Meditation is SO individual. While the great masters can map out a path and try to describe the indescribable, in helping you to know what’s ahead if you keep pursuing your practice, the actual experience of meditation will manifest for you as something unique and personal. Sometimes meditation will be sublime; sometimes it will be grueling; sometimes it will be abjectly boring. All of those experiences are still legitimately meditation! Provided you’re actually putting forth the effort to stay focused and not allowing yourself to indulge in drifting throughout your time of meditation.
Sometimes (all the time?) people have unrealistic experiences of what meditation is, or what will happen to them at a particular time during the evolution of their practice. The only experience you should be having during your meditation is an earnest attempt to keep meditating! Some people experience fantastical visuals or bodyrushes or extremes of emotion during meditation, which is fine — but that’s not meditating. That’s just a phenomenon that arose from that person’s activity of meditation. In other words: The goal is not to have these incredible revelations or hallucinations or insights. Those are all by-products of the practice. They can be exhilaration and eye-opening and incredible, but they don’t prove anything. They don’t make you a better meditator except to the extent that they may motivate you to meditate more. They don’t show that you’re especially accomplished or advanced. They’re just more phenomenon. They can be fun, no question, and they certainly can be inspiring. But the experience itself is not the point — unless we’re talking about the experience of oneness, but even that is just an experience. To truly KNOW that you are the divine means going beyond the experience of it; there is no experience there. (And this unfortunately is where words fall apart….)
This is one reason why it’s often counterproductive to talk too freely about your own experiences in spirituality. In certain circles this can be welcome and safe and help you to grow, but at other times it can serve only to tamp down the enthusiasm. Your meditations are precious. There is only one reason why you should want to share that experience with another person, and that is if you know in your heart that it will help her to grow. If you are 100% clear that sharing it will be welcome and useful to the friend you are speaking with, then absolutely do so. However too often, we have some incredible mind-blowing meditation and then the ego wants to claim it for its own.
The real risk when sharing experiences in meditation is that the motivation behind sharing is often suspect. It is almost 100% guaranteed that once you have some beyond-the-body experience or otherworldly incredible moment during your meditation, a) you will want to share it because OMG IT WAS INCREDIBLE!! and our cultural conditioning is such that we tend to want to tell someone; b) you may want validation, that YES because you had such an experience, this means you are in fact exalted and special (eek! 🙂 ); and c) pretty much definitely, your ego will try to abscond with the experience and claim it for itself.
Bragging about an incredible moment of transcendence is not a good look.
It kinda degrades it, ya know?
So keep those precious moments to yourself. There’s no need to talk about your advanced meditation experiences.
Especially since, if you keep humility and keep earnestly practicing, those moments will soon be surpassed with what Eternity wants to present you with today.
Provided you don’t block that from happening, by holding too tightly to what you think meditation is.
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