Bestowal

 After group meditation tonight, I was thinking about the discussion we had around thoughts being somehow beyond ''good and bad', 'true' and 'mistaken'. From a perspective of absolute mind, there is no such thing as a truly 'mistaken' thought, because all thoughts are in the moment: they are not interacting with past or future thoughts, so there is nothing to compare them to. Have you ever had a situation where you were so convinced that something was 'true', only to later realize that there is some key evidence somewhere that renders it untrue? It's not that 'true' became 'untrue'. It's that you once had a thought of something being true, and then the conditions changed where a new thought arose to say, 'this is not true'. In fact, true and untrue simply don't arise in the pure thought itself. It's only in comparing thoughts that we develop these distinctions of true and not true thought.
    It reminds me of the long-standing debate about whether a person is esteemed for their own sake or for the sake of the one who is esteeming the other. Is it an actual person who determines whether they are 'good or bad' to someone else? Actually, people don't affect our judgments, since the judgments of what are good and bad come from our own mind as "esteemers" (or as beholders). Hence, there is an expression: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". More often than not, one's judgments about others are based on comparison with memories or older thoughts. Have I ever made a judgment over something I see after meditation? Well, what I notice during longer retreats is that the mind is less prone to making judgments, because it is simply in the moment, and not comparing the current thought to a memory or a previous one. As soon as I do compare thoughts over time or string them together, I 'story' the experiences I am having, by populating my mind with connections between one phenomena and another. Once the mind is calm and clear, there is not even a sense of needing to connect one thought to another. It's a bit strange, but it seems that only a very agitated mind is in the habit of putting thoughts together and making judgments around those thoughts.
    But to go back to the question, from the perspective of true nature of mind, is there really a 'good' or 'bad' thought? It s only when one is caught up in distinctions across different thought that there is even a perceived necessity of preferring one thought to the other. But in doing this, we create castles in the sand, because all thoughts are continually changing. Imagine trying to perfect a sandcastle! That is what we do when we try to shape our awareness according to the thoughts we tend to like the most.