In a fictional piece I am currently working on, two of the characters are taking a journey through a dense jungle. One of the characters is new to the jungle, while the other is his guide. The guide uses a variety of means to determine whether they are following the right path, and some of those means, such as climbing trees atop hills to see the lay of the land, create a sense of uncertainty, of being hopelessly lost, to the one who is new to this jungle. Finally, after feeling anxious about whether he will get to the destination or not, this character asks the guide if he really does know the way. The guide's response is: "In the jungle, paths get overgrown in a matter of days. You must then rely on landmarks and what you can remember from previous journeys." The same is often true of our meditation sittings: the paths get overgrown and we feel lost until we have cleared away some of the obscurations and found a familiar, onward leading path again.
The meditation teachings most people are exposed to deal with "clearing away obscurations," giving the meditator tools to handle hindrances in skillful ways. Awareness of breathing, moment-to-moment awareness of the senses, body scanning, metta practice, to name only the most common vipassana-samatha practices, are employed as skillful means to get beyond the hindrances to meditation and arrive at purified states of mind. These hindrances, when one is completely immersed in them, are like a vast jungle with no trails through it. A person may feel that there is no way to break away from any of the five hindrances (sense desire, ill-will, restlessness, laziness, and doubt) except by staying with what they have found to be the path that works for them.
Finding the various paths that lead to purification of mind is what "vipassana" and "samatha" meditation is all about. Some meditators may state their quest for purification of mind as finding the right teacher, the right school of Buddhism, the right practice, or the right ideas for them. Others may say that all paths lead to the same place and there is no one practice or teaching that is better than the others. And here we may find the two extremes of there being only one path, on the one hand, and the validation of all paths as leading to the same goal, on the other hand.
I look at this from outside these two extremes. The question that I consider important here is this: What happens within the consciousness of someone who follows a particular path (or meditation instructions)? One might suppose that by answering this question, it can be concluded that either there is one path to a particular goal or many paths. In actual practice however, what becomes understood is not the goal, but the path one is on. This shift of focus, from the goal to the path, is by no means something new; what makes it different here is that in order to look honestly and clearly at the path, the goal needs to be taken out of the picture, for by including it at this point in our understanding of the meditative process, we put our vision on that which is not present and tend to misread what is.
Each meditation instruction a person uses sets up a particular process. If we imagine consciousness to be like a flowing river, the effect of following an instruction in meditation is to divert that flow in another direction. What we want to do, however, is not divert the river's course but purify the water in it. And we are continually in this position of diverting the flow of our individual consciousnesses and trying to purify it at the same. These are two different types of activity, both of which make up the meditative process. For example, a person who meditates observing the inbreath and the outbreath, steers the flow of consciousness to focus more heavily on that activity, and thus pulls it away from going with the flow of thoughts, and at times during this the mind becomes purified as it has moments of being only aware of each breath. The meditative process is "determined" by the instruction of bringing one's attention back to the breath and by those moments of mental purification that occur when one's attention is focused solely on the breath.
Views or beliefs pertaining to the true nature of things can also operate like meditation instructions, and thus become ways in which one tries to be. This is what we often do to influence consciousness to make it be other than what it is. Experiences of mental purification can come about through this influence, though they more often arise through less predictable means. Purification is more a result of the meditative process moving in a good direction, where more wholesome states of mind arise effortlessly, than it is a product of following a particular set of instructions or holding certain kinds of views. In fact, one interesting thing in all of this, which I believe most any experienced meditator can testify to, is that similar purifying experiences occur from following completely different instructions. Zen, Tantra, and Vipassana meditation practices can all lead to a host of similar, transformative states of mind, sometimes through completely different (and occasionally contradictory) instructions and beliefs.
I realize that the example above is a more or less ideal scenario, for the meditative process includes a third element, one that is often excluded from realm of meditation, but is found there much of time, which is none other than "oneself." Everyone who meditates has periods of planning, day-dreaming, worrying, scheming, revenge-taking, lusting after things, problem solving, contemplating existence, dozing off, getting upset, feeling sad, wanting something to change, wondering if this is going anywhere or not, -- the list is endless. These are the kinds of things our minds latch onto in meditation which are as fully a part of the meditative process as the instructions and the purification of mind. To exclude "oneself" from the meditative process would be to throw out much of what actually goes on in meditation.
Thus when we look at the question of what happens within the consciousness of someone who follows a particular path, we take into account the instructions one follows, the experiences of mental purification, and the various things our minds latch onto ("oneself"). These three elements of the meditative process are not the sum total of what goes on in our meditation sittings, as I am sure that more elements of the meditative process could be found as well. But this is not a scientific investigation in meditation; it is only a way for a meditator to become more aware of his/her own unique meditative process. By becoming aware of how instructions influence one's sittings, one not only understands the nature and intent of those instructions, but also important things about oneself. In becoming more aware of a variety of purified states of mind, such states of mind can then be cultivated and practiced. And when one is more aware of oneself in meditation, it becomes possible to learn from negative states of mind, how to not get overwhelmed and dominated by them, and how they come to be and are able to flourish in the first place.
Now back to the feeling of being lost in the jungle. When the paths are overgrown, how do we find our way? We are having meditation sittings filled with obscurations and when we apply an instruction, it does not lead to a purified state of mind. Worse yet, our attempts at clearing a path don't reveal any hidden paths, but rather only more jungle. The process just can't be about instructions, purified states of mind, and "oneself." Here is where the knowledge of previous journeys, and the landmarks found on those journeys, comes in handy. There has to a consciousness of the process, not in the present moment, but over time, from having known the lay of the land within, that helps us clear away the right obscurations at that time, opening up a familiar (or, sometimes, newly discovered) path towards mental purification.
Learning the lay of the land within requires reflecting back on one's meditation sittings. Awareness in the present moment is always a plus here, but sometimes the practice of always being in the present moment becomes so much about letting go of the past that many things get forgotten in one's meditations. Reflecting back on each sitting afterwards, or for a moment during it, can bring back to awareness things that otherwise would have been completely forgotten. Forgetting about totally unproductive trains of thought and negative emotional states may seem like a very good outcome from a meditation sitting; but what about forgetting how tranquility came about in the sitting, or not remembering a particular understanding one arrived at which produced an instant of mental clarity? For these are the "landmarks" which we need to know about to continue arriving at purified states of mind. When we don't recall these landmarks, we may not recognize them as such in future sittings.
A "landmark" in a meditation sitting can be almost anything. It doesn't have to be some deep meditative state, and, for the most part, it never is. Just as with someone trying to find his way through the jungle, losing the path momentarily, will look for what he recognizes as being near, or in the direction of, the path. For him, a landmark may be a large tree, a boulder, a stream. For example, in our meditation sittings, when we are bound up with planning something we will do later, we may remember how we had a sitting with similar planning going on and what our mind did that diminished it. We may recall that we knew a particular feeling associated with the planning, and that perception lead to its decrease. Or we may recall having seen an image of the planned situation, and in our mind holding that image for a moment, the planning thoughts dissipated. There are many possible landmarks one can remember that cut through a particular hindrance and leave the mind serene. And the serenity is as much a landmark as that which leads to it, for it provides a sense of certainty that one has once again found the path through the jungle.