Buddhism, Meditation, and the Baha'i Faith: Part 3

I realize that most people go into meditation looking for stability, happiness, and comfort in the face of their own existence...I have spent many years cultivating extreme experiential instability, careful awareness of the minutia of my suffering and the clear perception that I don't even exist as a separate entity...I can honestly say that these practices are without doubt the sanest thing I have ever done in my life. -Daniel Ingram

The path of insight is not known to be easy. There are said to be many ups and downs - ecstatic bliss and energy one moment and crushing fear and misery the next. There are many maps of this territory, all different on a superficial level, yet all containing many of the same fundamentals. In the words of Ingram:

One of the most profound things about these stages is that they are strangely predictable regardless of the practitioner or the insight tradition. Texts two thousand years old describe the stages just the way people go through them today, though there will be some individual variation on some of the particulars today as then. The Christian maps, the Sufi maps, the Buddhist maps of the Tibetans and the Theravada, and the maps of the Khabbalists and Hindus are all remarkably consistent in their fundamentals. I chanced into these classic experiences before I had any training in meditation, and I have met a large number of people who have done likewise. These maps, Buddhist or otherwise, are talking about something inherent in how our minds progress in fundamental wisdom that has little to do with any tradition and lots to do with the mysteries of the human mind and body. They are describing basic human development. These stages are not Buddhist but universal, and Buddhism is merely one of the traditions that describes them, albeit unusually well.

In this post I will discuss the map, known as the "Progress of Insight", which is originally derived from the Pali cannon in the Theravada tradition, as related by Mahasi Sayada and Daniel Ingram. The part of the map that I will discuss is "1st path" (there are four successive paths) which is basically the road to initial, but not complete, enlightenment, to a point after which insight generates itself automatically whether one practices or not, beyond the "plane of limitation". I will also relate this path to the first Four Valleys in the Sufi tradition, as commented on by Baha'u'llah: Search, Love, Knowledge, and Unity. 

My motivation for doing this is simply to share something that has become a big part of my life. This is my own working model of spiritual development and I will relate some of my experiential reports traveling along this path. 

Buddhism, Meditation, and the Baha'i Faith: Part 2

-Part 1 Here-

And if we turn inward and prove our True Nature, that True Self is no-self, our own self is no-self, we go beyond ego and past clever words. Then the gate to the oneness of cause-and-effect is thrown open. Not two and not three, straight ahead runs the Way. Our form now being no-form, in going and returning we never leave home. Our thought now being no-thought, our dancing and songs are the Voice of the Dharma. How vast is the heaven of boundless Samadhi! How bright and transparent the moonlight of wisdom! What is there outside us? What is there we lack? 
-From the Song of Zazen

The Baha'i Faith is a mystical religion. Baha'u'llah describes the spiritual seeker in the Valley of Knowledge - "the last plane of limitation" - as one who has "passed over the worlds of names, and fled beyond the worlds of attributes as swift as lightning" and has "made their dwelling-place in the shadow of the Essence." 

It is also a practical religion. Baha'u'llah emphasizes the need to be "anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and centre your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements."

Putting these two things together requires being “in the world, but not of the world” so to speak. This requires a delicate balance and careful integration of the two modes; yet they are each distinct. They are mutually reinforcing but they also develop along different axis.

Somewhat along these lines, in Buddhism there are three types of training which reinforce and integrate with each other, yet are distinct: morality, concentration, and insight. 

Buddhism, Meditation, and the Baha'i Faith: Part 1

So the true goal of meditation is achieved through a dialectical process that alternates between dissolving into flowing nothingness and detecting subtler and subtler instances of solidified somethingness. - Shinzen Young

In my opinion, the Baha’i community is exceptionally well developed in two important ways. 

The first way has to do with thinking about and acting in the world.  It has a comprehensive system of morality - with laws and principles that guide personal conduct and attitude; it has a brilliant evolving mechanism for interacting in the world and trying to make it better - the institute process; it has a universal and unique system of governance; and it is philosophically and theologically rich and modern.

The second is along a mode of spiritual practice: prayer and contemplation. There are countless prayers revealed by Baha’u’llah and Abdu’l Baha, and clear instructions for ideal practice, for example in the long obligatory prayer. The writings are poetic and intriguing and, by both the content and the very structure of the language, evoke positive spiritual feelings, mystical inclinations, and realizations of oneness.