Awakening Through Meditation: Understanding Consciousness and Growth

Curiosity drives personal growth and deeper understanding on the path to awakening.

### The Gradual Path to Awakening: Insights on Meditation and Self-Discovery
* 🌱 Awakening is seen as a gradual process, with various thresholds that can be passed to **gain greater clarity and presence of mind**.
* ⏳ Consistent meditation practice is emphasized as essential for **deepening awareness and reconditioning the mind**, with **daily hour-long sessions** recommended for **optimal results**.
* 🧠 Curiosity is highlighted as a key motivator for meditation practice, encouraging individuals to **explore their own experience and ask questions about life and consciousness**.
* 🔍 Developing a precise phenomenological language is crucial for **effective communication and understanding** of meditative experiences, as terminology can vary widely among practitioners.
* 🎭 Imagination is acknowledged as a **valuable tool in meditation**, with the distinction between **imagining and experiencing blurred** to some extent.
* 🌀 The concept of "contractions" is introduced as a fundamental aspect of experience, with **excessive contractions leading to suffering and dissatisfaction**.
* 🌿 Nature is presented as a model for understanding **impermanence and the cyclical nature of life**, contrasting with the rigidity often found in urban environments.
* 🌟 Ultimately, the text emphasizes the importance of **self-compassion and self-discovery** on the path to awakening, suggesting that individuals must first become "**bodhisattvas unto themselves**" before being able to effectively help others on their journey.

okay, how do you know when you're awakened? You just know. No, I more and more so I'm less interested in that wording or that phrasing or making a kind of hard demarcation between awake or not awake. There seems to be many life-changing thresholds that can be passed in terms of presence of mind, medical cognition, a kind of clarity of perception, and sense of inequity. And there can be these big bump-ups in those, but you know, for some people, it's more of a very gradual process. And the thing is, is from one side of passing a particular threshold, it looks like some big insurmountable mountain that's going to be, once you get over it, it's going to radically change your understanding of yourself and your life. And in some sense, it's not that that's not true, but once you get on the other side and you look back, it's not this giant mountain you've passed over. It was more

of a kind of a molehill, and you've gained greater capacity of mind, so you just recontextualize all that was previously inexperience within a wider, greater spacio-temporal framework of mind, into eventually even space and time are contextualized themselves, and so on the other side of these thresholds, it looks very different, and one doesn't see that they fundamentally changed in nature. You see that, oh, these shifts were never what I presumed them to be, and everyone already contains what I'm now aware of; they just are not aware of it yet themselves, like the importance of having a consistent practice. Yeah, yeah, like I can ask what happens if you miss a day, what happens if you miss a week or a month. All your gains, your consciousness gains, go back to zero if you miss a day. God, I hope, yeah, of course you would be too hard on yourself, but you know, I think most people who really go the distance and really

radically change their default setup of mind to be one that is, uh, just more peaceful and more liberated day-to-day. Have sunk in an incredible amount of time into meditation. You know, there is a physiological process here that takes time to retrain, to recondition the mind, to, uh, undo certain binding traps, and, you know, for some very lucky people, that can happen sporadically, R, seemingly spontaneously, randomly, all at once, walking down the street. But for, for most of us, we got to put in the work, and the odds are you're not going to be one of these people walking down the street and something spontaneously shifts. And even if you are, you still need to do a lot of integration work after that. And so, just to hedge your bets, put in the time, really started daily meditation habit. Sit down every day, ideally an hour a day, and, um, yeah, think of it like, uh, just ongoing, uh, mental health workouts. I think that's a, a good way to think about it, just like you'd go to the gym and

train in that way. Why 1 hour? Yeah, why 1 hour? 'Cause at the 1-hour mark, that's when things tend to get interesting. Just from what I've observed personally and talking to other people, it seems on average the first 30 minutes is just like warming up, just settling the mind, you know, from your more chaotic busy day-to-day routines, and having to calm down and stay with your eyes closed and sitting still. It can take about 30 minutes to let a lot of the gross distractions defabricator [Music] doing. A lot of time spent meditating is often done quite half-assed. Even if we're physically showing up, it's like there are many subs that are not on board with the meditation, and it takes time to collect them, to unite them, to unify the organism here, to be all in line with one particular objective, to concentrate on this meditation object, or to do self-inquiry, or notice particular facets of

