Spiritual Meditation

Spiritual meditation is classically taught to have five levels: the lesser (3 levels), the medium, and the great.

The small motivation has to do with attaining a decent outcome for this life. Some sort of good situation for yourself. Some people might say this is not really spiritual, and that might be accurate. Nevertheless, there it is. We just want to have wealth and a decent comfortable life free from strife and warfare, some sense of peace in our life. Maybe.

The medium of the small has to do with it. Desire to attain some virtue, or goodness, in this life too. To be a decent person. The large of the small is looking to future lives, to create good karma so that the next rebirth will be a positive rebirth.

The medium motivation is to seek liberation from samsara, to try and free oneself from the round of rebirth altogether. And the great motivation is to free all beings from samsara.

Spiritual Meditation Motivations

Spiritual Meditation: Lesser Motivations

Lesser does not mean bad. It is not negative in any way, it simply aims a bit lower than each succeeding level. The small of the lesser spiritual meditation motives is about establishing a good life with a good family and having peace, abundance, and a good community. Spiritual means can be used for this goal. The Secret is an example.

The middle of the lesser motivations is to have a spiritual life. This person would want to believe in a higher power perhaps, or in something more meaningful: justice, angels, human dignity.

There’s not much that needs to be said about the first two. They’re somewhat self-explanatory. The third, the large of the lesser motivations, has to do with karma. Karma here means good karma as opposed to bad karma. So the practitioner of that kind of spiritual meditation would pursue acts of goodness with the intent of collecting good karma. They would eschew the ten non-virtuous actions, list these, and pursue the ten virtuous actions. This practitioner seeks a good rebirth from the good karma.

Spiritual Meditation Medium Motivation

The medium motivation also has to do with karma. It has to do with escaping karma altogether. In the large of the small, one would be pursuing good karma. In the medium, spiritual meditation is about transcending karma. This is the Hinayana Path in essence. Here the practitioner studies the skandhas and the Nidanas and meditates on them.

Generally, the goal is to perceive the activity of the sixth Nidana, craving, as it becomes the seventh Nidana, grasping, then release the craving. Craving can be craving for a wanted thing or craving to make an unwanted thing go away. You can crave that somebody die, for instance, or you can crave a better job.

Grasping is when we bring it into the mind stream and make it a part of who we are. After that, it becomes existence. This means it is a defining identity and will entail rebirth of that grasping thought. We will look to satisfy that in our next rebirth. If we continue working with it, it becomes more fundamental to our existence an identity principle.

Overcoming this grasping tendency is the goal. Then the cycle of rebirth can be cut. The person (or mindstream more precisely) simply chooses not to be born. They rest in non-self. They have attained Nirvana.

Spiritual Meditation – Greater Motivation

The greater motivation of spiritual meditation is liberation of all beings. This is the Mahayana Path. The great motivation: we contemplate that all beings suffer and we desire to relieve them of that suffering. We don’t ponder whether they’re good or bad, but we realize that as they suffer, they’re likely to increase their own and others’ sufferings. As they’re released from suffering, they’re likely to help release others from suffering. The practitioner of the great path meditates on compassion through the four immeasurables, tonglen, and by practicing lojong among other things.

This spiritual meditation also includes-as a more potent aspect-meditation on wisdom. It’s also somewhat more difficult. This equates roughly to meditation on emptiness. Wisdom from this perspective means insight into the nature of emptiness. Emptiness can be seen in many ways. Fundamentally, it’s that things are not as they appear. They don’t have the basic essential quality of thingness that they appear to have. When you get up close, it’s just parts, it’s pieces. The Madhyamika logic of the one and the many helps with this. The tiny vajra disabuses the notion that cause and effect is real (or not real), and puts one beyond that where nothing can be said of it.

The meditations on emptiness comprise five progressive schools of meditation, the first of which is meditation on selflessness, equivalent to the medium motivation. The next level is on the mind-only school, where all objects don’t have their own reality. They exist only as objects in the mind, concepts. The mind names them, therefore they exist in that form in the mind. The one after that is Svatantrika, where everything is like space. Not even mind is real; it refutes the existence of mind itself. Beyond that is Prasangika, which refutes all conceptual elaboration. The final one is Shentong, which focuses on the luminous awareness, empty aspect of mind.

The Prasangika and Shentong work together in terms of a contemplative approach for Prasangika and a direct meditative approach for Shentong. The two are good to balance together. Here is an extensive post on Spiritual Meditation on Emptiness.

Summary Spiritual Meditation

This is from a non-Buddhist perspective.

May all beings be happy

May all beings be peaceful

May all beings be safe

May all beings awaken to the light of their true nature

May all beings be free