Hi Christian,
Welcome to the DhO. Thanks for sharing your practice notes!
I hope you understand everything I have written and could give me some thoughts about it. I tried to write as good and clear as possible, but it is sometimes not easy to explain different actions in another language, so please apologize. ;-)
Super-clear. Thanks for your practice with English.
When I sit down I feel the sensations which make out the calmness of sitting down the body, the sensations of cool down, the heartbeat, the heat and the satisfaction to meditate
.
Often there is the question of “what is it?”. I know what is going on, the thought, pleasant, neutral or unpleasant, the following mind state (sometimes also the other way round) but I don’t know what it is (the name, e.g. anger or rapture). So there is thinking about this and sometimes I get carried away for a minute. There is often this kind of “wanting to know”.
Indeed, wanting to know is the mind arising, provoked, uplifted. What is this? Want to know...
If your practice was a hill to climb, that "wanting to know" is the incline. And nibbana, cessation, is the "passing away" slope. So the inhale is often part of a lot of elaborative thought, but at the base of the exhale, how much thought is happening? Often at the base of the exhale, there's not much thought.
Anytime the sensations become less and the whole field of objects calms down. It is like consciousness grasps no longer at any object.
This is useful; the mind is clearly letting go, not grasping, not provoking, not on the incline, not arising.
So I “try” just to be with this “nothing happens” and I try to relax in this situation.
Yes, to me, this is "yes". The mind will even stop grasping this. I think Daniel somewhere has written that there are parts of meditation that are like learning to stabilize the hand on the surface of water without breaking the surface of water. To me, this area ~ where mind is quiet and "nothing happens" and one is " to relax in this situation" -- this is that training of letting this more subtle mind stabilize itself there. The more the mind gets to go here and also let go here (without falling asleep or gratifying itself with myriad elaborations) the more the mind will develop its own natural, stability here, just like a light leaf on water that a frog jumps on: nothing arises, nothing gets provoked, no splashes. (It's so natural that there are splashes and ripples in the beginning and middle of the training 'lifecycle'). From here, too, there is still letting go. There is complete cessation to come yet.
And after a certain time I know that the “movement” comes back. Objects appear and consciousness knows about them. Like the time is over, the entry is closed. ;-) If I try to meditate a certain time further, it is possible that I touch this point again. Of course at this point there is often a kind of expectation what comes next or also a feeling of boredom.
Sometimes if I am at this point where quite nothing happens, there is a very subtle feeling of movement, and then this movement changes into a slight falling or a flying. It is very difficult not to want to stay with this experience and just observe what is there.
These descriptions are very clear to me. The falling and flying sensations are very normal.
Sometimes I think the brain does this flying-falling sensation movement for the thrill of gratification. You've probably had some adrenaline rushes from these. It's okay. The mind will, with exposure to these movements, find nothing reliably stable or reliably useful here and one day will drop these, too. (These can be extraordinary moments though and it's okay if something spectacular happens here and you spend a good while chasing that. That would be natural. But for the cessation
of which people have associated withpaths, the mind moves towards letting go everything that comes up (without falling asleep or comparing), first appreciating the ceasing side of all phenomena, then just letting the wakeful ceasing occur, the gradual petering out of all mental objects arising (thoughts, feelings, sensations).
And in this “dream” the experience of “wanting SE” was very clear, I hoped that this whole thing would finally explode. But it did not. ;-)
It's such a good idea to set intention before meditation. So one can just say at the outset, "Mind, we can do a lot of things, but in this training for today, we're training in letting go, we're training to see cessation, we're training to let you stop for a bit. There'll be other times when we can check out the falling-flying sensations, but today, this sit is for seeing the cessation of everything, being unafraid to let go, to need not wanting, to need not flying-feeling, to need not falling-feeling, inhale will happen on its own when it needs to. Today, we're just rolling down the hill to a full stop. The exhale, the exhale, the exhale. Soft, soft, subtle..."
Thank you, Christian.
edits for spelling, grammar