What are you afraid of?
This is the question I’ve been sitting with when the urge/drive to meditate, be mindful, concentrate, or do otherwise classically ‘meditative’ practices comes up.
And it is pretty fascinating what information follows.
This is a hot take for me to speak so generally, but I don’t think meditators really want liberation. We really want a sense of security over our lives. That security is being packaged as awareness, awakening. it supposes that our individual chaotic worlds will become manageable once we are aware enough or mindful enough of nonduality.
This has to be a myth though. Awakening, mindfulness, non-duality, are all at best approximations of what we are calling truth. Each is an inherently static idea. But life is dynamic, ungraspable and uncaring of all our efforts to conceptualize it. Life will take us into the next tragedy, ecstasy, loss and boredom whether we are aware or not.
How do we reach liberation then? The question presumes that we will still be there observing it all when ‘liberation’ is reached. Liberation means liberation from the questioner, so who be there to observe?