The Myth of Self Discipline Meditation and the Reality of What You Already Are

We often find ourselves caught in the trap of thinking that if we just apply enough effort, enough focus, or enough self discipline meditation, we will eventually arrive at a state called liberation. But who is this "you" that is trying to get there? We speak about a journey as if there is a distance to cover between where we are now and some future awakening, yet this is the ultimate illusion. It is like searching for the donkey while you are already sitting on its back. We are so distracted by the act of looking that we fail to notice the very thing that is carrying us. There is a common misunderstanding that meditation is a ladder we climb to reach the absolute. We might feel better after sitting in silence—the body-mind may find a certain comfort or a "seed of peace" that brings relief from the daily grind—and that is perfectly fine. It is a horizontal improvement, much like learning to play the piano or solving a mathematical equation. It makes the "dream" of our daily life more pleasant. However, this has nothing to do with what we call the absolute. The absolute is not a destination. It is the vertical dimension that is always present, whether we are happy, miserable, focused, or completely distracted. If we think we are a separate self that must perform self discipline meditation to recognize what we already are, we are simply delaying the inevitable realization that there is nowhere to go. If the absolute is truly infinite, it must include you exactly as you are right now, including your distractions and your struggles. If you were outside of it, it wouldn't be the totality. The idea of a gradual path is a trick of the separate self; it suggests that "this" moment isn't enough and that some "other" moment in the future will be the one that counts. But there is no other moment. There is only this. We often hear people talk about the "I am" as the ultimate truth. But even this can be a trap of the body-mind. When we say "I am," we are often still standing on the side of the separate self, looking at experiences as if they are appearing to "us." We create a division between the observer and the observed. We look at a tree and think, "I am the one seeing the tree." We think our body-mind is on the side of the "seer" and the tree is "out there." But the observation is a single, indivisible unit. There is no "me" plus "the tree." There is just the seeing. The separate self is not a solid entity; it is a function, a way the body-mind relates to the environment. It is like a pair of glasses we forgot we were wearing. Everything we see is colored by them, yet we cannot see the glasses themselves. When we try to use self discipline meditation to "fix" the self, we are just polishing the glasses instead of simply taking them off. We seek silence as if it were a prize, but silence is not the absence of noise. It is the background that allows noise to exist.