Andy Hansen:
From my last mail, I have focused more on the experience of the sensation rather than just dissecting the sensation into smaller sensations. This put me into a more calm and focused state, while fighting what seems to be a dark night. However, I have a couple of questions, which I could not find an answer to in previous threads:
1) When I meditate, I found that I now can put my body (and some of the mind) to almost sleeping, while still being fully conscious. This produces a state in which there is little sense of the body. What remains is the breath, and momentarily the sense of there being a physical presence and also the breath disappears. Is this meditation a wrong tack or should I train this even more? Obviously, there is not much to note besides the breath, when the body sleeps, so should I bring the body back to a more awake state in order to experience sensations?
whether or not you bring the body back to a more awake state, you should attend to the sensations which do occur (sensations of the breath, sensations of the body, sensations of the mind, whatever) intently, not missing a moment of their occurrence.
Andy Hansen:
2) I have been wondering how hard I am really concentrating. I have been using count of outbreaths to 10 as a measure of being concentrated. However, I discovered that I can watch a soccer game and listen to the commentaries while counting outbreaths to 10 over and over. I can hardly be very absorbed in my breath while watching a soccer game, can I?
here's an idea: as you're doing your normal (first-layer) count, try also counting another layer - from 1 to 10 quickly in the same time as it takes you count each unit of 1, 2, 3 (so that you are counting
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10,
2-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10,
3-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 ... ). with these two count-cycles going at the same time, see how much soccer you can watch and commentary you can listen to then.
tarin