Different meditation goals

Just curious about different people's goals toward meditation.

I enjoy reading about different traditions. So you have the Confucian tradition, where teaching and experience are used to inform knowledge of a human virtue that is then enacted in ritual until enacting it is natural, during said process one learns more and theoretically becomes more ethical, which reduces life complications which aids in attaining meditative calm and gives further teaching to employ in enacting virtue during ritual, which...

Or Chinese Buddhism, where meditative calm is employed again to enable contemplation of samsara and the Buddhas teaching, which is applied to compassionate action, the results of which, success or failure, is applied to further contemplation, and the theoretical result of reduced attachment to the illusions of samsara means less intrusions from complications of poor actions into meditative calm, which enables further contemplation...

Or Taoism, where meditative calm is again used to enable contemplation of the falseness of preference(good or bad, hot or cold, near or far, etc), which reduces erroneous judgments based on preference, which means less intrusion into meditative calm, which means more effective contemplation of reality, which theoretically means better engagement with the way as it is, and not the way of your preferences based on false understanding.

I sometimes will use meditation as a preface to thinking about specific things I am seeking to understand in kung fu, or my own life. Nothing fancy on my part, but I find it helps to clear my head and come at things from a more open perspective.

I primarily perform two kinds of meditation:

A Taoist body vivifying one that involves moving a yellow or white light from the crown down to the soles of the feet and filling the entire body as it goes. I do this one with as much visual detail as possible as it moves through the various muscles, organs and bones. I believe the orignal exercise involved warm butter rather than a yellow light, but I could be mis-remembering. It also almost without fail will put me to sleep before I get past my abdomen. But in fairness to me I work nights, so I am short on sleep most of the time.

The second one is practicing presence of mind, or allowing the mind to return to its non-conceptual condition.

BTW, stop sneaking around, its getting hard to follow you with all this fluttering about like a butterfly! :mad::)

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Originally Posted by Scott R. Brown

BTW, stop sneaking around, its getting hard to follow you with all this fluttering about like a butterfly! :mad::)

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I try to make a hard target. You never know when the aliens are watching.

I'm not getting the probe. Never again!

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Originally Posted by Faux Newbie

Just curious about different people's goals toward meditation.

I enjoy reading about different traditions. So you have the Confucian tradition, where teaching and experience are used to inform knowledge of a human virtue that is then enacted in ritual until enacting it is natural, during said process one learns more and theoretically becomes more ethical, which reduces life complications which aids in attaining meditative calm and gives further teaching to employ in enacting virtue during ritual, which...

Or Chinese Buddhism, where meditative calm is employed again to enable contemplation of samsara and the Buddhas teaching, which is applied to compassionate action, the results of which, success or failure, is applied to further contemplation, and the theoretical result of reduced attachment to the illusions of samsara means less intrusions from complications of poor actions into meditative calm, which enables further contemplation...

Or Taoism, where meditative calm is again used to enable contemplation of the falseness of preference(good or bad, hot or cold, near or far, etc), which reduces erroneous judgments based on preference, which means less intrusion into meditative calm, which means more effective contemplation of reality, which theoretically means better engagement with the way as it is, and not the way of your preferences based on false understanding.

I sometimes will use meditation as a preface to thinking about specific things I am seeking to understand in kung fu, or my own life. Nothing fancy on my part, but I find it helps to clear my head and come at things from a more open perspective.

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Meditation was never really a part of the Confucian tradition, and when it was, had nothing really to do with the meditation found in Buddhism or Daoism.

I learned a meditation technique 15 years ago and have practiced it everyday since. There are several benefits. For my income I do lots of math and coding. Meditation gives me a clear head to do that. I don't make any medical claims, but I feel some benefits in recovery from weightlifting and sanda training. Finally, I feel its important that I have something to instill daily discipline. Spending a short time in dedicated silence is a good way to do that.

My current goal is merely to retrain a calm and focused mind. I've found since using smartphones I've definitely lost some ability to focus.

I don't meditate often but when I do, I make a cup of tea and put on the porno stash............................XXX tres equis:D

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Originally Posted by mawali

I don't meditate often but when I do, I make a cup of tea and put on the porno stash............................XXX tres equis:D

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Different strokes for different folks!;):D

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Originally Posted by pazman

Meditation was never really a part of the Confucian tradition, and when it was, had nothing really to do with the meditation found in Buddhism or Daoism.

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Different goals, and I'd have to check my sources, but, if memory serves me correctly, almost all the major figures in later Confucianism insisted on quiet sitting as a major and essential portion of practice. As for Confucius and Xunzi both specifically say that "harmonious ease" in ritual is nothing without the right learning, which is nothing without the right mental intent in the ritual, which is not as worthy without harmonious ease. This is almost identical to Chinese Buddhist views on the role of meditation, learning, and action, with Confucianism having an intermediate ritual stage, while Buddhism focuses more on immediate action of what is gained.

I'll try to make time to check my sources, but, unless I'm mistaken, of the periods we know the most about Confucian practices from, quiet sitting was always considered a major part of it.

Mind you, like lay Buddhists, everyday Chinese were probably not enacting what Confucian 'priests' did into their own practices.

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I learned a meditation technique 15 years ago and have practiced it everyday since. There are several benefits. For my income I do lots of math and coding. Meditation gives me a clear head to do that. I don't make any medical claims, but I feel some benefits in recovery from weightlifting and sanda training. Finally, I feel its important that I have something to instill daily discipline. Spending a short time in dedicated silence is a good way to do that.

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Agreed!

Be yourself.

That is the secret of life!:cool: I stole it from Bugs Bunny.