Rich Silva:
I'm not entirely sure if I'm in the right thread here, but my practice most closely aligns with Zen practice, not to mention Zen Buddhism is what I study and the path I work to follow. With that being said, I often hear about people having "experiences" as a result of meditating, often relating these to "enlightenment", but I don't meditate for any sort of "experience". I meditate for the sake of meditating. I notice that when I maintain a continual meditation practice, the meditation itself becomes something I sometimes enjoy doing, but not always. I often think the results of my meditation are more like side effects of the actual practice, and are not the goals as to why I should sit on my cushion. I may be way off base here, but I sit on the cushion because when I do I notice a change in my everyday life, and because of these very subtle changes, it motivates me to sit on my cushion again. However the motivation is not necessarily the reason why I do it. I don't know if I'm making much sense here but it's the best I can do to explain why I do what I do.
The other piece is: I don't have any crazy "enlightenment" experience due to my sitting practice. The closest I can come to any "experience" I've had as a result of my meditation is that I'm able to feel life happening a little more fully; and by "little" I mean bit by bit, piece by piece, my experience of life gains a modicum of depth to it. I did experience sort of an "aha" moment when I started looking into no-self or non-duality, but that was more because it just sort of makes sense. It's like spending all this time swimming upstream and then someone says "hey dummy! Turn around, it's much easier that way."
So my question is: am I on target here with my practice? Should I even have a target? Is that the point of this? Or is the point the fact that there is no point? (which is pretty much the conclusion I've come to lately, and that's not a bad thing.)
Thanks in advance for any insight.
Different people meditate for different reasons, and different traditions offer different rationales for why one should meditate. If you have an informed view of what's out there, and if you're pleased with what you're doing, then I don't see why you should change what you're doing. It seems sort of strange that you'd profess to enjoying meditation for its own sake but then post a question like this.
What you're talking about here is something I've referred to elsewhere as "throwing away the ladder". We all get into meditation for this reason or that. We read that it helps with stress, or maybe we heard you can get into altered states with it, so we went after it. There's nothing wrong with that. People do things for reasons (either good or bad), and it would be weird to get into some new activity - particular an activity that is as irritating as meditation often is - without a reason. Hardcore dharma distinguishes itself as being very focused on attainment and the "can do" attitude to a degree that I've seen in no other tradition. However, everyone gets into this for some goal-oriented reason or another, not just the yogis here.
That being said, there comes a point, even in an attainment-oriented practice - usually after one has gotten to a pretty advanced point - where the selfing behind the intention to practice has to dissolve and fall away. This is the part where the ladder you just climbed up is no longer there. Or if it was, it doesn't matter, because there couldn't have been a climber. This is a profound moment. It coincides with a very close approach to beingness itself: an experience where there is no coming, there is no going, and there certainly is no one who could be coming or going. The mind turns away from the arising and passing of mere phenomena and goes for something else entirely, something truly restful, something which brings resolution to all the tension and distress. And after that, it can seem pretty foolish to "go" or "try" for anything, even though one is very aware that at some point that going or trying seemed to make sense.
Other traditions don't bother with the coming or going at all. They make a b-line for being. You just sit. You just drop things. And if you're not just sitting or just dropping things, that's still beingness, too, so realization is possible there as well. I literally don't know how well that works. Is that easier than taking the developmental path? When I talk to practitioners who only take that approach, I feel like a person who has reached the summit of a mountain by going up a winding road, and the other person says to me, "Yeah, but you could have walked straight up the mountain," and I think, "Yeah, but that was is so thick with trees and thorns that it's hard to find a way through." But maybe that's just my impression. Since I've only taken a developmental approach, I can't say what it would have been like to have done something so different.