7 steps of correct meditation
Anyone can meditate, but not everyone is doing correct meditation that causes the body to undergo energetic transformation where the body and mind becomes hyper efficient and capable of extraordinary feats. These 7 steps are a causal sequence that work moment by moment, but they also work as independent factors that one can balance and tune, especially after once one attains a level of meditation competency, preferably zen 1 or zen 2 quality.
1. Remember: Choose meditation topic from memory bank
2. Investigate: Evaluate and ponder meditation topic with wisdom, discernment
3. Vigor: with aroused vigor persistently, energetically engage in previous steps, and all 7 steps
4. Mental joy: uplifting, spiritual, mental joy based on wholesome qualities
5. Pacification: deep physical and mental relaxation
5.5 physical joy: properly pacified body feels pervasive full body pleasure
physical joy can be as mild as calm, peaceful, comfortable feeling, or as intense as a full body orgasm that can last hours.
If you don’t pass through this stage with physical joy, there are 4 possibilities
Be like water 🌊
6. Undistractible lucidity
An ordinary mind can also be resistant to distraction, and see things clearly, but the the difference with this state 6, is it’s based on previous step 5, with thousands of hours trained in pacification, the subtle energies of the body have been sublimated to operate at exceptionally high levels not accessible to ordinary minds. There are 4 quality levels, with zen 1 being the minimum standard, and zen 4 being the highest, the body able to spend hours in quiet sitting without breathing.
One tries to always abide in this state of undistractible lucidity and deep pacification, whether in quiescent mode or any ordinary activity like washing dishes, working, interacting with people.
Zen 1 is a little more energy intensive, and allows for
verbal type of thinking.
Zen 2-4: drops verbal thinking, now operates at
subverbal mental processing power.
7. Ready to rock
Based on step 6, it’s like having a super power, a quality amplifier that makes anything you do much more effective.
A skilled meditator of correct meditation an always maintain a partial zen 3 or zen 4 in any activity they do. A full zen 4 experience for most people will require a quiet static posture like sitting, standing, or lying down.
Glossary
constipation = ‘force’ hitting blockage
Like fecal constipation, meditation constipation feels like there’s a ‘current’ of energy trying to push through a blocked passage.
current (of energy, bio-electricity, fluid)
A current of energy is the result of ‘force’ pushing energy through the interconnected loops of energy in the body unimpeded. Some currents will feel like electricity, such as if you touch the tongue the roof of your mouth, or just spurious moments, or a whole body feeling when doing Goenka meditation ‘body scanning’.
current can also feel hydraulic, like strong water, fluid, juice flowing in energy loops of the body. Zen 1 and Zen 2 can feel like orgasmic river of juice coarsing through your veins.
feeling (6 types, or 3 types)
1. mental-joy
2. physical-joy
3. mental-pain
4. physical-pain
5. mental-neutral feeling
6. physical-neutral feeling
The 'mental' or 'physical' qualification indicates that the feeling is referring restricted to that domain. For example, if we say physical-joy, we are not talking about mental joy, we are restricting the discussion to the effects of joy experienced in the physical body.
When we want to indicate both physical and mental, we can use 3 types of feeling without 'physical' or 'mental' qualification.
a. joyful-feeling includes both 1+2
b. painful-feeling includes both 3+4
c. neutral-feeling includes both 5+6
force
a physical feeling/sensation of pushing, pressure, vibration, often with a direction along loops of interconnected channels of energy (that may or may not correspond with anatomical body parts).
Example 1: burping and belching, one feels a ‘force’ in the direction from the stomach area towards the mouth.
Example 2: in farting, one feels force pushing in direction from stomach towards rectum.
Example 3: cracking your joints (fingers, toes, spines, hips, ankles, knees, etc), prior to cracking, one feels force/pressure at the joints, like it’s tight and congested. After cracking joints, circulation feels more free, lighter, less congested.
heat
when one is doing correct meditation, have greater bodily heat at one’s disposal is often a common product. For example, when I sit in full lotus meditation, my legs and belly heat up and it feels like I’m sitting in a car with heated seats. People with fourth zen high quality of meditation, the body heat is part of the body’s immune system. Where a normal person would catch a flu or cold and have aches, fevers, and other ailments for days and even weeks. The fourth zen meditator might just need a couple of extra hours of sleep that day, or even just during meditation their body will just flare up with extra heat and sweat out the flu virus within an hour.
joy
Two types of joy, mental and physical see also ‘feeling’ (6 types).
