When I was still a student I was looking for a spiritual discipline, which would give me the tools to understand and develop my inner life. I found that I wasn’t interested in a tradition, which told me just to believe, and that this was enough. I knew from my music studies that if you wanted to play the piano you needed a teacher to guide you and exercises to develop the skills, which would enable you to play. Nothing was left to chance – you knew what to do and could either do it, or couldn’t.
When I discovered the meditation tradition I was fascinated, because here was something, which worked in exactly the same way as music. You had a teacher who gave you exercises, which developed different stages of understanding and experience. You could check and test the results of your experience so that you knew exactly what was happening and what you were doing.
In our courses we explain how learning meditation is the same as learning sport – you have a coach who guides you and who not only knows how to do it but can show you how to do it too. This is why it is not possible to learn meditation properly from a book. It is a practical skill, which you learn by being with someone who is accomplished in it, so that you can get the physical feeling of meditation along with the knowledge.
I also like to describe it to students as travelling into ‘the outback’ of our inner experience. If you were to wander off into the Australian outback without having checked things out first, without the proper equipment and maps, you would certainly not have an enjoyable experience and would run the risk of not surviving. So, if you want to explore inner space, the meditation tradition provides the knowledge and the maps of how to get there and what you will find.
It is true that you can open up to the first stage of enlightenment by really probing any discipline, as did the poet Walt Whitman and the author and teacher Eckhart Tolle. However the meditation tradition outlines in detail five distinct stages of experience, which give the complete understanding of how, our minds, our inner life and our consciousness work.
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