phenomena, and it's worth routinely checking in with yourself whether you are putting in as much effort as you can into the meditation set. You might be there; you might be partly doing it, partly tracking whatever you're trying to track or do, whatever technique you're trying to do. But you know in the back of your mind there's lots of you that kind of want to be elsewhere, that are thinking about something else. Become aware of those other parts and reassure yourself, Hang on, whatever they want to attend to, they can do that later after the meditation. But right now, we're here to fully do it. Like, here and now is the time to wake up. I mean, it has to happen in the here and now, and that's about coming to a point of enough internal collectedness. And it seems to be there are energy thresholds that need to be made in order to break through certain binding delusions. And if you're not feeding the mind with enough directed attentional energy, then you're not going to be able to see in greater detail.

important qualities of mind that are otherwise keeping us deluded and in states of unary suffering. I think curiosity is the healthiest motivator, especially along the meditation path, to get curious about life, about experience, about what is this, what am I, and that can really propel someone to look, that can really direct the energy in powerful ways, but also creative ways, to consider trying on new perspectives. I think curiosity can effortlessly keep one coming back to practice, as opposed to maintaining a kind of hard-nosed discipline where you're pushing yourself because you have some sense of unworthiness or you're chasing something or trying to get away from something or driven by so much suffering. Those do play a role, and they can play a role, but I really like to encourage people to discover their own curiosity, and curiosity is something that can be nurtured within. We can feign curiosity, we can kind of fake it until it becomes genuine, and feed it and

so if you're prompted in this way, uh, start asking questions, and if you don't know which questions to ask, uh, read books and talk to people who are asking these questions, and they can give you the idea of which questions to ask, and then they can become your own questions, and then you'll think of new questions yourself, but uh, keep exploring, keep investigating, uh, so I think curiosity is, yeah, very important on the path. Often, when people start meditating, they start with a lot of self-doubt, like whether they can, uh, trust their own experience, and they're often trying to export their understanding of consciousness, of mind, by referring to, yeah, teachers or just other people to tell them, Oh, what should I be experiencing? or, You know, am I doing the technique right? And it is very important to gain an internal self-confidence that you can trust your own experience, that only ultimately, only you know what you're experiencing. No one else can see what you see or hear what you hear, and so you have to, uh, you have to give yourself that.

permission to trust your own experience and also train certain cognitive faculties that are going to give you more precision of mind and clarity of understanding. When there's an emotion, what emotion is it? When there's a reaction to that emotion, how and where that manifests in the body. For example, what kind of subtle mental images are flashing in association with other phenomena. But then if we want to share our experience, we do just have phenomenological reporting. And so it's important to have a shared language that people can communicate their experiences to one another and understand what each other are talking about. So without a precise phenomenological language, when people throw out terms like having an ego experience or entering the genres, they may be talking about very different states of mind. That actually what one person means by ego death is not what another person meant by ego death. And so it's some importance to being very clear with your language. There is also a more subtle kind of intuitive detection.

that people can develop and pick up along the path that you know at some points you just you can just see you can just tell by body language and the way someone talks that they've likely had certain experiences or reached certain levels of Awakening and you can just you can just tell by that person's demeanor you can just see that they're they're coming from a different place yeah where the emphasis is where the stress is you know you see how balanced someone is in terms of rushing through life or leaning really heavily into the future and putting all the the weight and the value in front of them rather than you know in the past or or being very balanced there being able to acknowledge where they are in time and space and along this journey of life and um also imagination is a tool in meditation as well yeah yeah how do you use that yeah yeah so that carefully that was a really good point like how do you know if you're really experiencing something or you're just imagining it

