THE APPEARANCE OF THE AWARENESS STATE
The mind consists of many things. Thoughts, ideas, and opinions are the main elements of the mind. Talking of the minds, we are talking about thoughts. Sentiments, feelings, and memory are elements of the mind, too. The purpose of meditation is to make our thinking settle down, and to concentrate the mind means to eliminate all our thoughts. When we apply these techniques of Buddha: Be aware of the entire body, its impermanence, and the breath, we are creating a NEW element for the mind, that is the state of Awareness. This state is new to us, and it makes our minds become pure and less depends on our thoughts.
When we haven't reached this state (of Awareness) yet, our minds have only thoughts and these thoughts always distract our attention. Now thanks to our practice of meditation, being aware of the body's impermanence and the breath, our minds start to have the miraculous state of Awareness. This state makes us less driven by our thoughts and consider them external objects, and they will thereby lessen and eventually pass away. But of course, other thoughts will arise.
If our Awareness state is strong, it will detect and overwhelm our thoughts as soon as they start, and our minds are quite Stable and Static. If it's not strong enough, our thoughts will compete with it to be present forever. The role of our Awareness state is so precious that people name it Buddha-Nature.
This Awareness requires many conditions to appear in our mind. The prerequisite is our blessings, morality, and internal force/inner strength; and the requisite is the technique of being aware of the whole body, its impermanence, and the breath.
One who has many blessings will have strong Awareness state. One who has great morality will have strong Awareness state. One who has internal strength will have strong Awareness state.
And finally, those who precisely follow the teaching of Buddha will attain Awareness state.
When we have Awareness state, we will be driven by our thoughts less and less and start to see them as external objects that need ignoring. At that time, as soon as we find our thoughts, they will go away. However, it's a pity that if we don't reach Awareness state, we cannot realize our thoughts. But to have Awareness state, we must have the prerequisite and requisite mentioned above.
If we focus on the awareness of the whole body, our inner force will run to the head, and after a time, we will lose our Yin force, which will cause our many diseases. So, you must be conscious of the body, reflect its impermanence, keep track of the breath, then you can hope to achieve Awareness state. Many strange phenomena appear in this Right Effort phase, so you need a great teacher. Sometimes you feel you enter very deep into meditation, sometimes you have hallucinations, sometimes you feel you have psychic powers, sometimes you feel you go mad, sometimes you feel you reach a dead end, etc. You will find it very hard to practice in this phase.
Without the guidance of a great teacher, we will have misunderstandings. We may think we have achieved Sainthood or have failures, and then we will make the wrong decisions. When learning meditation, you must understand the Right Effort phase to have a solid basis. Most meditators do not pay attention to this phase so they will have many impediments on their cultivation path. Some teachers talk only about Mindfulness and ignore the Right Effort phase. Some teachers speak only on the Right Concentration phase from the first stage to the fourth (highest) stage of meditation but ignore the Right Mindfulness and the Right Concentration phases. Such skipping makes meditators mistakenly think they are superior whereby they lose their blessing and go backward in their practice.
These days, most meditators haven't gone through the Right Effort phase but think that they have reached the Right Mindfulness state, become enlightened, or entered the first or the second stage of the Right Concentration stage. Such misunderstandings damage Buddhists' blessings, contributing to the decline of Buddhism.
How can we know if we are still at the Right Effort stage when our minds have reached many miraculous states? That is, if in the Right Effort stage, our results are not stable, sometimes we make progress, and sometimes we go back even we can lose all and become ordinary people. When we pass the Right Effort and move to the Right Mindfulness phase, our fruitions are quite stable and hard to be lost this life. So if we create any bad kamma, we will lose our fruition in the next life but not this.
Janna
Reference more: https://jannaquotes.com/en/meditation/what-is-meditationhttps://jannaquotes.com/en/meditation/instruction-on-meditation