What is the goal of meditation?
What is the goal of meditation? An incredibly hard question to answer. There’s no singular one goal to be achieved. There’s no “The End” screen. In fact, it’s possible to argue that there’s no ending to it at all. It’s simply a constant and never-ending practice. I think a better question is, what can you achieve with meditation?
Our meditative practice sometimes feels as if there’s a goal or an end point. A core concept of meditation is that there is no arriving. There is no ‘there’. The practice of meditation is the successful meditation. Training the mind to be observant of the thoughts.
You will never be a perfect meditator. I think this is one of the hardest things that I struggled with at the beginning of my own meditation journey. I’m a min-maxer, I like knowing the set of rules. I like ranked systems. I like knowing where I stand and when I’m improving.
With meditation, all of that is thrown out the window. There’s only the practice. The only thing we can ask is “Do I know myself better than I did before?”.
Through the different techniques used in meditation, we can try to understand ourselves better. Often it involves focusing on the breath or repeatedly realizing when you enter the dreamlike state of thought.
This circle of falling into the torrent of our thoughts and coming back up for air is meditation. Many times it involves doing less, and not more, another hard concept to get my brain around.
Meditation itself, for some, is of course a means to an end. It’s a means to living a happier life, to being less stressed and to understanding ourselves and others better. If that is the final goal that you’re talking about, then those are totally valid. But the word goal in itself implies some form of completeness or finished-ness. That just isn’t true with meditation, or being a nice person for that matter.
Ultimately there may be goals or states you’re trying to achieve by meditating. That’s understandable, we all start for different reasons. The most important recommendation I can give to you is that you let yourself determine those ‘goals’. But remember that meditation isn’t something to be completed. Our reasons for practicing can be wholly separate from our experience of the practice.
It is up to you to decide what you want to achieve.
(Sorry about the featured image, I couldn’t resist.)