well, the truth is, even imagination is a type of experience, so there isn't actually a difference between imagining something and experiencing something. There's just a degree of richness, you know, with the experience. Imagination is just a very, very faint experiencing of a kind. And so, uh, it's all our imagination in a way, you know, the mental what you perceive so-called mentally and what you perceive here physically is not of a different type. It's not of a different kind. It's of a different degree of phenomenological richness. Um, a lot of times when, uh, I'm guiding people in a kind of meditation where we're going to perceive like vast open boundless spaciousness, many people, they're unsure like, Well, I don't know if I'm really having this big open awareness experience or if I'm just imagining it. Uh, and I tell them that's okay. Imagine it. There really isn't actually much of a difference. The thing that you really care about is a release of sense of pressure and contraction, and by releasing certain contractions, often

like in the head tights pressure like that. It reveals the wide open spacious awareness. And so, however much you're tuning into that, and you keep tuning into that, that will be releasing these contractions. And so, I say just keep imagining, keep imagining. That's okay, it's okay. It's going to feed into, it's going to lead to the same place you want it to get to. Either imagine big and think big, and then you reach a boundary and just kind of perceive on the other side of that, and keep going, and that's going to release the contractions and give you this wide open spacious awareness. Or go the other way around and just start releasing the contractions, releasing the contractions somatically, and that's going to reveal the wide open spacious awareness as well. Can you expand more on the contractions? Contractions are inherent to experience. It's what, it's the quality that gives anything form. The reason why we perceive anything, there, subtle contracting, forming of the sense phenomena to bring anything about.

into existence to reify it, and um, the thing is, is when those contractions become too gross and not evenly distributed throughout the experience space, then they start causing us a lot of problems. That's when we really feel the suffering turn up, and one way to [Music] understand what people are doing in life is they're just trying to manage [Music] different contractions that they feel throughout their body-mind experience in day-to-day life. That's uh, making them feel uneasy, and that people are seeking uh, experiences of greater uh, expansion, the opposite of contraction, to ease their suffering. And people go about this in many different ways, and some ways seem to be more effective and productive than others. Yeah, so I wanted to talk about a lot of what I'm doing when I teach meditation, is introducing many, many techniques, many ways of applying one's attention, and accessing a plethora of conscious states to reveal to people just the magnitude and the diversity of how

one's present moment experience can be, you know, how the mind can present itself. And so, what this is doing is giving people a lot of flexibility, a lot of flexibility in perception and experience to recognize there's so many different ways of seeing. And I think by expanding people's conscious horizons in that way, two things: you loosen your attachment to any particular one state of mind to be in, as you realize there's so many other ways of being, and they all have their own degrees of similitude or value or truth-telling to them, and delusion and ignorance, that no state of mind gives you the whole picture, that reality is perspectival in this way. And secondly, gaining greater flexibility of mind gives one a greater liberation to play with their consciousness and their experience. And this means we're not so attached to any particular experience of mind, and we recognize even in those different states of mind what seem to be the universal qualities between them, that no matter

how this is set up. No matter how the smells and the sounds and the tastes and the colors and the sensations are presenting themselves within all of that, there isn't a main central controller. Even though it might present itself like that, it's not really the one driving the show. That none of this is permanent, that all of this is in flux and ever-changing. There aren't really these hard boundaries, and there's many more insights like this to gain that seem to give one this greater degree of understanding and sanity about what we're in, what we're living, what we're experiencing, what we're working with, that helps one arrive at a point of kind of getting it. And part of getting it is also recognizing that there's an inherent not knowing to this. You don't get to drill down to any kind of fundamental ultimate truth that is stable, able, and consistent among any state of mind. And there's a freedom in this.

letting go in that and then just accepting and being with whatever experience you're happening at time and and knowing the ingredients of what this is made of of the senses and knowing having the skill sets to move your attention and go into other states of mind or have better uh theory of mind and empathy to understand where others might stuck where they're coming from what their experience is likely to be by by visiting a broader array of conscious experiences we we get the the show we recognize what this is you know with have a greater flexible mind we also recognize the cocreation of ourselves with our environment that how we show up who manifest In This Moment how they speak is because of all the the causes and conditions of the past and the environmental happen stance and there's no separation there there's no you independent of your environment and so there is something to recognizing there isn't a fixed identity to preserve here like who Who Am I who am I really at at every moment you reveal who

