the main obstacle.

There's no chasing bliss or curating spiritual states.

So again at the early stage and even at the mid stage to some degree, you're chasing us out in experience.

You're chasing a moment different from this moment right now and you're trying to get from here to there and you're basically saying this state is not good enough, I want to feel blissful.

But you see this is not what happens at the late stage because again, you just realize that moment to moment experiencing is occurring and you fully feel it and fully let it all arise.

Now obviously this isn't, this is a skill. So these are very broad generalizations I'm making but unho, you are letting experience arise without resisting it.

And this is a very deep rewiring of your nervous system and of your perceptual system.

Ordinary life is enough because again, you just realize that there's nowhere to go and nothing to get.

Not as a story, not as like a slogan but it's really just becomes very obvious and you realize that you can see the mechanism of striving.

You can see the mechanism of building castles in the sky and chasing after them and you no longer have to do that because you realize that that itself is, that itself is really one of the main sources of suffering and it's one of the main things that takes you away from your current experience, your mind body sense experience right now.