The Objective of Meditation:
A Yogi’s Guide to the Quest for Self-Mastery
Meditation, Inner Peace, and the Paradox of Control
Written By: Balraj Persaud
The goal of meditation is not 'anxiety relief' or 'self-mastery'. The goal of meditation is bearing witness to the way(s) in which our awareness is pre-occupied, and then to the way(s) it is determined. In other words, the goal of meditation is self-awareness. (And in yoga, self-awareness is self-transcendence.) For a fuller set of practical questions about meditation practice, see our responses to frequently asked questions on meditation practice.
Meditation as Self-Awareness, not Self-Improvement
The goal of meditation is not to produce a sense of a calm or eliminate your anxiety.
The goal of meditation is not to perfect your mental health, eliminate your trauma, or “purify” your emotional life of all “bad” feelings, including guilt/shame/fear, etc..
The goal of meditation is not to “manifest” whatever material thing—financial freedom, fame, love, enlightenment, etc.—you think will add more weight or sufficiency to your self/image/life and make it impervious to future sources of discomfort, and/or too significant to be ignored.
The goal of meditation is not to transport yourself to some other realm or place outside of experience where you transcend (and thus are no longer subject to) the vicissitudes and demands of inner and outer life.
And, indeed, the goal of meditation is not any kind of “self-mastery”. Indeed, the pursuit of something like “self-mastery” often reinforces the very problem that meditation is intended to subvert.
What meditation is, instead, is a practice of self-awareness: a direct inquiry into how experience is organized before we ever begin to reflect on it.
Meditation and the Personal/Idiosyncratic Pre-Reflective Self
What is the goal of meditation? The goal in meditation is to become directly aware of how your attention is habitually and automatically pre-occupied, and to notice the role that this pre-occupation plays in determining who/what you think you are. Most basically, the goal in meditation is the experience of freedom from these habitual ways of being absorbed by inner/outer life.
We typically think of “self-awareness” in the context of attempting to learn our own personal, idiosyncratic ways of reproducing destructive habits. We typically seek “self-awareness” when we’re attempting to address some difficulty in our life, to reveal our personal unconscious habits that prevent us from attaining what we desire. Indeed, becoming aware of how your attention is habitually and automatically pre-occupied with the world will reveal your addictive ways of interpreting your experience that are producing and re-producing your existing habits of engagement with your inner/outer life (e.g., with things, people, thoughts/feelings, yourself, etc.). But the purpose of meditation is something different. The purpose of meditation is not to identify any specific (destructive) pre-occupation, but is rather to notice the very impulse that characterizes pre-occupation itself: the impulse to self-transcend, to “reach out” or “recoil” (that is, to move beyond where one is)—in all of its manifestations, be they in craving or avoidance, or even the faint/fleeting micro-movements of something like the “starting up” or momentum of a (or the habitual) self that arises even in deep stillness. In meditation, we develop the capacity to notice the ways that our attention is in the grip of (or possessed by) various incarnations of the momentum of pre-personal habit.
Specifically, in meditation we are able to see how our everyday interpretation of the world is a kind of desire-based interpretation, one that is defining reality (i.e., things, people, places, situations, etc.) in terms of our own needs—a fact that is obvious when we consider that we’re only ever really paying attention to what’s relevant to/for ourselves. This basic desire is another non-optional element of our experience, but becomes a “problem”—i.e., the source of suffering/grief—when it is aimed at the pursuit of some incarnation of personal immortality/wholeness. What does this mean?
The background sense of dis-ease/dissatisfaction that characterizes our everyday sense of self strikes us as a kind of personal inadequacy (as in, “there’s something missing in me” or “I’m not good enough”). In order to remedy this personal inadequacy—so we can finally feel “at peace”, never impelled to strive for anything again—we attempt to “fill up” or “clean up” our sense of self with whatever we think will grant us permanent security/peace. This is often more status/power/money/fame—whatever we think will command/demand others’ recognition—or something like perfect mental health or inner “purity” (as in, I am disgusted with myself and want to get rid of all the “bad” in me) or even spiritual enlightenment. Acutely aware of this core vulnerability, we protect the very sense of self—our “identity” or “ego”—that we are attempting to transcend, always running: running away from our own inner discomfort, running towards whatever we think will solidify our ego in the world and add weight to my independent existence, all so that I will matter more, so that I will be secured in and by the world—so that I will be more “real”.
Who decides if my existence carries more weight? Other people. But I want to add more weight to my individual existence so that I don’t have to care about others’ opinions. And yet I need others’ [positive] opinions in order to acquire more weight. So, in order to not care about others’ opinions, I need to care about others’ opinions. And if the weight of my personal existence depends on the assent of other people, I am never “in control” of the weight of my existence. (And we hate not being in control, if only because this lack of control “reminds” me that I don’t matter or that I am not enough—that my independent existence is inherently insecure.)