you are and what you are is incredibly complex, incredibly sophisticated, incredibly capable, and you demonstrate that by like how well you are acting and navigating all the different life circumstances. And there's the lifetime of proof to show you like you've made it this far, and you continue to learn and continue to [Music] grow, and there is a learning and a growing with the times. There's no being independent of that. You know, you see how diverse nature is, is like that's what you're capable of, like all the amazing things. I mean, there's something that really comes down to like when you really understand the no-self insight, and not just understand intellectually or even merely like experientially, but embody it. Like it's so pervasively saturated throughout then in a funny way and in a non-egotistical way. You feel a kind of ownership isn't the right word, but I'm going to say ownership with everything that has been done, that all

mankind does that. You're like, Wow, we do that. I do that. You do that. But in this kind of like, the universe is capable of doing all these things, but that includes, comes with a lot of responsibility because it includes the magnificent and beautiful, but also the horror, also all the atrocities. And so, yeah, there's something [Music] to becoming nothing, to become everything, to not just wake up but to grow up and take on a radical responsibility for the whole. And yet, despite the radical responsibility, recognizing there's no one, no one controlling this, no one doing it. Yet, there's still a care and a responsible stewardship that naturally comes about. So, how do we develop a more flexible mind? Mind, essentially, I think we do this via training a number of factors that I like to highlight, which is our concentration ability, our metacognition, our noticings per second, and our sensory clarity. And by applying different repetitive meditative techniques, we strengthen those cognitive faculties.

and those are really the tools that help us inspect and understand our experience at any given moment. And then, no matter what's going on, we can recognize, you know, the metacognition is key here because that is to recognize what state you are in while you're in it and not be just totally lost to the story or the content in which that is to be deluded and caught in samsara essentially. It's not recognizing, Oh no, I'm not ever fully gripping around whatever is happening. I know that it will come and it will go, and I can't hold on to any of it. And there is just this groundless nature to this ineffable mysterious something which is beyond even the concepts of thing or no thing. It can't even be put into those boxes, and yet it's much more magical than that. The idea of samsara is that we're stuck in an endless kind of Hell Matrix setup of birth and death and rebirth and a cycle.

that just perpetually spins and spins and spins of sort of desire unfulfillment, you know, going on forever and ever, that no matter how many desires we might try to fulfill, we never feel incomplete. And it's this endless process, and we're stuck in it. And how do you escape samsara? Is the idea. And I mean, the truth of the matter is you don't escape. You can't get out of this. There's nowhere else to go. I mean, reality, this is reality. You are not in reality. You're not observing reality. You are reality. You're not just like sitting on top of it or anything like that. There is no getting out of this. But there is becoming lucid to the nature of the show here, and that in itself greatly frees one from dual or his perpetual dissatisfaction with life, always chasing the next thing and the next thing, be able to recognize, ah, it's possible to upgrade one's consciousness so that each moment of experience is

so rich is felt so deeply that there isn't a sense that you need more to feel complete, and it's not about obtaining a sense of completion and then holding on to that. It's letting go of this myth of completion, actually, that anything could complete you. And by letting go of that myth, you stop feeling dissatisfaction. The reason we feel dissatisfied in life is because we're holding on to a belief that anything could fully satisfy us, if even for a moment. So while we hold on to this belief, it comes with the experience of dissatisfaction. But if you explore phenomenal reality precisely enough, intimately enough, you recognize that this notion that any constitution of qualia bits formed together could bring a moment that you're looking for of complete satisfaction is a total myth, that that's not what this does. You're lost to a utopic vision that way, that it just doesn't get realized. That's not what this thing does. And once you see through that myth, you let go of the belief of satisfaction.

and by letting go of the belief of satisfaction, you stop feeling dissatisfied, which is all you ever wanted in the first place. It's not really to feel satisfied but to stop feeling dissatisfied. So, a lot of people, even they even think they do feel satisfied at times, it's just that it doesn't last. It's just like, Oh, it's impermanent. So, I feel satisfied temporarily, but then it disappears, and I have to start again. I have to keep chasing these moments of satisfaction. And actually, if you inspect more closely into experience, you don't even feel it for a moment. That idea that you did feel satisfied for some period of time is a misremembering after the fact because you weren't really very present with your experience. You actually missed the moment of satisfaction, and you artificially placed it back in retrospectively and thinking, Well, actually, I think that cigarette, that I think that I just smoked, or that food that I just ate, or whatever that experience I just had, that drug.

