Stages of Meditation

According to Hindu yogic gurus, meditation becomes deep at the fourth stage. There are four stages of meditation. First is not talking; your lips are silent. That is an outer kind of silence but the beginning. The beginning has to be outer because you are on the outside. You can begin only from where you are. Even now there are people who go silent for one day in a week. They are the people who easily can communicate with a dumb and deaf person. Because on that silent day all of their action duplicates a deaf and dumb person.

The second meditation is not thinking. First you stop words, you don't speak. Second you stop words, you don't think.

Third stage is: not thinking that "I am not thinking." which is the most difficult - because when you see that all thoughts have disappeared, this thought grips your whole being. This is the third stage I am talking in the first stage when you were silent thoughts play havoc inside you, second stage it is somewhat controlled.




Coming back to third stage, you now think, "Aha! so I have arrived. This is satori!" But you have started falling. And in the beginning it is bound to happen a few times, unless that Master goes on hitting you and telling you, that "Stop this! There is no need to brag about it to anybody or to yourself either. Let it pass-that too is a phase."


And then the fourth is the deep meditation when you simply are-not even the thought that "I have no thoughts."

During first and second stage itself people think themselves to be something special in them. Thinking special means they think why not brag about their specialty to the world. So they start writing autobiography. People start remembering beautiful things about a past which had never been there; they invent. People are inventive, very inventive about their past.

I don't believe there is a single autobiography which is true. There are thousands of autobiographies, not a single autobiography is true. Only a Buddha can write a true autobiography-but Buddhas have never written-because a Buddha can see actually the facts, but then it is not worth writing at all. What is there to write? Ordinarily people invent their pasts. First they try to create a future-which is not possible, they fail, everybody fails inevitably. When you fail in creating the future, the only substitute is create a past. Now nobody can prevent you; you can enjoy inventing a past. All autobiographies are fictions created, invented, polished, exaggerated. Many things have been dropped, many things have been added.

People are not doing it knowingly-people are not so much conscious-people are simply doing it. They must be believing that it is how it happened, they believe it. They are writing it with very great sincerity.

So people cling to the past. The last clinging in meditation is that. "Now I have arrived, all is finished, mind is gone"- and this is mind coming from the back door. This is the mind's last effort to befool you.