Meditation and Beyond: The Two Aims of Meditation

                                                Meditation

Meditation is an age-old contemplative practice that has two aims. The first is to improve the quality of day-to-day life through reduced stress, reactivity, distress, and suffering accompanied by a greater happiness, calm, and spaciousness. The second and most traditional aim is to support and enable us to go beyond the perspectives and conditioning of our ordinary mind and usual identity to a natural, unconditioned self that allows for the full actualization of the human possibility—that proverbial “more to life.”

The first aim fits the character and needs of modern life—the epidemics of stress, time urgency, an overactive mind, and related emotional disorders. To address these concerns, contemporary meditation practices primarily focus on relaxation techniques that serve as temporary antidotes to the disturbances of daily living. Although meditation, when used as a relaxation technique and therapeutic antidote, can superficially address these concerns and upgrade the quality of our lives, it can only go so far.

Why are its achievements limited? The answer is simple: the focus is on upgrading the quality of our acquired and familiar personal self. Our familiar personal identity is not present at birth; it’s acquired in tandem with individuation. Early in life, we are given a name that becomes the container of our worldly self. That personal self is progressively filled in with life experiences, positive and negative.

Over time, our individual history coalesces into habits of perception and conception that shape and condition all our future experiences. Our lives, once open to all possibilities, are soon limited to the known, to the confines of our personal history, a fraction of our total being. And that becomes the foundation of our day-to-day life, our tenaciously held and limited sense of who we are.

Upgrading and improving daily life goes under the label of self-development psychological development. So what’s the problem with focusing meditation solely on self-development and relaxation? The problem is that improving the surface quality of our ego-based personal identity can soften but not eliminate its foundational characteristics. These include the unavoidable disconnection that invariably arises from the assertion of a separate self—self-centeredness, defensiveness, self-righteousness, and the false belief that we are solely our personal identity. In contemporary life they come as a package.

Emotional vulnerabilities and afflictions result from this unchallenged investment in a separate sense of an individual self. That’s why addressing only the first aim of meditation is a limited endeavor. It ultimately fails to overcome the fundamental sources of personal distress and suffering that are grounded in our firm belief in a personal self. This belief blocks access to the true self and the full possibilities of human existence.

What helps us at one stage of development will often hinder or obstruct the next stage of development. That’s why we can say that personal development and self-improvement strategies are beneficial at the start, but if maintained past their value, they become an obstacle to further development. We must know when to take up a particular path to move forward and when to let it go so that further progress becomes possible.

The

Chapters

• 0:00 Overcoming the Overactive Mind
• 0:00 Awareness-Based Meditation
• 0:00 The Two Selves
• 0:00 The True Self Revealed
• 0:00 Experiencing Pure Awareness
• 0:00 The Direct Practice of Awakening