Awareness in Buddhist Meditation

100
without becoming entangled in it, because there is no meditator who
attempts to achieve an end of perfection.
When the mind is merely watching the entire process without
taking part in it, it is quiet without anticipation and without fear.
There is neither striving to attain, nor desiring to escape, for there is
no thought of ‘self’. Without goal or purpose, in mere watchfulness,
there is no conflict, no entanglement, no agitation. And in that
quiet peace there is a new revelation which is free from idealistic
colouring. It is the stillness of understanding and love. That is
meditation without thought and without ‘self’.
Meditation is of a mind that is not focused on an object of its
own selection; it is not concentrated on an exclusive object of its
own choice; it is not a channelling of thought with a fixed purpose in
view. In meditation the mind is very quiet, the process of thinking is
at a standstill; the surroundings are observed, but do not influence;
and thus, the mind, while awake and alert, remains unconditioned.
Although the perceived forms part of its perception, it is not stored
up in memory and as part of the mind. Perception in meditation,
which is contemplation, is free and unattached; it has no desire for
the possession of the perceived, and thus it is no stored up in memory
and is not used in that extraordinary composition, where the past
and selected experiences are collected to form that unit of existence
which can continue only in desire, in projection, in an ideal which
is the future, the ‘I’, the ‘self’, the embodiment of security.
For the sake of that security the ‘I’ stores up whatever may
strengthen the building, the isolation, the opposition against that
‘self’, which is the conflict in the basic struggle for existence between
to be what is, and to become what is wanted.
Meditation is not a search for power, for quiet, for achievement,
but is the simple watchfulness of what is, in the beauty of a flower,
in the squalor of the mind in search of power, in the striving for
spiritual attainment. In that simple watchfulness and awareness
there is immediate contact with actuality, not with the ideal of the