| | Well, I will give you an account from last night. I usually tend to meditate late at night before bed and very occasionally when I wake up in the morning. During the day I often mean to but that simply doesn't happen. This is especially the case now because for this month I'm living at home with my parents and late at night is one of the only time when there's absolute quiet in the house. At around 3:20 am last night I sat down cross-legged on top of my bed, with two pillows sort of wedged behind my back to provide lower back support. I then meditated until I opened my eyes and looked over at the clock and it read 4:30. My object of concentration this time was the koan Mu, since I've been studying Zen lately and I admire its simplicity and directness. So, I simply repeated Mu and focused on the beginning, middle, and end of my thinking it each time I repeated it, the pace of which tended to roughly mirror the pace of my breath. I also tried to focus on the non-meaning, the greater clarity of mind, that Mu affords and refocus every time my mind began to drift into discursive thought. Much of this discursive thought centered around doubts, such as if I was meditating on the koan as I should be and if koan meditation is really appropriate for me. Nevertheless I continued, and for most of the time my attention remained pretty calmly upon Mu, though of course it vacillated, and each of these vacillations was also noted. I noted how each recitation of Mu has either a visual image or a sound associated with it and imagined/reproduced in my mind, so I think I see that I am not experiencing Mu itself but rather a facsimile of it in each case. I also observe the transitoriness of Mu, that each time it appears when it's born in my mind, gradually changes, and vanishes, before I renew it again. I understand the intellectual grounds of what I'm supposed to understand very well, that Mu is an expression of my buddha-nature and shares the same characteristics as everything, but the experience will be something utterly different and more important. I also wondered if my noting practice is good enough if on occasion my mind wanders enough that I only realize it's wandered after I'm back and concentrating again after a minute or two. I don't know if it's because of my practice or because I manufactured it in my mind, but I noted as well what I can only describe as a few sudden energy spikes. My body suddenly began to shake and I felt like I had electricity shooting through my entire body, and then the feeling would subside back into calm after probably 5 minutes, I don't know exactly how long. I often prefer to meditate with my eyes closed because no matter my object of meditation my eyes tend to wander slightly to objects within their field of vision, which takes the focus intermittently off of my object of concentration. However, tonight I spent most of the session with my eyes hooded and half-open because it was dark in my room. As far as my body posture is concerned, I frequently noticed I had to correct and straighten my posture once I began to slacken it as I relaxed into my object of concentration. I notice oftentimes, this time as well, that I feel what I can only describe as a reluctance to stop once I've been meditating successfully. Last night I knew I had to stop after not too long because I had a graduate record exam to take in the early afternoon. It's strange because it's not as if the fundamental restlessness that I experience necessarily stops during this time, but I have a weird feeling that I'm making some kind of progress and that part of me wants to bear down and endure, grateful for the opportunity to express itself now that I've overcome the sloth and torpor that I almost always have to confront to some extent or another. I do notice that meditation with that sort of object, like koan meditation, helps my mind stay more one-pointed than vipassana, simply because my mind becomes tired easily with the effort of following such a....gentle object. My mind tends to be clever in ways of distracting me and it helps if I have an engaging object of meditation.
For a strange example of how I consider this during the day, I often attempt to meditate in the shower and randomly throughout the day, and while silently reciting Mu I observe the water coming out of the shower head, the water itself, the shower, the water hitting the curtain, the water flowing over my hand held in front of my face, and I see that I'm making the intellectual realization of oneness but that a suffering exists from seeing at once that all my intellectual realizations are nothing substantive and that I'm still so far from the real truth, from the real experience.
I should add that, while I don't usually change my object of meditation during a particular meditation session, I do sometimes experiment with different objects, like this time. I have tried Shikantaza and I also admire its simplicity, but I find I still drift a bit much to prefer that.
Also, meditation sessions like the one I've just describe come from thinking I should maybe take a break from seeking jhana actively. When I consciously decide to cultivate jhana I tend to desire it too much, and the desire manifests more and more subtly as I try to sweep it away. If you're correct and I'm a more insight oriented individual, then maybe jhana isn't something I intuitively approach and so would be more difficult for me.
Does this help? |