A seeming contradicion in meditation In Buddhism I have often heard the idea that there is nothing wrong with what you are feeling, thinking and sensing, it is only our relation to those things that define/judge them to be bad.
Well this has me thinking. If there is such a thing as a &quot;wrong relation&quot; to our thoughts, that relation is itself a thought, which would mean that suddenly there is &quot;something wrong&quot; with our thoughts.
So to me this is an apparent contradiction. Either there is something wrong with your thoughts that can be fixed by sitting, or there is not.
If there is nothing wrong with your thoughts, feelings, senses, then why sit at all?
If there IS something wrong with your thoughts or your relation to your thoughts, that seems to go against the whole non-judgemental awareness idea.
In other words, in meditation we say that we are not trying to achieve anything and get anywhere outside the current moment. But getting to that state of mind DOES take effort and training. It IS trying to achieve something. It is moving towards something. It is applying effort in some direction.
I can't seem to reconsile these two thoughts.
It has been bugging me for a while now, I hope you all can help.
Cheers!
Excellent question. You're definitely onto something.
As everyone here said, wrong thoughts are real, these are thoughts that have a nature of conflict: thoughts of wanting more, thoughts of not wanting anymore, thoughts like &quot;it's not supposed to be like this&quot;.
Our tactical goal is Peace, a state of mind when there's no inner conflict, no conflicting thoughts. (Our strategic goal, at least in Mahayana, is Enlightenment and full Liberation, but let's not get ahead of ourselves).
To attain that tactical goal, you need to eradicate the conflicting thoughts (of both craving and aversion types). Now, if you were to judge your thoughts as &quot;wrong&quot;, you would only create more conflict right then and there. So the trick is to eradicate conflict without creating even more conflict. How is that to be done?
Instead of sitting there and hating yourself or hating your bad thoughts or blaming them or suppressing them - we just don't feed them and let them dissolve. We let our attention naturally move on to other thoughts. Or, if attention keeps getting stuck, we gently move it onto other topics, deliberately.
Depending on where you are in your practice this may require less or more effort. When you are very advanced, you just watch them and they dissolve like the writing on water. When you are a beginner, you may have to speak out loud on some positive topic in order to distract your attention. And everything in between.