How do I know if my practice is progressing? Am I advancing toward something, or just sitting?
The short answer: there are three different things called “progress,” and they are not interchangeable: the stage (the tradition’s ladder), the process marker (what you can actually check — attendance, breath rate, sitting time, daily-life reactivity), and the symptom outcome (what research measures). The site’s line, stated on the results page: measure the practice, not the stage — and the stage-claims, whether yours or a teacher’s, are the tradition’s map, not your transcript.
The three registers, kept apart
- The stage register: ladders that disagree. The Zuowang lun has seven stages; the Buddhist record the site’s EXP-016 preserves has nine dhyanas; the series’ own teacher draws a line the texts don’t — nothing before the channels open counts as meditation at all, only sitting. The ladders are real, and they are different systems: the site’s standing rule is that no stage-language converts between traditions, and no practitioner is obligated to accept any ladder. If your progress question needs a stage answer, it needs a chosen ladder first — and the choice is optional.
- The process register: what you can actually check. The teachers the site archives give exactly this kind of marker: a breath rate (12 to 4-6 per minute, EXP-023); a sitting duration that holds without the leg giving out (EXP-018); the legs alternating rather than one side hardening (EXP-024); the surfacing of old material treated as normal (EXP-004, EXP-024); attendance itself — “no meal eaten once keeps you full forever.” These are checkable from the outside, and the site holds them as the honest currency of progress: the practice, measured in days and breaths.
- The symptom register: what research measures. The eight-week evidence shows mood and pain outcomes move — measurable, modest, symptom-level. Nothing in the literature measures a dhyana or a channel-opening; the site’s qi question already drew this line. Progress at this layer is real and is the only layer an outside observer can verify — and it says nothing about the stages.
- The negative markers: what is NOT progress. The record the site archives is unusually specific here, and the site keeps all of it: drowsy blur is not stillness; a “special state” that turns out to be hypoxia-laced haze is not entry; the “first dhyana” that collapses under questioning was not a first dhyana; and the site’s own feeling-nothing page covers the commonest false negative — nothing happening is not nothing happening. The shepherd’s rule from the two deaths is the classical form of all of it: progress is whipping the sheep that lags, not admiring the one that runs.
- The one asymmetry to hold. You may check your own process markers freely — the tradition itself encourages exactly this (量练习不量境界). But no one — including a teacher — may certify your stage for you, and the series’ own teacher models the refusal: claims are met with “not yet”, not with certificates. Progress, on this site, is the practice’s own record; attainment is the tradition’s map.