What are you meditating for?

Originally Posted by Argento

I think you can't get rid of conditioning, it's judging something as negative causes that you to want to de-condition. Can you forget that 2+2=4 even if you sit for 20 years in silence?

Maybe you can become aware that most of your conditioning has very little use in daily life.

Yes, indeed you can forget that 4+4=8, for example. In fact, literally, after studying maths for years, my mind easily shifts from 4+4=8 (decimal) to 4+4=10 (octal). How was this conditioning changed? Not from "concentrating REALLY REALLY REALLY HARD"... rather there were two steps:

1. Understand the mathematics that explain the different numeral systems
2. Even after we know this, years and years of primary, secondary and sometimes university education have still trained our minds to assume 4+4=8. Now we must de-condition and re-condition ourselves to not automatically assume out of habit that 4+4=8

In fact, as an analogy to spirituality, we can break people down into three sorts:
1. People who assume 4+4 is ALWAYS 8 (ignorant and ignorant of their ignorance)
2. People who know 4+4 is sometimes not 8, but make mistakes because they "revert" to solving the problem as though 4+4=8, even when it is in octal (where most spiritual seekers stand, myself included)
3. Those who know that the answer to "what is 4+4" depends on what base you are in AND are able to naturally adapt, depending on the problem that is being solved

I have gotten to the point in mathematics where, if someone writes that two numbers added equal something unexpected, I wonder what is being done with the numbers instead of immediately assuming that they "did it wrong". It would be nice to achieve that level of spirituality...

Likewise, though meditation, or other forms of reflection we come to understand the "mathematics of the self"... once we've understood this, we may know our conditioning is wrong (or at least, not the whole truth) but by recalling and reinforcing this knowledge over time, we can begin to recondition ourselves to knowledge that is perhaps more in sync with the way things truly are... As we come to higher levels of realization, this process happens again and again. This is the "refining" of which we speak.

Meditation is ultimately the scientific approach to spirituality. It isn't drawing logical conclusions... rather it is observing self, seeing where we are living unfulfilled and cultivating harmony in our hearts. The goal is not to dispense with meditation... rather, it is to have a sense of constant meditative awareness and observation of self and other even when we aren't sitting on a cushion with our eyes closed... we should be able to meditate in the midst of the fire of turmoil.

Also, a quick question for you: have you been able to destroy all of the turmoil in your heart just by choosing not to judge things as good or bad? If so, I feel like you should share your experience with all of us. For me, it has not been so simple thus far, so I think sharing your experience or story would help, even if there was no method. Was it "one day, I woke up and decided to stop judging circumstances as good or bad... and from that day forward I was free"? Short of that, I would say that "immediately abandoning opinion" is just talk from ancient books.

While this doesn't mean that we are revealing "absolute truths about the universe" by doing so, not being blinded by our own narrow mindset is ESSENTIAL to any understanding that we can achieve outside of meditation... Just like moving beyond the 4+4=8 mentality is a sign of progress in mathematics, so is moving beyond our current conditioning a sign of spiritual progress. As for whether we can ever reach the end of the journey, I'll end with a paraphrasing of a koan that I'm partial to:

One monk asked another how their spiritual journey was progressing. The monk who was questioned responded "I'm going to an unchanging place."

The monk who asked the question berated the monk, saying "How are you 'going' anywhere if the place is unchanging... Just accept the mind as is and you are there."

The other monk smiled and replied "The going is also unchanging."

-TaoSandwich