Pay director of here, and today I want to talk about meditation and more advanced levels of meditation. And if you've seen my video, on the nine stages of meditation, you'll see that there's a big jump between level four and level five. If you haven't watched that video, I recommend you go and look at it now, because you find it interesting and it serves as the basis for what I'm going to talk about in this video. And that is the difference between calming the mind and pacifying the mind. Because when you get to late stage for a big change happens between stages four and stages five. When we first start meditating, we're trying to calm the mind.

We keep bringing the mind Back to the meditation object to try to get away from distraction. Because when our mind goes to an object which is distracting, like say, we really want a new promotion at work, or we really want the new latest Gizmo that all our friends have got it causes are mind disturbance. Or if we think about that person were really hyped down the street or something like that, it causes our mind to disturb. So we need to bring our mind to a neutral object which will be calming and that is maybe the breath meditating on the breath. And the more we can take your mind away from emotional distractions and put it on a common object, the more we come to mind. Now at the level of level four in the meditation practice, we pretty much are able to keep our mind away from those negative issues 99% of the time and we can keep our mind basically on the middle dictation object the whole time.

But then a big switch occurs because we need to pacify the mind. Because the objective in the end is to be able to remain calm and passive, even when we're thinking about difficult situations in our life. So we need to transform problems into qualities of mind. So that even though someone is difficult in their difficult in our life, when we meet that person and have to deal with that person, we actually become calmer and more patient. And we actually it increases those qualities of mind rather than causing us to feel negative towards that person. Now, the key with this is to understand that everything out there is a projection of our own mind in that we're judging it.

So for example, a person who's difficult in our luck could be seen as horrible and evil and terrible, and we Need to really put that person in jail or dump them into the police or whatever. Or we could see a difficult person as a teacher, you know, an opportunity to practice being patient, or we could see that person as an object of compassion. Because, you know, they've had a difficult life and no wonder they are being difficult in our life because their mind is mixed up. However you look at it, you need to be able to transform what previously you felt was a problem into something which actually brings out a quality in ourselves. And that is a major step from calming of the mind to being able to pacify the mind. So that no matter what you think about the mind is always being pacified in calm, whether you're thinking about a neutral object, or an object, which in the past caused us to feel anxious or jealous or whatever, and now begins to elicit even better qualities in our mind.

So think about that when you next try to meditate and see if that helps you in your meditation practice.