True Meditation Is Without Effort or Purpose
Meditation as Being, Not Doing
You are already that for which you long. Meditation, in the deepest sense, is not a practice you take up or a discipline you perfect over time. It is the natural condition of being itself, available in every moment, prior to any effort or purpose. This essay explores what it means to rest in that condition and what stands in the way.
Everything you do requires a degree of effort. And everything you do, you do for a reason – to bring about some change in the mind, the body or the world in the future. Meditation is an interruption of this flow of becoming.
If you are making an effort, you are in a state of becoming. If you are meditating for a purpose, for a reason, in order to acquire something, become something or understand something, then your meditation is taking you into the future. It is part of your project of becoming.
The mind is accustomed to always making an effort in order to achieve something. And it imagines that meditation is a refinement and a continuation of this project. And indeed, many meditation practices do give the mind something to do.
But what may be called meditation – or non-meditation – is not something you do or cease doing with the mind. Meditation is not what you do; it is what you are. Simply being.
How much effort does it take to be? And are you being for a reason or a purpose? Does the fact of being stand to gain or lose anything from the content of experience?
Ask yourself: am I being, or am I in a state of becoming? If there is any sense of becoming – meditating for a purpose, making an effort, trying to achieve something, even trying to achieve enlightenment or union with God – then you stand as the ego, the one who would derive some benefit from the effort.
Being is never enhanced or aggrandised by anything you might do or achieve. Being never wants to meditate. Being doesn’t want enlightenment. Being doesn’t seek peace. Being doesn’t want union with God.
If you are engaging in any of these activities, you stand as the one who feels a lack, who feels incomplete, and seeks something to complete or fulfil themselves. In other words, you stand as the ego, and your activity perpetuates that ego, that sense of separation.
There is nothing to do, nothing to achieve, nothing to become and nothing to understand. You are already that for which you long. Enlightenment is an idea created on behalf of the ego in order to keep it in a perpetual state of becoming – and, as such, to perpetuate its illusory identity.
The ego, the apparently separate self, can only exist in a state of becoming. So when you deprive it of the possibility of becoming, acquiring or achieving, it will feel redundant. It will feel like death to the ego. Indeed, it is a kind of death.
As a result, there may be some rebellion in your mind – a rebellion that persuades you to remain in a state of becoming. Don’t engage with this rebellion. Don’t do anything to it. Meet it with your understanding.
In time, the project of becoming gives way to the peace of being. The object-knowing mind that lives in a perpetual state of becoming will consider simply being to be boring. It will project a blank state onto being and experience it as boredom. And in an attempt to escape the discomfort of this boredom, it will do one of two things: escape into thinking, or fall asleep.
These are two subtle means of avoidance. If you are bored, don’t escape from it into thinking or sleeping. Sink down deeper. The peace of being lies just beneath your boredom. Boredom is like a blank screensaver that appears after all your other programmes have closed down, seeming to prevent you from seeing the screen as it is. Boredom is a blank state of mind that exists after the other states of mind have subsided, a thin veneer over the peace of being.
It is not so much that there is no effort, no practice, no purpose, but rather that there is no entity left on whose behalf any such effort, practice or purpose could arise. No one left to say: I want to be enlightened. I want to meditate. I want union with God. I want happiness.
‘I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope. For hope would always be hope for the wrong thing.’1
Anything you search for, anything you long for, would always be the wrong thing, because it would always be an object or a state, and as such it would always disappear. Even if it were found, it would be lost.
In meditation – in non-meditation – the great search comes to an end: not a disciplined end, not a forced end, but a natural end. An end that is the natural consequence of understanding.
The project of becoming is outshone by the peace of being.
T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, Four Quartets (1943).
Thank you 😇
Thank you