We all do innumerable things due to motives. We all do things for reasons, to get something out of it. Our calculating minds were programmed to react primarily with self-centered motives in mind.
What place has true meditation (and mindfulness) in all this? I have been, in the distant past, to so-called “meditation gatherings,” where i have observed people sitting cross-legged, smugly acting like they are achieving something immensely profound. But is that really meditation? It may be that true meditation is not what a person can arrange to happen. True meditation might not merely be just another effect brought about by a scheming cause. You can work out (via motives) how to acquire money, knick-knacks, drugs, and self-satisfaction from asking favors from a learned (imagined) deity, but can you similarly plan or plot how to truly meditate or partake in real, spontaneous insight? It might be that true meditation and insight may occur when one is not plotting how to meditate and not plotting to have insight. It might be that a mind that is not wrapped up in “plotting” may be touched by what cannot be reached by groping in (and “as”) time. And far too often, a person tends to do something for himself (or herself) and not for others. It all can be very robotic and infantile while one lives foolishly. The self can think that the “special spotlight” is on it, with its beliefs and spiritual conclusions. Beliefs and conclusions are what someone is (which often results from programmed motives).
There is often a space between the self and “others,” and there is often a space between what actually exists and what one wants for oneself. Such space is extremely limited. It is of mechanical, animalistic foolishness. But most of us take that bait and run with it. Limitation is its own prison… a prison that is self-concocted.
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