The purpose of meditation is for sure not to become Buddhist or professional meditator. It is to become more free from our conditioning and especially the neurotic part of it. By conditioning we mean socio-cultural, professional, religious conditioning. But, beware, we also mean spiritual conditioning and … meditative conditioning!
Why would we want to be free of conditioning in the first place?
Conditioning is not bad by itself, we could not function without it; we would not be able to learn and adapt to the conditions we are facing while we are experimenting this life. The point is rather to constantly recycle our conditioning in order not to get caged by it. Then we can ‘think out of the box’ so to say, but also and more important, we can feel out of the box and act out of the box! We can surf more freely and adapt to the wave of life for what works best, what makes more sense and what makes us happy.
‘In a nutshell, meditation exercises are here to enable us to make a positive difference in our life and in the world.’
Izt seems that an enormous amount of the unhappiness and the dysfunctioning we experience in our life and in our world are self inflicted and recurrent. They arise from our preconditioned unchecked habitual patterns. Those patterns were indeed built up in the past as part of our conditioning, but are neurotic now in the sense that they keep repeating themselves without our consent so to speak – i.e. mostly unconsciously.
As tools, meditation exercises are conceived to help us get in touch very consciously with a specific state of mind of ours which is open, lucid and fairly free from our conditioning and neurotic patterns.
Such a state of mind can access a level of creativity and ability that can drastically enhance our ability to respond to the complexity of our human situation. This enhanced state of mind has the agility to continuously transcend yet include the previous level of our evolution and conditioning. It is a basic human quality that each of us can experience fairly easily.
But beware, it is not something very far-off and exotic, as religion or spirituality try to present it !
Enlightenment as a faraway unattainable goal is the biggest hoax that comes from the spiritual and religious (media) world.
Indeed, the hoax would have you meditate for ages… or for billions of future hypothetical lives as they say…!
Instead, what we are talking about here is just to re-discover a very simple aspect of our human experience, a very sane wake up to the reality of both our conditioned and unconditioned mind.
This simple aspect of our human experience opens a vast and meaningful array of possibility into a better management of our human situation. It severs the heavy doom of fate and empowers each of us, personally and as a group. This experience is then extremely liberating and useful, and that is why it has been hailed as ‘enlightenment’ … before being sold for it !
In fact, the difficult part is not to reach enlightenment, but the implication of enlightenment!
Enlightenment just gives us a fresh mirror on the de-conditioning work that lies ahead.
Indeed, taking the time to dodge our mental inertia, to step out of our seemingly comfortable habits, to acknowledge our biases and to face reality is not always an easy process ! But the fun part of this work is the natural arising of our talents that are covered up by those conditioning factors, and the ensuing capacity to make a difference in our life and in the world.
The meditation game – because indeed it is a game – will be to develop that enhanced state of mind while our blinded conditioning reduces – or vice versa: To reduce our conditioning while our enhanced state of mind develops.
Meditation is then just a temporary tool. It is a kind hand extended to help us get back straight on our personal horse of positive conscious evolution – here and now.
Meditation is a daily choice, a personal decision to shape and condition consciously our evolution.
Because there is no such thing as an obligation
You might want to watch out for a true aspiration.
It means work and adventure!
It means efforts and rewards!
It means good times and bad times!
It means leaving away the inertia of our inner donkey…
… and the copy & paste of our inner monkey!
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It is the start of an Odyssey
In which – for once – we get included
In where – for sure – we’ll have company
Because there are a lot more enhanced monkeys !
In the same way that the fruit of learning to walk is to be able to move around more efficiently and more freely than to keep on crawling; the fruit of learning meditation exercises is to be able to move around in life more efficiently and more freely than what we do right now, personally, as a group, and as a species.
Meditation is not about meditation.
It’s about riding those sparks of qualities
that lead us toward a greater humanity.
