| | It depends on what your goal is. If you want to become more familiar with pure concentration, then go ahead and focus on solidifying Mind and Body, the first vipassana jhana, into the first shamatha jhana by refusing to look at the constituent sensations that make up the jhana. Devote your effort to focusing on pleasurable sensation without investigating it or seeing anything resembling vibrations.
If you want to do insight practice, then cultivate the first jhana as long as you like, and then start investigating it and looking for impermanence in the sensations. Watch the sensations closely, NOT becoming embedded in them or "one" with the meditation object. Rather, watch them like a hawk, being dispassionate and uninterested in whether or not they're pleasurable, and try to break them down and see what the sensations are made of. This will take you past Mind and Body and into the following insight stages.
The decision is yours. If you aren't a dark night yogi, it can be really prudent to become familiar with concentration before you get yourself into the dark night, because concentrating is hard in the dark night. Previous experience with shamatha is really helpful there. But if you've already had A&P stuff, it may be too difficult to get your concentration strong enough to do shamatha until after stream entry.
Just so you know, any time that you want to do insight practice, you can always note. The only time I wouldn't recommend noting is if the mind is so bound up in hindrances that it's absolutely impossible, regardless of how much effort you're using, to actually accomplish any noting. I'm talking a thirty minute sit where, despite maximum unrelenting effort, you can't get more than 5 minutes of mindful observation of sensations. If you just can't do the noting, then go ahead and practice concentration until you can get enough concentration to do the vipassana practice. |