When we start meditation, there is a need and tendency to judge our sittings by what we feel during the sittings or what we experience, the conditions. That is always a problem in the beginning. And in some way we are also taught to expect that we should have experiences. But what is an experience? I don't know what is an experience, you see. I don't know what to call what we experience, whether they are experiences or some sort of situations - it's like when you go out you feel cold, is it an experience? Of course, in the normal use of language, we say, "I experienced cold outside." But to my way of thinking it's not an experience at all - if I go and stand out in the cold I feel cold. If I come back into the room, I feel warm. So, I think we call all these things, experiences. The food is an experience, the drive back to Seattle is an experience. Today, everything is an experience. If you sleep well it's an experience. If you don't sleep it is another experience. So I think an experience, strictly speaking, should be something we should not have in the normal course of events. Something, shall we say, not germane to the situation, not natural in that situation. Something which should not have happened. Suppose I were to go out and stand now outside under the trees in the cold and feel hot. That would be an experience. Or if I were to jump into the swimming pool, or that canal down there, and feel warm - that would be an experience. I mean, to feel cold where you should feel cold could hardly be called an experience. So this mistake, we all very blithely make - that I closed my eyes and I felt that it was all dark. Of course, the lights have been switched off, I close my eyes and I see nothing but darkness. It is hardly an experience.

Now suppose you are to feel the reverse, that all the lights have been switched off, my eyes are closed, but I felt as if a pair of car headlights were focused on my face - that would be an experience. So the first thing we need to distinguish is, what is an experience and what is not. To most of us, in our anxiety, in our eagerness to experience something, we sort of convert everything into an experience - if it makes any sense to you. So, that tendency to convert everything into an experience because we feel we should have an experience, relates in some way to a need to have an experience, rather than to the fact that there should be experiences during a sitting. Now this is the first point we should note very carefully.

The second is, how to sift out the true experience from that which is natural to the situation. So we must know what is natural and what is not. Now, if I should eat an apple and it should burn my tongue like pickles, that would be a very strange apple indeed. Wouldn't it? Or if I should put in mango pickles full of hot red chilies and taste it sweet, that would be very strange, too. So, strangeness seems to indicate a more appropriate evaluation of what is an experience and what is not. Strangeness in the sense that, that should normally not be the feeling associated with that activity. So, when we sit for meditation, we are normally expected to feel calm; we are normally expected to feel that thoughts, or the level of thoughts, has gone down, the frequency of thoughts has gone down. These are, therefore, not experiences; they are consequences of meditation. But most often the rookie abhyasi says, "Sir, I had a wonderful experience today." "What did you have?" "Oh, I didn't have any thoughts today." And the preceptor is also happy, he says, "Wonderful." Technically, it is not an experience, it is a state induced in you by the fact of meditation or, shall we say, by the fact of correct meditation, right meditation, properly done. So when we start out with our diaries, of course to us it is valuable indication of how you are meditating. There is a suppression of thoughts or a reduction in the level of thinking, you feel more calm, at peace with yourself, with the environment. These are states consequent on right meditation. So we have to distinguish between experiences and conditions or states.

Now the other thing is, when we have these two, there is not only a distinction between them, but there is an interplay between them, in the sense that when our condition is gross, when we are in the beginning stages of spiritual life, the grossness itself conditions the experience. It is like, you know, when you have a fever you cannot taste what you are eating, properly. The taste eludes you. Smokers know that when they have a fever, they cannot enjoy a smoke. Now the tobacco hasn't changed, so something has changed in you. Your fever has made it impossible for you to perceive certain things. So, our condition does have an effect on our experience.

A very mundane example. We are travelling on the road in a very nice car through very scenic surroundings. But the man is sleeping, the passenger, you see - how can he have an experience? So, to know what is an experience, to know whether it's really an experience, we have to be aware of our condition and also to be alert to note what is going on. A passive state in which we are almost asleep, well, you would need thunder or lighting before you would know it is an experience. As they say, he has to be given a sock on the jaw before he feels anything. So, to experience - to have an experience, and to experience the experience are two different things. Whether I am asleep or awake the road is passing by, the scenes are going on, the beauties of nature are passing by, but to a man who is asleep, it is as if they had never happened. But to one who is awake, who has an aesthetic sense of appreciation, who has colour sense, form sense, he sees beauty in everything that he sees. A businessman only looks at the lumber and says, "Ah, what wonderful timber, and how many tons I could get out of an acre of this sort of woodland." And some of these incendiaries might think what a wonderful blaze they could have if they set a match stick to the whole thing.

