This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline.
This morning’s session continues the week’s exploration of right intention on the Eightfold Path. Linda opens with an alternative translation — one that shifts the whole feel of this path factor — and from there the talk moves through empathy, creativity, songwriting, and the gap between what we can imagine and what conditions can actually hold.
Multiple translations, multiple doors
In the Eightfold Path, “right” means skillful, appropriate, useful — not morally correct in some fixed sense. And right intention itself carries several traditional translations: right thought, right resolve, right intention. Each one opens a slightly different door.
Today Linda draws on Stephen Batchelor’s rendering of the Pali word sankapa as imagination. And that shift — from intention to imagination — immediately loosens something. Instead of asking whether we have the right intentions, or working to correct the ones we don’t, we can begin to imagine: the kind of person we want to become, the kind of world we want to participate in.
It’s less about control. More about exploration.
One meditation at a concert
The example Linda brings is one she’s used before, and it lands every time. She attended a concert, and the next day in meditation, a figure surfaced in her mind: an elderly man in a wheelchair she’d barely noticed at the time. He hadn’t been central to her experience. But in the quiet of meditation, she found herself imagining what his evening might have been like — how he’d arrived, where he’d sat, what the music might have meant to him.
The imagining was probably inaccurate. But what surprised her was what came from it: a genuine sense of connection with someone she’d never spoken to. And beyond that, a heightened sensitivity to accessibility — in music venues, on walking trails, in parking lots — a new awareness of different bodies moving through this world.
That felt like an ethical direction. A direction she wanted to keep moving in.
This is what imagination can do in meditation. Not fantasy, not idealization — but a genuine widening of perspective. We often need to imagine ourselves into another person’s situation in order to care, even a little. Excluding thinking and imagining from meditation, Linda suggests, risks excluding a deeply human capacity that practice can quietly develop.
Imagination needs grounding
Linda holds the other side honestly. She knows from her own life — from singing, songwriting, and the as-yet-unrealized folk harmony trio — that not everything we can imagine can be created. Writer’s block is real. Friends have limited time. Enthusiasm doesn’t automatically translate into skill.
The violin solos she’s imagined in meditation remain mostly imagined.
But the imagining still plays a role. It opens possibilities, even if those possibilities need to be shaped by actual conditions. And Linda has developed a kind of inner check: a felt sense of when she’s reaching past her fingertips, past what she can actually hold. When that happens, she asks herself: what can I hold now? What might I be able to hold later?
This is the balance she sees emerging — imagination can inspire intention, but conditions determine what’s possible. If we imagine too far beyond what we can support, we tend to end up disappointed or self-critical. If we don’t imagine at all, we miss what the mind is quietly reaching toward.
Less about getting it right
What Linda is describing is a different relationship to this path factor altogether. Right intention, understood through imagination, becomes less about correcting ourselves and more about exploring the shape of our lives — how we envision things, what we’re reaching toward, what creativity and curiosity can reveal when we let them into the meditation.
It’s one of the more uplifting path factors when approached this way. And it works with all the others — none of them stand alone — but in isolation, there’s something genuinely enlivening about it. The dry material, as Linda puts it, gets a little more creative air.
