And before I jump into the levels of progression,
I want to say first that this is not the be-all-end-all,
Written-in-stone path that everyone is going to take.
Far from it.
Rather,
I would encourage you to think of this as a general description of a spectrum of the progression that you may experience as a meditator,
And that you don't really have to worry about working your way up it or along it.
This is just the process that will naturally tend to unfold for you as you continue to meditate regularly over the years and get stronger and stronger.
It's just going to happen naturally,
Completely on its own.
And the reason I'm sharing it with you is that as kind of a peek into your future as a meditator,
As you may have monkey mind worries about,
Oh,
Progress,
And am I making enough progress in my practice,
From time to time you'll notice that I'm different from the way I used to be six months ago before I started meditating.
And you'll hopefully look back at this progression of mastery video and see that you've actually moved along to milestone three or four in that time.
So really it's just a help for you,
A framework for you to guide your progress over the course of years or even decades going forward as you continue to meditate.
And now because you're familiar with the Two Birds imagery,
I'm going to go ahead and use that image to help describe and mark the milestones.
So there are roughly seven milestones in this progression,
And I'll just go through them quickly in order.
Now the first milestone is the one where it's just the regular state you were in before you learned how to meditate.
Right?
And that's where you are in the seat of the first bird 99% of your time.
And again,
Being in the seat of the first bird,
You're in the seat of your judging mind,
Your criticizing mind,
The mind that gets angry,
The mind that gets happy or sad,
The mind that is thinking about what it likes and dislikes.
And you're basically trapped in that first seat except for those fleeting moments of your everyday life where the thinking mind has just zoned out.
Right?
And typically that's where you've typically taken alcohol or drugs to zone out or you're just getting a massage and you're feeling very relaxed and zoning out from there.
Or if you're having sex,
Those kinds of experiences that almost through brute force blank out the thinking mind for a little bit.
And of course that's not sustainable and in many cases not healthy.
So that's the first milestone.
The second milestone is the one where when the first bird,
Your monkey mind,
Is generally calm and not too upset or agitated,
You're able to meditate and in meditation gently shift over to the seat of the second bird.
And it is a sort of nascent skill of yours,
Just an emerging skill,
Where you're able to do this in meditation and you're doing it more and more working out your muscle of meditation and trying to nurse that atrophied muscle back up to full strength over time.
And one of the characteristics of this milestone is that,
Well,
When you're a monkey mind,
I.
E.
Your first bird is upset and is very agitated or very excited,
It's really hard for you to sit and meditate.
When the first bird is deeply hooked in by emotion,
Excitement,
Fear,
Desire,
The Buddhist would call this,
It's very attached.
You can't get yourself into meditation and you can't get yourself over to the second bird.
It's just too hard,
Your muscles too weak to be able to pull you out of a deeply attached state.
And that is what the second milestone is.
