Meditation Without Goal
Brad Warner did a video on the subject of meditation without a goal. As sometimes happens, after watching it I felt I could give a better explanation, or at least a different perspective, So here are my thoughts. The question of what is the goal of meditation comes up often in Soto Zen because Dogen emphasized the meditation practice is to simply sit with no object and no goal. Whenever the quesion came up when I was teaching meditation, I said that the goal of meditation is to do the mediation properly. It is like practicing a song on a musical instrument, you play it over and over again with no other purpose than to play it properly. The problem of having a goal is not so much the goal, but the anticipation. A goal makes you focus on the future instead of the present.
For Buddhists there another problem. In Mahayana Buddhism it is emphasized that we are already Buddhas. I always used the analogy of Clark Kent and Superman. To see Clark Kent is to see Superman. There is no Superman anywhere else. But no one seeing Clark Kent believes they are seeing Superman. Your mind is Buddha, but you do not realize it. This problem is not going to be solved by self-improvement, but by self recognition. There are several Zen koans that make this point. So meditating with a goal distracts us from the original reason meditation was taught, to recognize our own buddha nature. And to do this the mind does not need to be developed or improved. We only need to sit until our contrived thoughts settle and we can see wht has always been there.