What are the stages of meditation and a seeker’s journey? What is the role of a teacher?
Everyone is a seeker, whether you are interested in your true self or not. Your mind is always searching for something, some sense of satisfaction. The only difference between truth seekers and other seekers is whether you are looking for that sense of satisfaction within or in outward circumstances. The beauty of this game of seeking is that the design of the Universe, or Mother Nature, is that no one has ever found sustainable satisfaction outside.
The only question is, when would you realise that chasing tiny drops of satisfaction scattered here and there outside will never fulfil you, and that the whole ocean of ultimate satisfaction is waiting inside while the mind is busy with a few droplets.
Stage 1: Seeking Satisfaction Through Experiences
The first stage of the journey is when the mind starts to find rest using different experiences or substances. This could be music, tasty food, lovemaking, alcohol, nicotine, drugs or anything which lets you forget your daily struggles. The mind keeps on chasing those experiences and substances because it feels a gap from the usual mental chaos and disturbances.
Stage 2: Discovering Inner Practices
Then, somehow, the person gets to know that there is something called meditation or similar practices, through which you can calm the mind without depending on outward experiences or substances.
Stage 3: Curiosity
The mind becomes curious about it and wants to try it. Depending on what kind of practice you encounter first, either you get very interested in it or you feel it is too difficult and lose interest.
Stage 4: Distraction
You may leave the practice and go back to chasing experiences and substances.
Stage 5: Return
After lots of ups and downs you may get interested again, perhaps by hearing from other sources or other people who were benefited by inner practices, and you may try it again.
Stage 6: The First Taste of Inner Peace
This cycle may repeat again and again, but once you taste the relief from the mind - even just a fragrance from a distance - then the mind becomes convinced that there is some real possibility to feel happy and satisfied without depending on external circumstances.
This might be experienced as a temporary gap in the continuous thought processes. The sense of personhood (or smell of ego) may still be there in this temporary gap, but it is still relieving.
Some rare people may directly fall into stage 11 from here, bypassing all other stages.
Stage 7: Chasing the Possibility
This is where people start practising sincerely. In this stage also, you may go through many ups and downs. You may lose motivation because the mind is trying to repeat the initial experience where you caught the fragrance first, but because it is expecting the same experience again it may miss the subtle progress and not notice how you are getting benefited with each session. When the combination of all subtle improvements combine and you feel some tangible improvement, then the mind again gets convinced that it is on the right track.
Stage 8: Introducing Effortlessness
In the next stage, when a teacher recognises that your mind has started getting exhausted with regular practices and mind training, the teacher introduces the next stage, which is effortless.
Initially, the mind may revolt against the idea that calmness can be achieved without effort. The mind is habitual of doing, it only knows activity. Initially, expert teachers encourage people to apply a lot of effort to exhaust the mind and to break this habit of mind that believes that to achieve something great you have to apply a lot of effort. Once the teacher realises that the mind is exhausted enough, and is at the border of surrender, then the teacher introduces the effortless way of discarding all efforts and just being as you are, which is relieving and satisfying at the same time.
Stage 9: Camping at the Border
Even after this stage, the mind may play and go back to efforts and go back to chasing experiences. But once the mind has seen the possibility of being effortless and blissful without any dependency on external circumstances, then the mind can never be fully satisfied with outward experiences and it would gradually come back. This is the mind’s design or nature, to chase the highest possible experiences that it knows about, so it automatically gets attracted to whatever is the highest that it has tasted so far.
Stage 10: Crossing the Border and Breakthrough
After a lot of to and fro, distractions and returns, sometimes a pause hits the mind, wherein the attention loses interest in the thoughts and stops moving for some time. It may feel like an absorption, where time stops, and you experience for the first time that even in the absence of the mind and thoughts that you are there as Awareness, not as a person. Initially, it might be a temporary satori experience, and some call it an awakening experience, but at this point the mind is fully convinced that the mind itself is a temporary appearance and the real you is beyond even the consciousness.
Stage 11: Full Awakening
From this point, it’s an automated process, which leads to full awakening.
Even if there is chaos in the life situation around you, nothing can disturb your inner peace. You are no longer identified as the body or mind. More than 99% of people leave their body at this stage, but if cosmic consciousness wants to use your body-mind as a vessel, then some rare few may still remain and appear to follow daily routines like other people.
At this stage, your life is like you have awakened from a dream which is still continuing and you are fully aware that this dream environment, this dream body and this dream mind are all illusions and it may collapse any time. You remain detached but fully involved in the dream.
Stage 12: Maha Samadhi – Final Merger
The dream collapses and you return to your formless pure awareness without any residue of the dream story. This can be called Maha Samadhi. This stage is like you created a dream universe to play with yourself, and now you are wrapping it up and the dream universe collapses into you.
The Role of a Teacher/Guru
The teacher’s role is to help the student to get the first taste of the effortless state, to clear any doubts, and to help address any distractions. After a point, when the truth is revealed, it becomes clear that the teacher was an expression of your own true self, which came to guide you.
In essence, the teacher is never a person. The teacher is an answer which the Universe provides when your question is deep enough. That answer may come in any form. It may come appearing as a person, or it may come intuitively from within also. The only thing a seeker needs to do is to ask for help from the Universe. If the question is deep enough to bring tears to your eyes, then the Universe always responds.
Ultimately there is only you. The Universe, all the people you met or didn’t meet, your guru, all beings - everything - was your own projection to remind you of what you really are, because your consciousness loves this game of hide and seek, of forgetting yourself and then creating a whole drama to remind yourself of what you have always been.
- Aham Shoonyam
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