Janna · Aug 27, 2026
PART - V
HAVE A CALM MIND, BUT IT'S NOT DONE YET
Our cultivation path still has many obstacles. When you've reached the second stage of meditation, your tendencies, views, memories, and kamma remain. These can be right or wrong. It's not true when you have a pure mind, and your points of views are all correct.
As Buddha taught in Nikaya Sutta, achieving fruition of meditation doesn't mean we also achieve that of Sainthood.
When you reach a stage of Sainthood, your viewpoints start to be correct, and the correctness increases when higher fruition (the first/lowest fruition is Sotapanna, the second Sakadagami, the third Anagami, and the fourth/highest Arahant). Start to be correct but not completely correct at the first fruition of Sotapanna. A Sotapanna has absolute faith in the Dhamma, absolute respect for Buddha, but he hasn't yet had the divine eye or supernatural powers to know all things about life, so he still has many misunderstandings.
Even Arahants cannot compare with Buddha on wisdom though are liberated like Buddha. And if you haven't attained any fruition of Sainthood, but just meditation, maybe the Right Mindfulness state, or lower with Awareness state of the Right Effort phase, then your viewpoints are not sure to be right.
Your views on spiritual practice, the goal of enlightenment, and ethics are inscribed on your subconsciousness. So, although you can go deep into meditation, your views remain intact.
Those views are mostly taught by your masters, provided by books, or by self-reflection. You learn, read, study, and you accept, then those views become yours and govern your thinking and actions.
We accept a view of some master, and it will be imprinted in our subconsciousness. We think that that master is very super but unfortunately, we cannot recognize if he's achieved fruition in meditation or of Sainthood, so we can't do anything other than believing in what he claimed to be. If we are lucky and he is a Saint, we will learn many precious things from him. If unfortunately, he's achieved only fruition of meditation, he has mysterious powers, but his teachings are unsure to be true. So the more we trust his teachings, the more disasters we will have later.
One of those disasters is that the master's view that makes us arrogant and the more we practice, the more we feel we are talented. Our arrogance will destroy all our good virtues and cause us to go back later.
Another disaster is the view of neglecting the goal of selflessness. Not head to selflessness, and you won't be able to make progress on your cultivation path and easily go in a wrong direction of another religion.
One more disaster is the view of neglecting the Law of Cause and Effect and not trying to create more merit. Your merit doesn't increase but decrease because you are enjoying the fruition of meditation, so your attainment of meditation will thereby pass away unexpectedly some day.
Understanding this, we vow to wholeheartedly follow the teachings of Buddha from the beginning, pray to Buddha to bless us have the Right Understanding as Buddha wants. When we have the Right Understanding and a pure mind, we won't be driven wrong by the views in our subconsciousness.
Another important thing is our Breathing.
Written by:
Janna
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