There are future lives. It is not necessary to cram everything into this lifetime. You can enjoy this lifetime, go with the flow, and know it will lead you to a better life in your next incarnation.

If we get too caught up in the rhetoric of meditation, we will miss the point. The point was to go beyond rhetoric.

Allow the inherent emptiness within what you are about to do direct you.

When you can successfully stop thought for longer periods of time, you do move into other worlds. This can also happen in the very beginning, if a person meditates with someone who is very advanced.

It's easy to tell the evolutionary level of a group of beings, or an individual being, simply by examining their behavior, their art, their psychology, their thought forms, their lingual structures, their history, their present moment, their future ideas, and the quality of their emotions.

Nirvikalpa samadhi is another matter. I don't feel that's really up to us. That happens at a certain time when our being has gone through countless changes and refinements.

The force that drives the green fuse, as Dylan Thomas said, cannot be understood. So self-discovery is to accept your daily meditation, to observe yourself meditating and not be concerned with the results.