The Milestones of Meditation
You don’t have to meditate to experience enlightenment, but a lot of people do, and it’s probably fair to say that meditation is the most popular technique for getting it done. Yet it struck me recently how I’ve never come across a model for the progress of insight phrased in terms of the development of meditation technique.
I was thinking about this because I’d noticed a couple of important milestones in my practice that I’d never seen listed in any of the classic descriptions of enlightenment. These milestones, I realised, were developments within meditation rather than stages of insight per se. Having understood this, it seemed possible to describe a whole model based on technique, although the model closely follows the contours of the classic Theravada four-path insight model.
The first milestone
In terms of meditation technique the first milestone is passed when the meditator overcomes completely his or her aversion to sitting.
I noticed this for myself after the attainment of stream-entry (or the grade of Magister Templi in the western magical tradition). Beforehand, there was often a sense of disinclination toward the prospect of sitting, of having to resolve oneself against one’s natural desire. But at the first milestone in my new model this is eradicated, although in a curiously paradoxical fashion: one’s aversion to sitting becomes itself an object of interest.
After stream-entry the involuntary expressions of aversion that arise at the prospect of sitting become a source of motivation. There is no longer any question of whether one will sit or not. The meditator has understood that the resistance to sitting offers a juicy opportunity for investigating how ignorance partitions certain sensations away from others (i.e. the sensation of not wanting to sit is isolated from the feeling that one should sit) in order to create an impression of a self.
The second milestone
This, like all the others, also appears as a deeply experienced paradox, but is most likely not established until the meditator has a few fruitions under their belt.
Simply put, on passing this milestone we begin to notice a new level of stabilisation in our technique, to the extent that we begin to become aware of what we are not currently aware of.
If we are focusing on the breath, for instance, or other sensations in the body, then when the mind wanders we are not completely absorbed in the wandering, but a kind of paradoxical consciousness enables us to see that we have wandered and we remain focused during the wandering in a way that enables meditation to continue rather than to be grossly interrupted.
In other words, there is no longer any ‘break’ in our meditation when the attention loses focus upon the object. The focus remains even during the wandering; it is merely a change of object that has occurred.
Again, this breakthrough in technique represents an erosion of the sense of self. Formerly, if the mind wandered from the object, there was an experience of a ‘break’, as if the change in focus represented a transition from a self that was meditating and focused to a self that was not meditating and unfocused.
The leap in technical competence that is achieved with this second milestone comes about because the meditator has examined reality thoroughly enough to observe that sensations of being focused and unfocused are simply that, and do not imply a self separate from those sensations that somehow can ‘have’ a focus to gain or lose.
The third milestone
The first milestone concerned the challenge posed to meditation by the ‘self’, and the second concerned the challenge posed by the ‘object’. The third milestone undoes the very basis of both of these.
Prior to this milestone, when we sit we are driven by a desire or the idea of a goal that is to be achieved. After this milestone, our practice is informed by a curious sensation that whatever idea or goal we set ourselves, our current experience is already it. This development represents a deep acceptance and a letting go of the idea that in our meditation there is anything to be surmounted.
The experience that our current awareness is already ‘it’ is not wish-fulfilment, but the simple realisation that nothing ‘extra’ is needed for us to see what is. Our meditation now becomes fulfilling to a degree that we had not imagined possible, yet at the same time it’s clear the practice itself is entirely redundant.
This milestone is passed shortly after the attainment of third path (or the grade of Magus) and represents a deep and dramatic shift. The notion of meditation technique itself now comes into question and is seen through. Indeed, it’s probably advisable to abandon whatever practice one was doing formerly at this point, in order to understand clearly that whatever that practice was, it isn’t responsible for what can now be seen, for how could it possibly be that experiencing reality as it is should involve ‘doing’ or ‘seeing’ anything? This is already it! That’s the realisation that underpins the shift in technique at this stage – a shift towards abandoning technique altogether.
The fourth milestone
The third milestone is a curious echo of the first: the overcoming of the aversion to sitting (‘don’t want to’) is superseded by the more inclusive realisation that meditation isn’t necessary (‘don’t need to’).
Similarly, the fourth milestone is an echo of the second: the realisation that there is no ‘break’ in awareness is superseded by the more inclusive realisation that there is no difference between meditating and not.
The practice of meditation is, in a sense, destroyed at enlightenment. There simply isn’t any difference between meditating and not meditating. The culmination of the progress of insight, from the perspective of meditation technique, is to arrive at a point where there is no longer any technique whatsoever, because when a person who has experienced enlightenment sits, then they’re just sitting.
