What Are the Stages of Meditation?

Meditation means being in a state without thoughts, in full awareness. For the sake of a preliminary understanding only, the successive stages of meditation can be set out as follows: 1. You begin by consciously following the natural process of breathing. This is known as anapanasati. (There is no need to control or manipulate the process of breathing.) Whenever a thought draws your attention away from the breath, return to following the breath without struggling against that thought. 2. At the next stage, add your heartbeat to what you are consciously following, alongside the breath. This is awareness of two aspects. Then comes the following of the whole body along with the breath. This is known as kayanupassana. Here you are aware of every event inside your body. 3. At the next stage, widen your awareness further still by adding to it the following of all sounds, of both the outer and the inner world. Let your awareness become more intense and more extensive. Let it grow into multi-aspect awareness, which means being aware of many aspects at the same time. You are aware of your breath, your heartbeat, the sensations in your body, the various sounds within and without. You are also aware of the air moving over your skin, of the different scents in the room, and so on. When you simply become established in this state, the third eye opens of its own accord and you begin to see things directly. This is known as vipassana, or "special seeing". Many meditators report various experiences at this stage, known as experiences relating to the third eye. 4. With the following of thoughts and a further sharpening of this awareness, becoming established in the state without thoughts grows easy. A reservoir of energy builds up as well, since there is no dissipation of energy by the thinking mind. As you remain in this state more and more, the energy builds to peaks and then falls back into itself. This is the experience of enlightenment, in which awareness begins to be aware of itself. Through this, multidimensional awareness becomes possible, and with your "multiple seeing" you can see the various vibrating universes (etheric, astral, causal and so on) that all coexist at the same time. This brings an understanding of the diversity of the different vibrating universes - the gross, the subtle and the most subtle of all. You understand all these "consensus realities" as temporary, illusory appearances, and you let go of all these experiences of the past, remaining wholly rooted in the present moment. This is nibbana (in Pali), or nirvana (in Sanskrit) - the state in which there is no desire. The greater the intensity, the less time it takes to make progress in meditation.