I've begun to do a practice based upon the instructions in the
Anapanasati Sutta. If you look at the Guided Meditation in
Noble Strategy, that's basically the technique I'm using, plus my intuition/good judgment.
This is not extremely different from the practice I ordinarily do, but the focus is different enough that I'm not 100% sure how to interpret the results.
Ian And, if you're reading, I wouldn't mind hearing your feedback. You too,
Nikolai. Or anyone else who is used to doing jhana the way the Old Man prescribed.
I did this for 45 minutes right now. For the first 30 minutes of this, I'm basically just going through the body, piece by piece, feeling the breath in each part of the body, until I get the whole body breathing, i.e., every breath is being registered in the body as a whole, in this kind of soft-focus, medium-angle impression of the body. The body is pretty calm at this point, so areas of tension - like in the shoulders - are sticking out. To the extent that I can release tension, I do. After awhile, it becomes apparent that some of these areas have injuries, and I'm only going to make them so relaxed, so I stop making a project out of that, and just return to that medium-sized soft focus on the body.
So this is about 30 or 35 minutes into the session. I don't really think I'm in any state right now, but I do feel relaxed. Up until this point, I had been directing myself: "Okay, the attention moves here now ... now here ... now I release this ..." etc. But since the body is really still at this point, those sorts of thoughts in my head are getting very loud. I make an attempt to stop them, but it doesn't work. Lotta running commentary.
So I take a different approach. I focus back on the body as a whole, but now I'm watching the interplay between thinking and the sensations in the body. And what I begin to perceive is that certain patterns of thought are causing or are being followed by contractions or tensions in the body, especially in the shoulders and arms. This is happening on a very subtle level, but things are pretty still now, so it's really showing up. So it kind of occurs to me in this directly perceived way, "Oh, I can go deeper, because every time the thoughts stop, even for a little bit, the breathing body gets even more still than this."
At this point, the whole body starts vibrating and feeling like it's lifting off the ground. (I was doing this laying on the floor, which really helps in terms of releasing tension.) "Cool!" I think, which is followed by a tension down one side of the body, which stops the vibrating and levitating, which is experienced as dukkha, albeit on a microscopic scale, which results in the thought ceasing, which results in the relaxation and concentration deepening, which results in even more emphatic vibrations, a sense of the world dropping away, a sense of the body as a vibrating energy field in and for itself.
At this point the lightshow behind my eyes is so strong, I'm nearly convinced my eyes are open, but they're in fact closed, and it's only like I can see through them. It was cool.
I wanted to go longer, but there was a distraction at that point which rudely jerked me out of my meditaiton which I will make sure doesn't happen again in the future.
The interesting part of this session for me wasn't so much which state I got into or didn't get into. What was really interesting was seeing, directly, in real-time, on a microscopic level, how dukkha was fabricated. The mind was focused on the body. The body was very still. So it was easy to see whenever the mind decided to toss something up, no matter how small, to shatter that stillness. As the meditation became more and more refined, it was easier to see it happening on more subtle levels. This in turn clued me in, "Ah, yes, there is an even more refined state I can get to, so long as I cease this more subtle degree of fabrication." And then the body would dislocate from the world even more, become its own thing even more, expand, distort, whatever. And so long as I didn't do much with that weirdness, but just kind of kept an eye on the mind and what it was doing, things were pretty good.
And if you can cause dukkha to cease during meditation on that kind of nuts and bolts level, theoretically you should be able to do it when you're not meditating, albeit with a lot more practice.
Thoughts?