What Is Really Meditation Part-3

The Buddha or enlightened man, represents a state, an achievement, a way of being and a mode of consciousness that have no real equivalent in Western thought, and for which we have, therefore, no word or equivalent term. "Buddha" does not mean God, Supreme Being, Creator of the universe, nor is God. "Buddha" does not mean man in the ordinary sense. It is better to think rather the Buddha, the Awakened One, in terms of evolution. The Buddha, the Awakened, is a man. But he is a man of a very special kind, a man more developed. In fact he is a man very much developed. That is to say that he is a man who has attained and fully realized the state of spiritual perfection that we call enlightenment. That's what "Buddha" means. And Buddhism is all that helps to bridge the abyss between the ideal and the real, anything that helps to transform the human being awakened in non-human Buddha, all that helps us grow, evolve, to develop. When the real man is the ideal man - not when the man becomes a man awake Awake - an extraordinary change took place - may change and human development the highest that can happen. And it is this kind of development that we call the spiritual life, or the process of what is sometimes called Evolution. But what change? What is this development?

Obviously this is not the physical body is changing, man physically resembling Buddha who is not. The change that takes place is a purely mental change, using the latter term in its broadest sense. It is the consciousness that develops. We could say that therein lies the big difference between the higher evolution of one hand and the lower evolution of the other. What we call the Lower Evolution is the process of development from the amide and leading to the common man, is to tell the man not awake. It is an essentially biological process, which becomes emotional towards the end. Superior Evolution is the process exclusively psychological and spiritual process that part of man not awake and ends in man awake and it's only a psychological and spiritual process, a process that can ultimately account become completely divorced from the physical body.

Traditional Buddhism speaks in terms of four stages or levels of consciousness, each higher than the previous one. There is first the consciousness associated with the "world" or the level of sensory experience. Second, there is the consciousness associated with the "world" or in forms of mental and spiritual - or at the world of archetypes. Then there is the consciousness associated with the "world" or at the formless. And finally, there is the consciousness associated with the transcendental path, that is to say, the path that leads directly to Nirvana, to enlightenment, to Buddhahood, to Nirvana and also associated with the Enlightenment and Buddhahood themselves.

There is another classification that we use often and which may be more convenient. There are also four stages or levels of consciousness, although they differ slightly from those we have already listed. We start with what we call sensory awareness, that is to say consciousness associated with objects such as we are experiencing through the physical senses. It is sometimes known as the conscience of simple or animal consciousness. It is the consciousness that we share with members of the animal kingdom. Second, there is self-awareness: not self-consciousness in the familiar sense of the term, but the self-consciousness in the sense of being aware that we are aware, in the sense that we know. This is sometimes called reflexive consciousness, because here in a sense, consciousness folds back on itself, knows, is the experience itself becomes aware of itself. We could perhaps say that this self-awareness or reflexive consciousness, human consciousness is in the full sense of the word. Third is what we call transcendental consciousness, that is to say that the consciousness of the Reality - the Ultimate Reality - or direct personal contact with Reality, seen as an object that is "out there". Finally there is the absolute consciousness in which the subject-object relationship is fully dissolved, and in which the Ultimate Reality is fully realized and completely transcends the duality of subject and object.