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You can divide the practice of meditation into three major life stages. There is no hard and fast line or division between the middle stage and the end stage. However, you can find signs of the change from the middle to the end in several ways. This guide might help you better understand where you are in your own meditation practices, what you might need to do, and what your future meditation experiences, to some extent, may be.

First, one of the most important signs of starting–or being in–an end stage of meditation practice is that being there doesn’t matter to you. In other words, you are simply on a journey and the stage is relatively unimportant. It may bring you a certain amount of comfort or confidence. However, what really matters is that you continue to practice and to progress. Seeking the source of being is enough. Being in the experiences themselves of inner peace, strength, love, and/or joy is enough.

Another sign comes from the path or paths of meditation that you have learned to use. In the previous stage–the “Middle Stage” (see)–you probably have found just one or a few main paths for meditating. However, near the beginning of the end or advanced stage, your main path or paths–and other paths of which you are aware–begin to unite, intertwine, combine, or complement each other.

For example, high-focus methods such as above-the-head or third-eye energy-center meditation begin to create consistent descents to the middle energy centers of throat and heart. Or if you have been working more with the throat and heart energy centers, you may begin to find those energies ascending to the higher centers and descending to lower centers. If you are more of a transcendentalist meditation person–one who finds the deeper, higher source of being outside of you, perhaps in nature or art–then you may begin consistently to experience descents of these states of being into your inner self in some form of peace, strength, joy, or love.

Those who have been practicing with a master on lower energy centers may, at the beginning of this advanced stage, especially find energies from the lower centers ascending more and more often to the higher levels. This may happen much more often in a variety of ways, whether over a period of months or of a few years.

Another sign of the end stage is that what was for you–in the middle stage of meditation–a sometimes intense but also somewhat irregular of less frequent practice will now become more frequent or regular. Your practice likely will become daily, rather than on and off again for days or weeks, as before. Those who had a daily practice even in the middle stage may find, as they move into the advanced or end stage, that their daily meditations are longer or more frequent or, at the least, more intense or deeper.

In addition, both public and private life began to show, or to blossom with, meditation experiences. Whereas in the middle stage of meditation, most of your meditation might have been in private, or with another person, or perhaps in small groups, you will find yourself having increasing meditation experiences in a wider variety of private and public spheres. (See “Group Meditation.)

Yet another sign of the end or advanced stage is that you likely have become adept at countering most negative forces (see). You are able to remove negative inner feelings and thoughts, destroy them, flood them, go to their center and explode or melt them, or otherwise know how to get rid of them or their influence on you. The same is true to some extent of outer negative forces, whether from people or nature: you can banish them, protect yourself from them, or intuit them ahead of time to avoid them (though there still may especially be outer, worldly experiences that cause you pain, especially as you age or people near to you have severe problems).

In fact, one sign of a developing advanced stage of practice is a renewed resistance to internal problems. You discover new energies, strengths, or abilities to get rid of–or dismiss more easily–negative forces that may once have troubled you for years, in spite of your earlier meditation efforts.

You also will become increasingly acquainted with a variety of meditation experiences and methods, and you likely will find or become increasingly familiar with the “Superconscious” energy center. (See, for example, “Descents and Ascents,” “Energy Sphere,” “Fire,” “Living Waters,” “Love,” “Nirvana,” and “Superconscious.”)

Because of the ongoing nature of the end stage, and because of the wide variety of differing experiences and their combinations that end-stage meditators experience, it can be difficult to describe the end stage in greater detail. For most end-stage meditators, however, the variety of the world’s meditation techniques–and the many different descriptions in many cultures and languages for these experiences–begin to make very practical sense.

In other words, when you were a starting-stage meditator, you might have begun your journey within one spiritual tradition (or within an agnostic scientific background). However, by the time you reach the end stage, you will become increasingly aware of the practical meanings of meditation experiences within many spiritual (and non-spiritual) traditions.)

Meditationary.org also is available at www.mdtn.org & www.MeditationDictionary.org.

First edition: 1 Sept. 2018. Second edition: 1 Sept. 2019. Free Use Policy

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