meditation goals

How would you know if your meditation practice is succeeding? Would you be having some oneness experience? Would you have a quiet mind? Would traffic lights change for you when you approached them? Would your relationships improve. Would you have more money? What would it be?

To know whether any enterprise is succeeding or not, we need to compare the current state of that enterprise relative to some goal. Unfortunately we too often set our 'spiritual' goals from our past conditioning. We often choose our goal to be one that we picked up from some teacher, to erase some past hurt, or to get something we lack. As thought is always about the past, this means that all such goals are just our past conditioning warmed over. New mixes of past thinking are still just past thinking. If we think about it, it is the past we are trying to transcend.

Let me challenge you to make your meditation goal be something that is not some 'new' version of your past thinking. Why not shoot for something fresh!

Why not choose your goal to be one that has already been accomplished yet is knowable right now? In other words, why not choose a goal that is outside the framework of past and future and outside the realm of 'things'.

What is available right NOW that is right smack at the heart of what is nearest and dearest to you? It is simply the forgiveness that has always been. If you make forgiving the world (and yourself) your goal, you will know that you are succeeding when you know that unconditional Peace is who you are.

PS: My wife told me I'd better explain what I mean by forgiveness as there are so many interpretations of the term. As you read this blog, I'd like to to at least know what I mean by the term. True forgiveness is the acknowledgment that the 'incident' never occurred ... that the 'incident' was just a fiction of separated mind and has no reality whatsoever right now ... it's something like a bad dream. Moreover the test to see if you have forgiven some one or some thing is: if you can remember it, you haven't forgiven it.

comments?
bob