Most people who approach what, for the sake of convenience, I will call “spiritual development”, do so because they are unsatisfied with the way things are now, and they do so in the hope that they will be able to change things into a state that they are happy with, whether that is an actual change in their environment, or a change in their capacity to cope with their environment.

I think I might have said this here before, but then again, I might have dreamt it, so I’ll say it anyway. The child thinks “if only I have this, or that, then I’ll be happy”. Everybody’s done it when they were a kid — “if you get me this, mom, I’ll never ask for anything again.” Most people with an ounce of sense see through this strategy pretty quickly, and get over it. Then they move away from a focus on stuff, towards a focus on what they do — “if only I was able to work for myself, or find the perfect spouse, or was able to live in the country, then I’d be happy”. A lot of people stop here, andspend the rest of their lives chasing that kind of stuff. Other people, some of them inclined towards a spiritual path, start thinking they’re pretty clever, moving to “if only I was able to shed myself of the need for this kind of stuff at all, if I could get rid of desire, if I could attain, then I’d be happy”. And that’s why a lot of people meditate, because they think it will help them change themselves, they think it will help them get to a state where they can “transcend” these sorts of desires, or to a state where they can focus on what is “really” important, whatever that might be.

All these things are identical. They all come back to the little kid, crying to his mommy, “I just want this, and then I’ll be happy”. It’s all symptomatic of a desire to change the way things are now into something that is better, and if you meditate with the idea that it is work, and that you should do work, because that’s how you attain, and you should attain, that’s exactly what you are doing, striving for something else, because you think that something else is going to be better than what there is now. “Spiritual development” is just a replacement for the toy car, or the new house, or the better job, except it has the distinct advantage that the practitioner can quote any number of “ancient texts” to happily convince himself that it is unattainable, thereby cunningly avoiding having to face up to reality, which is what he would have to do if he ever figured out that this idea of “spiritual development” helping him was as illusory as his childhood idea of his toy car making him happy.

So, he continues with his “work”, because — as he tells himself — as long as he’s “working”, then he’s aiming towards his goal, which makes him feel good. And, of course, as long as he’s aiming towards his goal, he can quite easily distract himself from the reality that he doesn’t want to deal with, which is the fact that this entire idea of being able to change to a better or “higher” state and becoming happy thereby is a complete and utter pile of shit. And this is, after all, perfectly understandable — nobody wants to give up their dream, nobody wants to spend the better part of their lives dreaming of a better place or a better situation, pinning their hopes on the existence of this place or state, and then admit to themselves that they’re never going to get it, that it’s all in their imaginations. It’s not a particularly pleasant thought, not many people have the appetite to stomach it, and it’s another example of where people refuse to believe the universe is the way it is, and instead insist on believing it’s the way they want it to be.

What attainment really involves is stopping all this silliness. People only hanker for change when they are dissatisfied with what they’ve got, and the way to get around that is to simply stop being dissatisfied with what you’ve got. These folks who hanker after this idealistic future state, who “work” in order to develop themselves, they are living in the future, and the future is an entirely imaginary place; it doesn’t exist outside of your mind. If it did, it would be the present, even if it’s a different present.

Meditation then, sitting still and being quiet, is shutting that noise down, forgetting about how different you want things to be, and living with the way things actually are. If you are living with the way things are, and you don’t have any problems with the way things are, then you don’t have any problems. You could be living in a ditch, a pack of rabid wolves closing in on your position, the debt collectors from the next town chasing you down, and a cancerous tumour growing at the back of your beck, but when you’re sitting down and focusing on the present, you don’t have any problems. You’ll get the problems back when you stop, but that’s why you meditate frequently, so you are frequently without problems. You don’t meditate in order to become better at dealing with problems, or to develop yourself into a state where you can transcend problems, you meditate because when you meditate, you don’t have any problems.

And that’s why I say you aren’t going to find liberation through aiming for liberation, because if you are aiming for liberation then you are still suffering from the misconception that there is some state out there, some attainment, that it going to take all your problems away, and there isn’t. You can get rid of your problems, now, this very minute, very easily indeed, simply by not attending to them, and attending to what is real instead. But this idea that there are so many problems in the world, that they need to be solved, that people need to become “better”, is so deeply ingrained that most people subconsciously reject this idea, and they are assisted in that rejection by the utter mythopoeia that has grown up around “spiritual practices”, that promise all kinds of delights to them if only they’d work for them. It’s a pipedream, an intoxicating illusion, an escape from reality. In the cases where people do attain like this, it’s either in spite of those practices, or because the inefficacy of those practices convince them to abandon them, and they stop caring about wanting to attain.

Whether it’s power, humility, grace, calm, peace, or anything else, the search for any of these things is nothing but a distraction. You need to get rid of all of it, and there is only one way to do that, which is to stop paying attention to it, to stop dreaming about being happy, to stop dreaming about being powerful, to stop dreaming about being in a state of peaceful calm. You need to drop all of it. You can’t half drop it, with a little wink to yourself, saying “I’m only dropping it because I know that once I drop it, then I’ll get what I want”. You really need to genuinely get rid of it all. For ever. And you could, in theory, do that within the next five minutes, if you were willing to face up to life without your comforting illusions. And since these are illusions, once you’ve done it, you’ll realise it wasn’t difficult at all, and that what you were giving up was actually a ball and chain around your neck that you never want back. The search for attainment is therefore an absolutely colossal red herring of epic proportions.

“For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect. (AL I, 44)”

The only purpose in traditional spiritual practices is to get people to this realisation.