experience was really so I need to get back there. But if you do everything so mindfully, so present, you realize, ah, it actually doesn't live up to that expectation, but it's better than that. It's fuller in itself, and so you don't need to keep chasing and repeating experiences. Actually, you can't repeat experiences. You can't step into the same river twice, not even once. Even at any given time, there is this... there is... there's not a moment where something isn't happening, experience isn't happening. Like, yeah, there's a lot to learn about being in locations like this, because I mean, the thing I really like about nature is how you see how everything flows, that really everything is flow, that even the most hardened structures in like the forest, they have a floater. The trees are twisting, the grain of the wood is going in a particular direction, and although they look rock solid, they are moving just very, very slowly. And then when you come out of a

place like this, and you go back into the city, you see a lot of these concrete buildings with right angles that you don't perceive in nature. The way that renders in one experience is it feels more hard-edged, more out of alignment with reality in a way. In some sense, it's all nature; it's all nature. All the materials in the city are just made from products of the Earth, but it's like we try to forget that. We pay to see over the planet and try. It's done in an attempt to try to find stability, control, control, yeah, as opposed to remembering our place in nature, working with it. But it's all a process, I think, of the universe unfolding and learning about itself and seeing how it can organize itself. But you know, we find despite our best efforts, nothing, nothing is fixed. People are, I think, you know, in their hearts, scared of full communion with reality, letting go into the groundless.

nature of this thing they scared the it means they' have to give up everything or that things won't go as part of them wishes and it's it's a process of learning to reassure oneself ease oneself and slowly surrender and let go into this and what you might find is then you are are in Greater internal alignment which will bring you greater external alignment and more sensitivity of being able to read the the intelligence all around and the signals all around that everything has a message to to give and if you're more acutely sensitive to that and that will guide your life and itself and we're also surrounded by expanding contractions here oh yes so there's expansion and contraction everywhere so yeah in the plants and the seasons how the foliage here it will grow and then in the winter die and then regrow that's a form of expansion and contraction you know there's those shots from space where you can see the Earth like breathing as the as the The Ice sort of descends from the poles and then

shrinks and uh maybe we're in a time where the Earth is struggling to breathe, and so the Earth's like immune system has been kicked into gear. It's like the planet's heating up just as like our immune system would heat up to kill uh invasive harmful viruses within an ecosystem, within an organism. And the consequences of that is that if it does that too much, it can kill the organism itself, like your own immune system can can kill you, and it can kill helpful bacteria. If you take um strong antibiotics, you know the idea is that it kills the bad bacteria but also the healthy bacteria as well, and can leave you worse off afterwards. Hopefully not, but maybe the planet's like immune system is kicking into gear, so we're in a mass extinction event right now as we speak, and so the Earth is not aware of exactly who the problem is or what the problem is, but it's purging a lot of species just trying to see like how can it uh everything is trying to get back to

homeostasis or greater internal alignment to balance the expansion and contraction in the yin and the yang. And there can be moments of too much yin, too much yang, and it's not evenly distributed. How can advanced practitioners work with deep-seated conditioning? One way I like to think about the spiritual journey is becoming a bodhisattva unto yourself. So, a lot of people who have really good intentions, they're very compassionate, empathetic people, they care about the suffering of other sentient beings, and they might aspire to be this sort of bodhisattva-like character, which is someone who kind of foregoes complete enlightenment until all other beings have been rescued or enlightened. And I mean, there are different versions of that, like the bodhisattva either foregoes full enlightenment or they are fully enlightened but they hang around to help other beings. But I talk about actually first becoming a bodhisattva unto yourself because you're not going to know how to

help others unless you've, uh, kind of dealt with your own, really. And so, uh, there's a process of, you know, this term you got to feel it to heal it, makes a lot of sense to me, that you got to go deep in your mind and feel your past conditionings and let those challenging emotions well up, except the mind will protect itself from what it's not ready to face or to feel if the suffering is too overwhelming. However, we can build greater, uh, capacity of mind and, uh, greater sense of internal persisting equinity. And equinity is born of this function of greater context of mind, so it doesn't get overwhelmed. And it comes with just a radical acceptance and non-judging, and there's a slight imbued love and positivity there to just allow whatever comes to come. And so, uh, by fostering in radical greater equinity with oneself, one's mind can bear to face our deeper, most challenging conditionings and, um, live them out and accept them and metabolize them.