The point here is not just that we are socially dependent. It is that desire and aversion structure the very way experience shows up before we ever begin reflecting on it. That is why meditation matters: it creates the conditions for the pre-reflective self to be revealed, the level at which experience is already being organized, interpreted, defended, and pushed beyond itself.
The purpose of meditation is not to identify any specific (destructive) pre-occupation, but is rather to notice the very impulse that characterizes pre-occupation itself: the impulse to self-transcend, to “reach out” or “recoil” (that is, to move beyond where one is)—in all of its manifestations/directions, be they in craving or avoidance, or even the faint/fleeting micro-movements of something like the “starting up” or momentum of a (or the habitual) self that arises even in deep stillness.
The Self Beyond One’s Self: What Meditation Ultimately Discloses
The account of meditation above has largely focused on noticing one’s own pre-reflective habits—the ways desire, aversion, and the impulse to self-transcend organize experience before explicit reflection begins. But there is a deeper point that this framing can obscure: the self is not first a private interior that then encounters others and a world. It is, from the beginning, constituted through the world and others that precede it. The body one inhabits, the language one thinks in, the history one was born into, the others whose recognition one has always already needed—none of these were chosen. They are the very “material” the engagement with which a self is made. The self is, from the beginning, already outside itself. Self-awareness, pursued fully, is awareness of this: that what one takes to be one’s own interiority is already woven through with what precedes and exceeds it. In the sense, the self is already outside of oneself—and this is what meditation, pursued fully, eventually discloses.
Meditation reveals something deeper than the personal and idiosyncratic, however. To see the nature of one’s own pre-reflective habits is already to begin to see the conditions out of which they arise—conditions that were never personal to begin with.
Freedom from these habitual ways of being absorbed by inner/outer life does not entail no longer being subject to inner/outer life; your awareness is irrevocably determined by the structural elements of human life—elements that do not conform to your will, such as the capacities/vulnerabilities of embodiment, social, historical, cultural, linguistic factors, etc.—and include the very conditions that have motivated you to want to improve your life (and also the very conditions that have allowed you to read and comprehend this article). These are not background facts about the self; they are, rather the self’s very ground. You did not determine these conditions; these conditions preceded “you”. These conditions are not subject to your will, but rather have given you your will. And because you could never become free of these basic structural elements of experience, “freedom” is not no longer being determined by these elements. Rather, you realize your freedom in becoming aware of the way(s) in which your awareness is always already determined. Or, stated differently, freedom is self-awareness.
Embodiment—the specific body as which each of us exists, with its particular capacities, vulnerabilities, drives, and sensitivities—is the ground of all meaning-making. It is through the body that anything shows up as significant, threatening, desirable, or painful. Language, culture, and history are equally non-optional: they provide the terms in which experience is intelligible, the background against which anything can appear as meaningful at all.
Among these non-optional conditions, the intersubjective dimension deserves particular attention—not because it is more fundamental than embodiment, but because it is the one most easily missed. We habitually treat others as external to ourselves, as people we encounter after the fact of our own already-formed identity. But others are not accidental to who we are. One becomes a person by attuning to the norms, customs, and language of people who precede and exceed any individual will. Others “dwell” in how things appear—in what strikes us as meaningful, threatening, desirable, or shameful—before we are ever aware of their presence.
What meditation practice discloses is that the self is always already involved in a field that exceeds it—most immediately in the body, in the pull of other people’s recognition, and in habits of perception and response that no individual invented. To see this clearly—not intellectually, but directly, as it is happening—is already to stand in a different relationship to it. And a different relationship with experience is a different experience.
The various traditions of meditation and even spirituality name this differently, but the basic point is the same: one is not self-contained and does not self-exist. One belongs to something that exceeds and precedes one’s individual will. In that sense, the “wholeness” yoga points to is not a private inner victory that places one above/beyond one’s determinacies, but a recognition of the field in which one already lives. The practice does not produce a separate self; it clarifies the terms on which the self is already in question. As such, meditation does not produce a separate self that finally stands outside its conditions.
This is not merely a sociological observation. It means that self-awareness, fully pursued, is not only awareness of one’s own personal, idiosyncratic habits, but awareness of the intersubjective field in which those habits were formed and in which they continue to operate. Furthermore, the self that recognizes it does not self-exist has not produced anything new; the very capacity to recognize—attention, awareness, the witnessing function—is itself part of the structure that precedes the individual.
To practice is therefore not to eliminate dependence, desire, or vulnerability, but to become aware of them before becoming consumed/possessed by them (or to do so willingly). The point is not to become invulnerable; it is to discover that what we most want to secure is also what keeps us from seeing the truth of our situation, the latter which includes the unrelenting pursuit of self-security. Meditation bears witness to that movement, and in bearing witness to it, loosens the compulsion to flee oneself.
What remains is not self-mastery, but self-awareness. And self-awareness is not a narrower, more polished self-image; it is the recognition that one’s life is already participation in something larger than the ego’s project of control. In that sense, the self does not disappear, but it is no longer mistaken for a self-enclosed possession. What remains is experience no longer primarily organized around the urgency of self-protection—and all the attending interpretive habits inaugurated by the more primary will to self-secure. This is the self-awareness that is self-transcendence.