We see what we see, not because we see what we see but because of what we are conditioned to see. I see what I think I see. Similarly, I hear what I think I hear. Very often I am sitting in my room here and hear this whispering of the wind in the trees and I think it's raining. You come out and see it's just rather stiffer breeze than normal, and it produces a sound like rain. Or if we are to depend only on these senses of ours - beautiful senses: eyes, nose, the sense of touch, taste, smell, hearing - we would have a very different idea of what the universe is from what it really is. It's not enough to see and to hear and to perceive and to touch and to taste and to smell. It is necessary to evaluate and to come through that into an association with the reality which is trying to peep through these experiences like, you know, the tentative touch of reality intruding into our consciousness, waiting for us to see the reality behind it. If you don't, it timidly, shyly withdraws. That is the reason why we have experience after experience, but nothing penetrates into the consciousness, nothing makes an impression on the soul. We see sunrise after sunrise and it doesn't make an impression. We see people dying one after the other and it makes no impression. We think we are going to be eternally alive.

So you see, how we can convert an ordinary, mundane thing like drinking coffee into an experience, or a smoke into an experience, and then to boost our ego into saying, "Yes, you are right, we put more and more money on that experience to prove to ourselves that it's a valuable experience." So instead of accepting the reality of an experience, we are loading what we suppose to be an experience with all the unreality that we can possibly load onto it, and present it as something novel, something unique, something wonderful. This tendency we should not sort of import into our meditative states, because the whole idea of meditation is to perceive reality, to become one with the reality that we perceive; finally, to merge into that reality ourselves, so that our separate identity no longer exists. So we have to be careful, we have to be discriminating, because in yoga, discrimination is of the highest value and necessity.

Now whether that is a condition or whether it is an experience, your guess is as good as anybody else's. I would say that without that condition you could not have that experience. So in spirituality, I would hazard the suggestion that every experience, to be real, must be backed by a condition of existence which is real, a state of existence which is real. And that is no mystery at all. I must be happy before I can feel happy. I must have pain inflicted on me before I can feel pain. Otherwise, you call these states suggestive, auto-suggestive or just neurotic. When you feel something that is not there, we say they are neurotic persons. In spirituality there is no space, or no place, for neurotics.

So the condition comes first, the experience comes subsequently. Then I have no difficulty in distinguishing the condition and the experience, because they are part of the same thing. I see a thing because the thing exists. If the thing didn't exist and I saw it, it would be a fantasy, it would be a hallucination. So what is the difficulty about understanding the spiritual jargon? It's what you are doing all the time. Except that, transposed to the inner existence, to the inner universe within myself, which is me, I find it difficult to understand how a condition and an experience can be the same thing.

When you sit in meditation, please try to be discriminative. It's not enough to say, "Well you know Chari, I felt pain here." Yes of course because you are used to cushions all the time in your pampered existence, and when you sit for the first time on the floor everything seems to prick and you know, that is the reality of the floor on which we must have sat before. If you had sat before like that, today we would not feel it. So we must try to be discriminative. Is this an experience or is this just the impact of the universe on me? And then write our diaries. So the best way is to sit in meditation, ruminate afterwards - what was this that I felt? Was it a feeling? Was it an experience? Anyway let me write it down, because now I am not able to discriminate but the fact of writing itself will train me in the discriminative faculties and I shall be able to write better and better as I go.

My Master said, "The condition, that is, the spiritual condition, must keep changing if there is progress. Often we find that an abhyasi has a good experience at a particular level, which he likes to be repeated at subsequent sittings. But I always tell them that if they have the same experience again and again, then they should run to the preceptor, because such repetition of experience shows stagnation, and requires correction. So change is necessary because without it no progress is possible."

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