Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘Enlightened emotional responses do not just happen accidently. They need to be cultivated through mental disciplines in order to make their spontaneous emergence at the right time more and more likely. Buddhist meditations that focus the mind on compassion or gratitude or sympathetic joy serve to make responses of compassion, thankfulness, and joy more prominent in the mental repertoire of the practitioner and therefore more readily available to everyday experience. The hope is that over time they become a second nature, well-honed tendencies of character.

Enlightened habituation of this kind is important because the goal of meditative practice is not always to be meditating. It is, rather, to have so integrated the content of the meditation into one’s being that the concepts themselves need not be conceived explicitly in every situation. In this way of imagining the meditative person, he or she is able to respond to situations in the world by way of the meditative wisdom, now embodied and instinctually available, without needing to step back from every one of them in order to think critically. Spontaneity and simplicity are among the long-term goals of reflective meditation and are achieved when reflective values have become instinctual and embodied at the level of immediate experience.’ (The Six Perfections)