Are people here of a results oriented mindset for people who have not yet had a 'Taste of Awakening"? Just askin'

Depends on what you mean by the "taste of awakening".

Cheers,
Florian

Well, the equivalent of "First Path."

It depends, if someone is psychologically solid and just not making progress just because they aren't focused -- of course. But if someone is dabbling or is using the idea or empty ritual of a meditation practice to spiritually bypass real life problems -- no way.

In my experience, both personally and from watching others, beginning meditators are always goal oriented. They sort of have to be or they wouldn't start meditating. The process of getting un-oriented then starts at some undetermined point but it takes along time and it's part of the practice. I can tell a new meditator not to be goal oriented until I'm blue in the face but they usually don't listen and maybe they shouldn't.

Being goal oriented motivated me like there was no tomorrow and I think it helped me find the right things for me to do and maintain a daily practice discipline. And then at some point much, much later I realized that the goal was not the point, or that the goal and the orientation and striving for a goal, seeking, was getting in the way of actually realizing something terribly important.

So at first being goal oriented was good and later, much later, it had to drop away - in my version

So there's this person I'm coaching who is a beginning meditator - getting stuck in the Three Characteristics stage. My idea was to have them use the "Breath of Fire" for the first 10 minutes of their 30 minute sit as that reliably produces A&P type effects. Kind of a cheat, but excitatory gnosis seems to work for attaining higher concentration states for beginners.

Just wasn't sure what the attitude towards that might be... Not sure what I think about it either...

I can see that working. I think that emphasizing the "purification" aspect of Three Characteristics can be motivating, too.

any altered states stuff tends to be motivating. i tend to encourage it in certain students who have very low levels of energetic phenomena and are very discouraged. if a student is having a very noisy practice and is too distracted i'll try to steer them into NOT doing stuff like that.

I would say yes, so long as the result is not necessariy an experience.

Practice, for me, is mostly about learning certains skills, and then developing them to mastery. If possible, the result one should keep in their mind is the execution of a certain task. Learning to do the tasks well may bring about an experience, but even if the experience doesn't come, competing the task should be considered good enough.

I realize this is mushy territory, though, in that some of the ways that one knows if they're completing a task is if a certain experience arises (think of Visuddhimagga-style jhana). Still, in order for any experience to be sustained, it comes as the byproduct of some other activity. This is a major sticking point for a lot of practitioners, since the tendency is to try and grab an experiential effect rather than keep the task going. Without the latter, the experience goes away. It's a hard lesson to learn.

What one does and what they experience play off each other in a way that can't really be divided, and I think it usually takes a long time to establish a good balance between the two.