SLUMP🌄👁 will try to use ‘joy’ exclusively, qualifying it as mental or physical, rather than using a plethora of ambiguous words like “happy, pleasant, rapture, cheer, glee, etc...)
lucid, lucidity
The greatest and most important product of correct meditation, is lucidity, the ability to see reality clearly, as it actually is, rather than the ordinary way of deluded seeing which filters everything through an arbitrary narrative or confused story revolving a strong sense of self identity and others.
A more EBT specific definition here:
lucid.
luminosity
when one is doing correct meditation, the body goes through a process of sublimation of energy over the months, years, and luminosity, a visible light the meditator sees, is a product of that energy sublimation. Luminosity is like spiritual capital. The more you have, the sharper and more clearly you can think, remember, analyze, and the less sleep you will feel you need.
for detailed treatment fo this in EBT, see
ASND 🌕🌟.
meditation
the process of trying to pacify the mind and body, so that it attains a state of calm undistractible lucidity, the ability to have unwavering focus on whatever subject one wishes, to think what one wants to think and not think what one doesn’t want to think.
🌟PIE = (P)recious (I)nternal (E)nergy
I try to use the simplest, most common English words for this glossary as much as possible and avoid acronyms, but here is one exception.
When one is doing correct meditation, especially the undistractible lucidity of zen 4, one builds up very refined sublimated energy that for convenience we’ll call PIE. This is your spiritual capital, the more you have, the more extraordinary powers will be accessible to you.
For more detailed treatment, see article:
Essential Principles:
and read sections on PIE and balancing 4 elements
subverbal mental processes that underlie thinking
see
subverbal for full definition.
think, thinking, thinking thoughts
Thinking thoughts of a
verbal nature.
for the purposes of
SLUMP🌄👁, thought and thinking most commonly refers to mental talk in a communicable language. Such as:
mentally reciting a teaching one is recollecting from memory.
In other words, thoughts are what you think in your mind before you say them out loud.
thought and thinking will also include mental tasks with a similar order of complexity, such as dogs communicating by barking, thinking about math, physics, logical propositions without verbal language.
The
subverbal activities that underlie thinking, require less mental energy and processing power and are a lower order of complexitiy.
For example, everyone knows how to walk. To do so, they issue a subverbal ‘volition/intention’ to walk, and their body starts doing it with
subverbal processes autonomously, without needing to think
verbal thoughts as “Now I am going to walk, now I’m lifting my left leg...”.
thought
see ‘think’.
undistractibility
the ability to have unwavering focus on whatever subject one wishes, to think what one wants to think and not think what one doesn’t want to think.
verbal
see
verbal for full definition.
zen, zen1, zen2, zen3, zen4
The English dictionary defiinition of ‘Zen’: a Japanese school of Mahayana Buddhism emphasizing the value of meditation and intuition.
But here in the
SLUMP🌄👁 glossary, we’re going to use the original meaning of ‘zen’, which is a transliteration of the pali
EBT word ‘jhāna’.
The original meaning of zen was not just ‘calm and peaceful’, but is actually describing four quality levels of correct meditation. For the purpose of non religious specific meditation terminology, it’s enough to say the the four zens are four successively higher quality levels of undistractible lucidity, with fourth zen being the highest.
Zen 1 is a little more energy intensive, and allows for
verbal type of thinking.
Zen 2-4: drops verbal thinking, now operates at
subverbal mental processing power.
thought control
3 stages of pacifying thinking
1. Thinking and evaluation:
lucid dream
is a dream during which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some amount of control over the dream characters, narrative, and environment; however, this is not actually necessary for a dream to be described as lucid.
out-of-body experience (OBE or sometimes OOBE)
is an experience in which a person experiences the world from a location outside their physical body.
Remote viewing
is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target, purportedly using extrasensory perception (ESP) or "sensing" with the mind.
Sleep paralysis
is a feeling of being conscious but unable to move. It occurs when a person passes between stages of wakefulness and sleep. During these transitions, you may be unable to move or speak for a few seconds up to a few minutes. Some people may also feel pressure or a sense of choking.
It's also universal and timeless to have a way to indicate when we are contrasting and differentiating between mind & body. Just enough to differentiate those 4 types of basic sensations. No need to get metaphysical or philosophical or get into subtle invisible energy bodies.
When there's karma (action) done by way of kaya (body) , speech, or mind, no need for invisible subtle bodies and metaphysics.
Ockhams razor is usually right.