Also, I would recommend making your goals for your life and
practice specific. For instance, you may wish to get a job as a dishwasher so that you can continue to feed yourself. You go to the meditation teacher and say, “I want to get a job as a dishwasher. Do you know how to do this?”
They may say, “Yes.”
To which you could reply, “How do you know this?”
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Practical Meditation Considerations
They could just as easily have said, “I have no idea, as I am a meditation teacher, not a career counselor or restaurant manager.”
The same basic conversational pattern could be repeated just as easily for the other two trainings. For instance, you could ask a meditation teacher, “I wish to learn how to get into the early concentration states. Do you know how to do this?”
You could also ask, “I wish to attain to the first stage of
enlightenment. Do you know how to do this?”
If they say, “Yes,” the next question would be, “What are the specific steps that will likely produce that result?”
This sort of straightforward approach to spirituality is extremely pragmatic and empowering. Further, it makes interactions with teachers more fruitful.
This brings me to another point: teachers can generally tell if you are serious and if you have clearly thought through what you want. For instance, it takes about two seconds of someone asking a meditation teacher for advice on their emotional stuff for the teacher to realize that this person is interested on working on conventional happiness and is not interested in learning insight practices. Similarly, it takes few conversations with a student to figure out if they are following your advice or not, so don’t try to fool them. If you don’t like their advice, better to tell them that and also why so that they can address this, either by modifying their advice or by further explaining why they feel their advice might be helpful.
Further, if you follow some of their advice but change parts, or select parts and add on other things, and then find that this way of working has not produced the desired results, be careful about criticizing the teacher or the method, as you have not done the experiment they recommended. For instance, if someone told you to stabilize your attention on the individual sensations that make up the experience of breathing so clearly that you can see the beginning and ending of every single sensation consistently for an hour, and instead you do something else or stop the practice before you can do this, don’t blame them if you do not get the results they promised. Barring insurmountable external circumstances, the choice not to do the work was clearly yours, and thus you should accept personal responsibility for 82