now I think only by being a bodh suffer to yourself first can then you really meet others from a much purer place, as opposed to not having uh worked on yourself as much and creating greater internal alignment. Then you're more likely to just be um projecting onto other people and really coming from a place of fear rather than love about wanting to save people and help others. And what you might find is uh I think love and compassion emerge naturally from a harmonized individual, and then it doesn't feel like you desperately need to help people or that you're working to do that. It may just come about how organically, and actually one of the deep lessons is you realize um people must participate in their own rescue. You cannot help someone who's not helping themselves. You can't, you know, despite all that you may wish for someone. Everyone must go on their own journey, and everyone's karma is their karma, and it takes the time that it takes. And so we can help um facilitate that and provide people the safe

spaces to do the inner work, but at the end of the day, they have to do it themselves. And doing it themselves, that's what's really empowering, is realizing you are the bod sapper that you're waiting for. You get to rescue yourself, and that's super empowering.

How to Develop a Flexible Mind for Greater Internal Liberation & Harmony

Roger This

Awakening is a gradual process, with life-changing thresholds that vary for each individual.

These shifts in presence of mind and clarity of perception often recontextualize past experiences, making them seem less insurmountable.

Consistent meditation practice is crucial for retraining the mind, with an hour a day being ideal for meaningful change.

The Importance of Effort and Curiosity in Meditation

Putting in full effort during meditation is crucial for internal collectedness and breaking through delusions.

Curiosity is the healthiest motivator for meditation, helping to direct energy and fostering a genuine return to practice.

Trusting one's own experience and using precise language for communication are essential for understanding and sharing meditation experiences.

The Role of Imagination and Contraction in Personal Growth

Imagination and experience are closely linked, with imagination being a faint form of experience.

The process of releasing contractions in the body can lead to a wide-open spacious awareness, which is essential for personal growth.

People often seek experiences of expansion to ease their suffering, and meditation techniques can help reveal the diversity of conscious states and manage these contractions.

The Flexibility of Consciousness and Experience

The mind's flexibility in perception allows for a diverse range of experiences, loosening attachment to any one state of mind.

This greater flexibility fosters liberation and the ability to play with consciousness, recognizing the universal qualities between different states of mind.

Ultimately, there is no fixed identity, and our complex and capable nature is revealed through our actions and navigation of life's circumstances.

The Nature of Responsibility and Consciousness

The universe's capabilities come with the responsibility for both its beauty and its horrors.

Developing a flexible mind involves training concentration, metacognition, and sensory clarity through repetitive meditative techniques.

Escaping the cycle of samsara is impossible, but becoming lucid to its nature can free one from perpetual dissatisfaction and the myth of complete satisfaction.

Letting go of the belief in satisfaction can alleviate feelings of dissatisfaction.

Many people mistakenly believe they feel satisfied, but these moments are temporary and often misremembered.

Mindful presence in experiences reveals that satisfaction cannot be repeated, and everything in life is in a constant state of flow.

The Process of Surrender and Internal Alignment

The fear of change can lead to a struggle with letting go, but surrendering can bring greater internal and external alignment.

The Earth's cycles of expansion and contraction mirror the struggle for balance, with the planet's immune system reacting to stressors.

The spiritual journey can involve becoming a bodhisattva unto oneself, prioritizing personal healing and alignment before helping others.

The Importance of Self-Work Before Helping Others

Dealing with one's own challenges is crucial before helping others, as it allows for greater internal alignment and capacity to face deeper emotions.

Radical acceptance and non-judgment foster equinity, enabling a person to metabolize their past conditionings.

Ultimately, true love and compassion for others emerge naturally from a harmonized individual, and everyone must participate in their own journey of healing.