| | Hmm... after lots more inspection of this tension and my recent practice, I realize that I've spent quite a lot of time, since near the beginning of my practice (on and off since then) in a bizarre and subtle trap, I don't know if others have found themselves here too.
So, what I've spent a pretty good amount of time doing is this: by trying to pay attention to everything at once, what I've actually been doing is widening the fabricated "edge" of attention. An image might help, the way I was conceiving of attention was that it was a sort of rubber band, you could push it outwards and thus pay attention to stuff everywhere or you could let it fall back inwards on its own. The actual rubber band was some kind of affective thing which I was pushing out so that it layered on top of everything, so that "i" was inhabiting everywhere at once.
When I did this, (alot of the time for over a year) I actually had little idea what the physical sensations occurring were. Instead it was just as if I was staring at this affective fabricated representation of the abstract idea "awareness." I finally realized this after putting about a million puzzle pieces together, "data" i collected based on how felicitous I was depending on what I was doing, the bit in the satipathana sutta on the second frame of reference... it turns out I didn't actually know what sensations I was experiencing... this is quite a bizarre trap, I don't know if others have had this or can even understand what I am talking about, as this could be based on a really peculiar and unique delusion. Oh well, I assume that the progress I have made was from actually knowing all the individual sensations rather than paying attention to this idea "sensations" and hopefully I can speed up progress by greatly increasing the proportion of time I am actually paying attention to actual sensations. |