I still find myself after more than 20 years sometimes thinking I want to achieve something from meditation. I over heard a girl on holiday last year say I've done my mornings meditation and I should be feeling at lot better than I am, Obviously really important for her to meditate on why she wants to feel better and what is wrong with the way she already feels. It may be an unpleasant feeling, but it is the feeling that is present you can't escape that. It is the real feeling and better for than than some some fake imagined feeling and worse a desired feeling.
Yet I still partition my mind into external/internal and good/bad rather than just present. And worse some things get claimed as "mine" and some as "not mine." I hear a bird sing and that is "not mine" and I have some good feeling and think "that is mine" or "this is me." And then you get a bad feeling and think "don't want it to be mine." What a pointless mess. They are all just what is happening right now, they are all just the appearance of reality as it is. And in meditation reality is all that matters.
And it messes up meditation cos we have the good feeling and we think great meditation is going well. And we have the bad feeling and think I'm doing something wrong. Well in a way this is true. The pure mind, unobstructed and empty of defilements is blissful and joyful. The presence of bad things is purely the arisings from karma in our mind. So in a very superficial way the good things are ours and the bad things are not. But this is wrong on two levels.
Firstly there is no self for things to attach to. When we become aware of the present do we also become aware of a "self" onto which everything sticks? No we just have the awareness plain and simple, it comes from and belongs to no one it is just the present. So pure mind is not pure mind "of" someone. It is just pure mind. If we wish to entertain thoughts of "someone" owning it that all happens within the pure mind. Pure mind itself is pure and free and these thoughts do not concern it, they just occur within it. If you are aware of a thought then it is IN mind, it isn't ABOUT mind! Indeed all thoughts just occur within Pure Mind, the Mind itself can never be the subject of such thoughts. In Kantian terms, Mind is the Transcendental condition for the possibility all things even thoughts and concepts.
The second way it is wrong is that Pure Mind does not make a distinction between good things and bad things. It is only interested in "what is." Regardless whether the feeling is good or bad, it "IS" and that reality is the point. Don't even bother to unpack it. This is Pema Chondron's way of seeing things as a way to greater realisation (not using her words right here). Good or Bad we just see it for what it is. In doing that we have a way of relating to things.
This last thing is so alien to the normal mind. The normal mind avoids the bad and heads straight towards the good. And when we start to meditate undoubtedly we are heading towards it as just another "good" along with fun times and chocolate. Ajahn Brahm would certainly welcome the good aspect of it. He says it it is not good then you are doing it wrong. But really we want to go beyond this coming and going movement that it sets up.
I think there are disagreements amongst meditation practitioners on this. Jhana is certainly a beyond this world pleasure and to path towards jhana is the rising of pleasure. Buddha absorbed into this extremely pleasant state as a child and it was the memory of this which redirected him toward the final successful stage of his enlightenment path. (That along with realising the importance of middle path and compassion when he was given the bowl of rice which led him away from self-mortification). But in Chan/Zen the focus is much more on the Pure Mind that has no relationship with it contents. Good and bad feelings come and go like clouds blowing across the sky: the sky is not affected in any way.
There is no one answer. But here I just wanted to highlight the stubborn habit of dividing the objects of ones mind into those we want to keep and those we want to get rid of. And how we are tempted to use meditation to getting rid of them and promote the good feelings, when really all things are of interest in meditation simply cos they are present.
Now it may be of interest sometimes to unpack bad and good thoughts and feelings. But this is no longer meditation and is more thinking. When you hold onto the tail of a mental snake and get dragged along with it you are thinking. This blog entry itself is one such snake that awoke in my mind and actually dragged me away from meditation a few minutes ago! How ironic is that!! But we can get good insight from following these snakes, or far better go the other way and see where they came from and why they arose at all. Seeing how a thought arises goes back into meditation. You are no longer getting dragged along by it, but going back to just seeing it as an event emerging in your mind. With free and easy mind like this you pick things up, and you put them down again easy. It doesn't matter if they are good or bad.
I suspect one of the problems with good and bad mental objects is that they illicit emotions. Particularly with bad objects we can get afraid and that is a particular big snake that picks us up in its jaws and drags us away. The power of meditation is to practice not getting picked up and just let it go like a thunder cloud. It won't last forever. Be amazed at how this comes into existence and fills your mind with darkness and lightening and rain. And then be amazed how it goes. Obviously the speed it goes depends upon how caught in the mouth we are. This is the problem with the mind that seeks the good things and tries to get rid of the bad things. When the bad things come it gets into a massive battle to get rid of them, and this makes it all last a lot longer than it needs to.
I realise writing this how we get fixed on things from the past. Great zen story of master and disciple coming to a swollen river. A woman is wanting to cross and the master pickers her up and carries her across. Some days later the celibate disciple eventually loses it and shouts at the celibate master that he committed a grave offence by touching the woman. The master simply says I only touched her for as long as it took to cross the river, you have been touching her ever since. So it is with good and bad objects of our minds. Long after the cloud or sunshine has passed we are trying to rid ourselves of the bad experience or seeking more of the good experience. We do not simply take things as they are.
So what of karma and morality. Could this mean we become a psycho and have no emotional response to things. Bad things happen and we just ignore, and good things happen and we just ignore. We become a stone. Actually yes and no. Becoming a stone is the 1st skill. It is better to have no response than have the wrong response. Someone makes us angry. It is so much better to ignore the situation if we are going to be unskilful than to wade in unskilfully and make things worse by perhaps shouting or starting a fight. But as we get more skilful and we start to see better ways of approaching things both internally and externally then we can open up to experiences eventually fully.
One scientific observation of meditation is that it strengthens the frontal cortex and that translates into better self control. Or actually its vice versa. When you have better self control it turns up in brain scans as a more active frontal cortex! Meditation brings you into the present, and that means we only have to deal with what is real. 100% of our problems lie not in what is real, but what our mind does with it which is unreal. With meditation we put ever greater emphasis on the real.
When I first meditated I noticed just with 5 min a day for a month I had a peaceful gap between myself and events. It meant that things I was afraid of were just a little further away, and I had a minute to think about things before I had a strong emotion like anger. I used to think I was not an angry person. With that gap I realised I was an angry person. Meditation gives you perspective and enables you not to get dragged in but to see reality as it is.
Anyway having dragged myself away with a long essay on unreality its time to go back to meditating.
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