The Seven Phase Shifts of Meditation and Seven Helpful Tips on the Spiritual Journey
Shunyamurti speaks about the seven phase shifts that occur during one’s meditation practice and gives seven helpful tips for the spiritual journey.
It’s tricky to language spiritual teachings these days because many people have an allergy to the “God” word, and some people have allergies to various other terms, and one can avoid using such terms, but, in a way, it creates a, somewhat of an unnatural deviation from the full spectrum of understanding of the Absolute, if we have to avoid certain terminologies.
So, I hope that it will be acceptable to recognize that there is a universal equivalent—whether we speak of the Buddha Nature, or Wuji, or the Tao, or we speak of Allah, or we speak of Shunyata, or we speak of Brahman, or the Buddha Nature, or we speak of God the Father, or we speak of God the Mother, or God as Ardhanarishvara—the Lord who is half woman, half man—or we speak of the impermanent, luminiferous Ether, that is impersonal and all-containing and all-creative, or we speak of Christ-Consciousness, or Krishna-Consciousness—it doesn’t really matter. All of them contain the variations of the spectrum of the higher chakras, and of the personal and the impersonal aspects of the Absolute.
But it’s useful to be open to receiving information from the Absolute, in all of those various forms it may come—personal or impersonal, transcendent or immanent, as signs in the phenomenal world, or as inspirations or interdimensional visions, and also as that absolute transcendental glory, that is indescribable, of union with the Absolute in its essence.
So, in whichever way this may come to you—or in all of the above—the more open we are to the acceptance of the unimaginably miraculous, the more that we invite that kind of experience and imperience to be given to us.
So, on my way here this morning I jotted a few notes that might be helpful. We’ll find out.
So, when you begin to meditate, you will probably begin—if you have a devotional sense, that comes with meditation—if it’s not simply “OK, I’m gonna to do breathing exercises to relax my body”, or, you know, “repeat a nonsense syllable”—like some forms of meditation are about, or “I’m just going to observe and take note of what arises”—but if there’s an actual intention of transcendence of the ego that is motivating the meditation, it creates a very different frame of reference that allows information to be received that otherwise wouldn’t.