Meditation Progress

0:01A boy asked, how do I know that I'm progressing in the meditation process? It's, I think, very easy. you will feel the difference, you will feel changed more or less, and you will feel ongoing changes. Sometimes it might feel that you are regressive, that you don't advance so much anymore, and you don't make any progress. But in general you will know that all this defilement is gone and that defilement is weakened and sometimes it goes in larger steps, sometimes in smaller steps, but when you had an insight that was really a deep insight, then you will certainly know the change and you will certainly know that you had made a progress.

1:30One thing that I always always tried to claim about the practice is that everything you sit down you should learn something about yourself or in general you might say about reality so if you're practicing and practicing and never learning anything no matter how small then you can say that well i would say that maybe you're doing something wrong because it should be that Every time you sit down to meditate, you should learn something. The things that we try to learn just to give an idea of what we mean by progress.

2:09In brief, the things that we intend to understand or the knowledge that we intend to gain from the practice, there are four things. There is the or it's three things I think, no? Knowledge of body and mind. So the first thing that you should gain from the practice is an understanding of the reality inside of yours, the reality of your experience inside and in the world around you. realizing that reality is made up of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and thinking, and it's made up of physical and mental experiences, moments of experience.

2:56The second thing is that you come to see impermanence, suffering, and non-self, So you'll come to weaken your grasp on these things. This is what leads the defilements to get weaker. You'll see that the things that you cling to are not worth clinging to. They're impermanent, they're unsatisfying and they're uncontrollable. And finally you'll come to see nibbana, which really you can break it up. So by saying there's four things, it's because there's the path and then there's the result.

3:33So the path is the weakening of the defilements. or the eradication of certain defilements, in the case of reaching the path of Sotapanna Sakyatakami Anakamirahan. And the fourth is the fruition. But really it's the same thing. The fruition and the path take the same object, and that is nibbana, or cessation of suffering. So... in the beginning of the practice, until you've realized, once you've realized the third and the fourth knowledges, this kind of question doesn't really have the same weight, because you already know what is the goal, so you're only work is to to attain it again and again and to weaken the defilements more and more but in the meantime you should be looking to understand your mind in terms of or your experience in terms of body and mind and to see things as they are the more you can see that the things that you cling to are not worth clinging to and how you're clinging is leading to suffering and so on That's the sign of progress in the practice.