Knowing One’s Inner Progress

 

Photo Credit: LonerWolf

Knowing One’s Inner Progress

It is very simple. First, there are qualities which grow as meditation deepens. For example, we start feeling loving for no reason at all. Not the love that we know, that we ‘fall’ in - not falling in love. But just a quality of lovingness, not only to human beings. As our meditation deepens, our lovingness will start spreading beyond humanity to animals, to trees, even to the rocks, to the mountains.

If we feel that something is left out of our love - that means we are stuck. Our lovingness should spread to the whole of existence. As our meditation goes higher, our lower qualities will start dropping. We cannot manage both. We cannot be angry as easily as we have always been. Slowly, slowly, it becomes impossible to be angry. We cannot deceive, cheat, exploit, in any way. We cannot hurt. Our behaviour pattern changes with change in our inner consciousness.

We will not fall into those sad moments that we usually fall into - frustrations, failures, sadness, a feeling of meaninglessness, anxieties, anguish; all these are slowly, slowly, going to become foreigners. A moment comes when even if we want to be angry, we will find it impossible; we have forgotten the language of anger. Laughter will become easier. Our face, our eyes, will be aglow with some inner light. We will feel ourselves that we have become light, as if gravitation does not function as it used to function before. We have lost heaviness, because all these qualities are very heavy - anger, sadness, frustration, cunningness. All these feelings are very heavy. We don’t know, but they are making us heavy-hearted and they also make us hard.

As meditation grows, we will feel ourselves becoming soft, vulnerable - just as laughter will become easy for us, tears will also become easy for us. But these tears will not be of sadness or sorrow. These tears will be of joy, blissfulness; these tears will be of gratitude, of thankfulness. These tears will say what words cannot; these tears will be our prayers.

So, if these things start happening, we can be certain we are on the right path. And soon people of understanding, people of experience, will start finding the changes in us. They will start asking us what has happened to us, how it has happened to us. “We would also like it to happen to us.” Who wants to be miserable? Who wants to remain continuously in inner torture?

As our meditation deepens all these things will happen: somebody will condemn us, somebody will think we are mad, somebody who has some understanding will ask us, “What has happened to you and how can it happen to me?” We remain balanced, rooted, grounded in our own being - whatsoever happens around does not matter.

We have to become the centre of the cyclone. And we will know when we have become the centre of the cyclone. There is no need to ask, “How will we know?” How do we know when we have a headache? We simply know.