The account of meditation above has largely focused on noticing one’s own pre-reflective habits—the ways desire, aversion, and the impulse to self-transcend organize experience before explicit reflection begins. But there is a deeper point that this framing can obscure: the self is not first a private interior that then encounters others and a world. It is, from the beginning, constituted through the world and others that precede it. The body one inhabits, the language one thinks in, the history one was born into, the others whose recognition one has always already needed—none of these were chosen. They are the very “material” the engagement with which a self is made. The self is, from the beginning, already outside itself.
The Logic of Meditation Practice
The benefits of meditation remain hidden to us if we enter into meditation with the intent to fix/perfect ourselves or our inner/outer life. (And this is the context within which meditation is often pursued.) Learning to be aware of this objective should be a core component of all meditation training. Meditation—or any yoga practice, for that matter—pursued in order to remedy some aspect of one’s “self”—to secure/purify one’s identity against the sense of inner lack—will only reinforce the problem of suffering that we were attempting to understand/deconstruct or subvert. Trying to destroy some aspect of our inner life keeps us entrenched in the dichotomy of avoiding x and pursuing y: the more I want to purify myself, the more hypersensitive I am to shame—I shame easily, I shame myself, I shame others, etc.—and I become more and more pre-occupied with shame, with my “self” and what it lacks, and I become more and more avoidant of the things/people/situations that make me “feel” my lack. In other words, the desire to find some kind of permanent security/peace/purity actually reinforces the basic sense of incompleteness that I was trying to eliminate.
And so the specific way you practice meditation is far less relevant than being vigilant about the impulse to fix/eliminate/transcend. Ultimately, any meditation practice must remain vigilant about this very impulse—to fix/eliminate or to be something/somewhere else, to transcend—without, of course, trying to get rid of it. Meditation is ultimately about bearing witness to the ways our awareness is seemingly compelled (or impelled or motivated or absorbed) beyond itself—i.e., bearing witness to the (self-moving) self-transcending character of being. In other words, meditation is ultimately about bearing witness to the very impulse to self-transcend. Among other things, this also means noticing the very impulse to become a something, a wholly self-determining self. And it also includes the tendency to rely on our struggles to keep us locked into self-definition—something to push against. And this of course includes the impulse to acquire even the “positive” benefits of meditation listed above. We want to notice our habitual such patterns: ways of orienting ourselves in relation to something “outside” of ourselves—including how/when they function as means for evading the discomfort of being dis-oriented, so to speak, of being nothing. In yoga, this is the foundation of self-awareness. (Yoga, as it is used here, is not a physical discipline. It is a direct inquiry into the structure of experience itself — into the conditions that precede and exceed the individual will.)
What is yoga? Yoga is not the strategic and permanent destruction of the suffering of our inadequacies; yoga just is what remains once we’ve abandoned the quest to “fill up” ourselves with the world (in order to “clean up” our sense of deficiency). This abandonment occurs as a result of bearing direct witness to the incarnations of the impulse to self-transcend, of desire—to avoid discomfort and to self-protect/aggrandize, to be freed of the constraints of our contingency and dependence, to be made invulnerable to unpredictable sources of discomfort, to be made inerasable: to never again be made to feel invisible, dependent, exposed, anxious, ashamed, unworthy, or unsafe. What remains is a more direct experience of one’s “entire” self—the non-optional dimensions of experiencing; the true dimensions of transcendence. What remains, in other words, is self-awareness.
This begins and ends with no longer fleeing yourself.
Different meditation practices work with this condition in different ways. Focused attention uses a chosen object to steady attention and interrupt habitual wandering; mindfulness of breathing creates a space in which one can notice the mind’s movement without trying to force an outcome; open awareness and related practices let experience show itself without immediately converting it into a project. Metta, generosity, and other active forms of practice do not bear witness in the same passive way, but they still work at the level of the pre-reflective self by loosening rigid habits of perception and response and by shifting the terms on which the self is organized. Again, the basic point remains the same: one is not self-contained and does not self-exist; rather one “belongs”, so to speak, something that exceeds and precedes one’s individual will.
The point is not that meditation is a tool for fixing the self. The point is that meditation makes it more difficult for the desiring self to remain invisible to itself. It reveals the self’s self-transcending movement at the pre-reflective level, before explicit self-interpretation hardens into habit, and that disclosure is what allows the practice to have its effects.
What remains is not self-mastery, but self-awareness. And self-awareness is not a narrower, more polished self-image; it is the recognition that one’s life is already participation in something larger than the ego’s project of control. In that sense, the self does not disappear, but it is no longer mistaken for a self-enclosed possession. What remains is experience no longer primarily organized around the urgency of self-protection—and all the attending interpretive habits inaugurated by the more primary will to self-secure. This is the self-awareness that is self-transcendence.