Meditation without agency or choice is not in line with what the Buddha taught.
"I don’t know how many times I’ve run into people who say that they’ve
learned from their meditation that there is no agency, there is no
choice. There are meditation methods that try to drive choice
underground: You get to the point where you deny that you have choice,
that you’re simply there on the receiving end of what happened from the
past. But that’s not in line with what the Buddha taught. He said that
if you think that the present moment is totally determined by the past,
you have no freedom at all. If whatever you do is determined by the
past, you have no choice as to kill or not to kill, to steal or not to
steal. It would be a meaningless life. There would be no meaning in the
path.
And, he said, it would leave you unprotected and
bewildered. “Unprotected” in the sense that you wouldn’t have any way of
arguing against your urges to do something unskillful. And “bewildered”
because you’d say, “What did I do in the past that made me compelled me to do this?” Because you’re denied the chance to look into your motivations in the present moment.
But
when you realize that what you’re doing right now is the important part
of kamma, and that you’re free to do something skillful or not, then
you can look into your impulses right now that would try to get you to
do something unskillful, and you can say, “I don’t have to follow these.”
You can pry into them, look into them, see what’s their allure. And
then you can compare the allure with the drawbacks, gain a sense of
where the compulsion came from, and realize you don’t have to give into
it. That’s when you escape."
~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Generosity of Spirit"
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