The ultimate goal of the spiritual path is to become lucid.  Mindfulness meditation, the favored technique for beginners, is a good first step for some but not the last.  If relied upon exclusively, it can lead to more suffering.

It begins innocently enough.  Watching the breath.  The renowned “body scan” encourages you to take notice of all the sensations impinging upon your senses in a given moment.

Most mindfulness meditation instructions stop there.  If you tend to ignore many things arising in your awareness, a mindfulness practice will get you up to speed.  However, if you are already particularly sensitive to the sensations, feelings, emotions, and thoughts that arise in awareness, mindfulness may simply magnify your sensitivity.

You cannot stop there.  If you stop at noticing, something sensitive individuals do quite well, automatically, and continuously, you may simply enter a state of absorbtion.

If the object of your absorbtion is pleasant, the experience can be very wonderful and other-worldly.  However, if the object of your absorbtion is unpleasant, you get sucked into a world of pain.  The pain grows larger and encompasses your awareness.

The trick seems to lie in finding ways to become absorbed in pleasant things and ignore unpleasant things, but practicing this is dangerous.  When the unpleasant things become too great to ignore, your talent for absorbtion will land you in the pit of darkness.

Becoming absorbed is like moving a microphone up to a speaker.  The microphone picks up faint sounds, sends them to the speaker, and picks them up again, sends them to the speaker again, and quickly repeats this cycle until the noise becomes deafening.

If the sound is pleasant, the deafening noise can bring ecstasy.  If the sound is unpleasant, the noise is unbearable, but the urge to make it stop only adds to it.  The urge to escape grows even stronger, which adds even more to the noise.  Finally, we are in a full blown panic, screaming for silence.

Absorbtion strengthens and reifies a bad dream, quickly turning it into a horrific nightmare.  One vascillates endlessly between heaven and hell.

Lucidity, on the other hand, shines a great light into it and exposes its transparency.  In a bad dream, when you truly realize that you are dreaming, the content of the dream no longer matters.  It loses its emotional significance.

The trick is wanting it.  Absorbion is addictive with its potential for extreme pleasure.  Lucidity imparts deep contentment and joy but goes against our instincts.

Absorbtion mimics lucidity when we think our intimacy with the senses is an unveiling of reality.  Lucidity does heighten the senses, but genuine lucidity does not shackle us to them.  In lucidity, there is peace, stillness, freedom.  In lucidity, you are no longer the helpless recipient of the sensory world but its author.