This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline.
This session continues the week’s exploration of conditions and character, and Linda opens with a concept from behavioral ethics that has stayed with her: ethical fading. It’s the name researchers give to what happens when the ethical dimensions of a situation quietly disappear from view — not because we’ve decided to be unethical, but because something else has moved to the foreground.
When Ethics Fade From View
Winning. Being right. Protecting our image. Achieving a goal. When any of these becomes the dominant focus, the ethical questions — who might be hurt, what do I actually value, what kind of person am I being right now — tend to slip out of frame. They don’t vanish dramatically. They just fade. And we often don’t notice they’re gone until later, if at all.
Linda finds a parallel here with certain approaches to meditation. When practice becomes narrowly focused on one thing — on concentration, on the present moment only — it can produce a similar narrowing of view. Conditions disappear. Complexity disappears. And it becomes easier to settle into fixed ideas about people’s character, including our own.
Two Portraits
Linda brings two historical figures into the conversation as illustrations — Marilyn Monroe and Mother Teresa — chosen precisely because they resist the single-story treatment.
Monroe grew up in poverty and foster care, and those conditions shaped her deeply. She was a vocal supporter of causes that carried real social risk at the time, including gay rights and the right to be communist during the McCarthy era. And yet what most of us carry in our collective memory is an image, not a person. Character has replaced conditions.
Mother Teresa’s story runs in the other direction. In recent years she has been the subject of serious criticism. Linda noticed her own mind wanting to rewrite the whole story in response — to collapse everything into a new single verdict. And yet the reality before, during, and after the criticism remained complex: a woman who lived among the poorest people in society, who began a movement, who suffered greatly from her calling. Neither saint nor fraud, but a person shaped by conditions that themselves keep changing.
When conditions disappear, Linda observes, character takes over. One word. One image. The whole person reduced.
Conditionality Is Not an Excuse
She’s careful here, because this is where the teaching can be misread. Understanding conditions is not a way of dissolving responsibility. It’s not a way of saying, that’s just how I am when things get difficult, or those were the conditions, I couldn’t help it. That, Linda suggests, is actually another form of ethical fading — using conditionality as a way to avoid seeing clearly.
The direction of the teaching is the opposite: to see more, not less. To widen the lens rather than narrow it. Conditions are not fixed, which means habits are not fixed, which means we can participate in changing them. And every moment of honest reflection, every act of kindness, every choice to respond rather than react — these become part of the conditions being created going forward.
Conditionality, as Linda closes, is both our responsibility and our freedom.
Living With It Personally
She brings it home through her own life. Managing double anxiety — an upcoming medical procedure and a home project — she noticed the pull toward building villain characters: the unresponsive contractor, the doctor she doesn’t quite trust. And she noticed something new: it didn’t feel good to grow those stories. The inclination was fading. That, she says, made her genuinely happy.
Not because the anxiety disappeared. Seeing conditions clearly didn’t remove it. But it gave her somewhere to stand within it. A way to attend to her own distress with a little more kindness, and to respond to others with a little more care.
