Normalcy
June 09, 2007
When we read about other people’s meditation experiences, we like to read about the really dramatic ones: The meditator’s awareness leaves his body and goes wandering around, sees all kinds of visions. Or a meditator discovers a sense of oneness with everything she sees. Everything is beautiful, luminous. These things sound very impressive, something we’d like to try too. But you have to look a little further into their stories, and you realize that those kinds of extreme experiences are things that have to be remedied. They’re problems. They actually get in the way of the goal. When meditators have experiences like that, their teacher—if they have a good meditation teacher—will say, “Okay, you’ve got to get over that; you’ve got to get past that. The weird stuff is not what it’s all about.”