As we draw to the end of this particular module, I want to conclude by giving you a little description of what happens if you work hard and progress in your meditation. You see, Yogi's of the past, who have meditated and taken their meditation to a deeper level have recorded their experiences as they go deeper and deeper into meditation. And it just so happens that many of the experiences or all the Yogi's seem to report very similar experiences as they got deeper in meditation and through time, this gradual path in getting deeper and deeper in meditation to finally reach calm abiding meditation or one point in meditation has been categorized into nine different parts. In fact, this knowledge has been reported so widely that the Tibetans have actually taken this down and even drawn a little drawing or a chart or a map of the progression of meditation through these nine stages.

And in fact, you can find this drawing and we'll be going through it in a moment. On the insides of monasteries. If you go to a Tibetan monastery on the inside of the doorway, you'll often find this nine stages of meditation depiction painted there for the monks to study and look at for example. Now I love this explanation of the different stages of meditation for a number of reasons. First of all, it gives you an enormous amount of information on what you're trying to achieve at each level. It also helps you to To become encouraged by when you see certain things happen to you in your meditation, you can check back against the, the different stages of the meditation and see if you're on level one or level two.

The other thing that it does for me is when you achieve, say level 123, and four of the meditation diagram, you feel like you're on the path, and you're very much inspired to keep going. Because my reasoning is, well, if the monks were correct about stages, 123 and four, then they should be correct about stages 56789. And of course, the benefits that you accrue at the highest stages are enormous. So being partway along the path and seeing where you're at gives you a huge amount of inspiration. So that's what we're going to do now in this section on the nine stages of meditation.