We might say that meditation is all about being aware of our thoughts rather than being sucked up in them, but what we can’t say is that the goal of meditation is ‘to be aware of our thoughts without getting stuck in them’. Or rather, we can say this, but it wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be right because goals are thoughts, and to try to attain a goal is to be sucked up into ‘the-thought-which-is-a-goal’. It is to be lost in it, immersed in it to such an extent that we lose touch with reality entirely. Goals are how thought seduces us.
In reality, there are no goals, not anywhere, and so to be focused on attaining them – no matter how worthy they might seem to us to be – is to be fixated upon something that isn’t real. We are engaged in ‘chasing an illusion’ and chasing illusions as if they actually were real things (and not illusions) is not what meditation is about! The practise of meditation has absolutely nothing to do with goals but because we are such a goal-orientated culture this is pretty much incomprehensible to us. In short, we just don’t get it – why would we bother meditating if there was no point to it, why would we go to the trouble if we weren’t going to get anything out of it?
When we talk about goals and purposes and intentions and ‘activities having a point to them’, then this is all the province of rational thought. Thought is always busy, it is always trying to achieve something. This is an extraordinarily effective trap however, even though we can’t see it. It’s an extraordinarily effective trap because if I’m trying to achieve something then whatever I’m doing then it’s bound to be all about me. If I’m trying to obtain something then this automatically brings me into the picture – who else is going to gain, who else is going to achieve? Gaining is self-referential. Even if I am trying to achieve some outcome for someone else’s benefit (or for the benefit of society or the human race as a whole) it’s still my idea of what constitutes a benefit, it’s still my own thought that I want to put into action. It’s still my desire to do this and so my actions are there to satisfy my desire, however else I might prefer to see it. I’m not ‘escaping myself’, but rather I’m ‘projecting myself out onto the universe’.
As long as we’re focused on goals then we are fixated upon ourselves; no matter what those goals might be we’re trapped in a super-sticky web of self-reference – always relating everything to ourselves, to our private POV. This isn’t a moral issue however – it’s not that we’re ‘doing something wrong’ to be trapped in the web of self-reference, it’s not as if we should strive to be ‘selfless’ for example. Striving to be selfless or unselfish is an activity belonging to the self, after all. ‘Being unselfish’ is just another goal of the self and as such it just tangles us up in the web all the more. It’s a self-defeating activity. What we could say about meditation is that it is where we are free from the need to keep on chasing goals (i.e., from the need to be continuously trying to change things). We could say that meditative state is one in which we are free from being enslaved by thought, free from the insidious trap of self-reference. We can say this, but that doesn’t mean that we can make it into a goal. We can’t make a goal of being free because thought can’t free us from the choke-hold that it itself has on us, no matter how clever or sneaky this thinking might be.
We can’t make a goal of being free because there is no freedom in goals! Goals are necessarily narrow – if we had a wide goal (a wide-open goal, a goal in which ‘anything will do’) then this wouldn’t be a goal. For a goal to be a goal there has to be a ‘right way’ and a ‘wrong way’ to it, there has to be ‘the possibility of hitting the target’ along with ‘the possibility of missing it’, but this business of ‘right versus wrong’ (or ‘hit versus miss’) has nothing to do with freedom. Freedom is freedom – there are no conditions, no rules to obey, no all-important agenda to enact. When we talk about ‘getting it right versus getting it wrong’ we are talking about the thinking mind, because that’s how the thinking mind always works. This brings us back to what we have been saying all along, which is that there is nothing purposeful about meditation, nothing purposeful about becoming ‘free from thought’. Most of the time we never think about being ‘free from thought’ – it doesn’t feel to us as if we are trapped in our concepts, as if we are trapped in our limited, crude understanding of the world, trapped in our private POV. We never notice that we are the captives of our own generic concepts, On the contrary, we imagine ourselves to be ‘free already’…
What causes us to become aware of our situation (our captive situation) is ‘the tightening noose of neurosis’ – neurosis is where our imprisonment by thought stops being invisible and starts being painfully obvious. There are all sorts of psychological theories regarding neurotic ill-health, and all manner of proposed methodologies for remedying this malaise, but all of this is merely the activity of thought and thought is never going to spot itself as being the problem. As far as the thinking mind is concerned, the problem is always ‘elsewhere’, the problem is always ‘something other than itself’, and this is directly analogous to the way in which the ego, when it is in trouble, always thinks that this trouble is someone else’s fault. Thought is constitutionally incapable of suspecting itself – it can (and does_ try to regulate or manage itself so as to work ‘the right way and not the wrong way’, but the one thing that it can never do is give up on itself entirely. Thought can never sacrifice itself, any more than the ego can. It can never ‘serve a higher master’, no matter what it might claim. Thought can never bring us to freedom, no matter how many promises it may come out with.
There is no method to find freedom, as Krishnamurti keeps on saying. There’s no ‘way’ to get there, no authority capable of safely guiding us in this direction. Saying that ‘there is no way to get there’ doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as freedom, simply that we can’t manipulate or control it. Actually, freedom is all there is – the world as we ordinarily know it is a distortion caused by thought. Thought operates on the basis of biases that it cannot examine, biases that it itself has assumed without ever acknowledging to itself that it has assumed anything. These biases (or rules) determine what we are able to perceive as real and what we can’t help writing off as not being real; they are responsible for the black-and-white world we perceive ourselves to live in, but they are themselves not real, despite their foundational role. If we were to examine these biases carefully enough then we would clearly see that they have no reality, but in our normal modality of being thought controls us and thought will not let us examine its assumptions. This is how we are kept prisoner in the false worlds that thought creates for us.
We look out at the world on the basis of these ‘invented biases’ and then everything we (deliberately) do is in accordance with what they allow and what they don’t allow. Our everyday modality of being is thus all about obedience – obeying rules is what the conditioned life is all about (not questioning them, not asking awkward questions). This is ‘the Prison of Purposefulness’ – we are slaves not revolutionaries! What keeps us obedient is – as always – fear. We are afraid of the new, afraid of the unknown, and so we stick to the safely formatted version of reality that the TM benevolently provides us with. We look at the world only in the way that has been approved for us to look at it in. Who knows what we may see otherwise? Who knows what we might see if we were free to see the world as it actually is? This is a very great irony, however – the only reason we fear the unknown (or ‘the unformatted’) is because it has already been disapproved of by the machinery of thought. It’s already been ‘demonised’. We have already rejected it – we have already turned it into ‘the enemy’. We fear the new and the unrecognisable because we are prejudiced towards it, in other words. Thought whispers slyly into our ears and tells us (on a subliminal level) that the new and the unrecognizable is our enemy and we believe it…
Image credit – redfm.ie
