Steph: by all means, join in!
Julian: Thanks so much, Shinzen Young is a meditation monster, those pdfs are amazing! He also seems to combine concentration with insight in most of the techniques that he describes, incredible - and probably a lot more pleasant than the practice of dry vipassana/pure noting. Especially the pdf 'Experiences Associated with Meditating on the Thought Process' is amazing in explaining a lot of the things being talked about here. It would be great if someone was to test the approach/technique that he describes there.
Can you elaborate on this more? What do you mean by "smaller sensations"? I'm guessing you mean more than the gross division of, for example, verbal thoughts into words? Right now I can see different properties of a thought (tone, voice, subtlety, etc.) but each thought seems pretty solid in and of itself.
Not quite. Its similar to listening to sound and realizing that it is possible to be aware of many parts of that sound - instead of a sound, there are 20 flickers of sound (all of them arising and passing away, hence flickering) one after another that make up that sound. In the same way, and as with all other senses, thoughts are also observable many times throughout their arising - as in, it is possible to be aware of the thought many times when its playing out. And when this is done (insight on thought), there is no knowledge of the overall thought, there is only knowledge/awareness of the component parts one after another, moment-to-moment. (same as, for example, the visual field flickering when seeing a series of mental images)
It is hard to say if those sensations (thought and location) are separate or now. At this moment it feels similar to the way hearing works, the direction sound is coming from is indistinguishable from the sound itself. Sometimes, though, it seems like the area I'm focusing on is affecting where thoughts show up. This is definitely true when I generate a thought intentionally but maybe sometimes for 'natural' thoughts.
Yeah, its the same for me now that I looked (thanks again). But as soon as I look for the location, there is only that to the exclusion of the thought and then looking at the thought there is no location, even though the location is somehow implicit.
When observing a thoughts I am aware of two distinct levels (and now of course, I'm aware of a third one). One level is the thought itself. Separate from that is the level where the thought is perceived. Of course this second level, the observer, is also made up of thoughts but for this discussion we look at them as two completely different things. At the base thought level thoughts appear and pass away. The observer sees thoughts as sometimes having a voice in which case it's exactly like hearing. Sometimes having no voice but having words, so you can think of this as whispering but really the property of voice is not present. Last, some thoughts or parts of some thoughts will not have words but the observer still sees the meaning as words, maybe you can think of this as telepathy but inside just one mind emoticon I'm not sure how the observer sees that meaning as the experience itself is just jumbled except for a meaning that pops out of it. Maybe it's more like completing someone else's sentence.
Thats amazing!
The feelings of witnessing is very fuzzy and hard to point at. It makes it hard to actually investigate the sensation since I'm not sure where to look. It's kind of like trying to explore the feeling of space, it mostly feels spacious and that's about it. In the same way the sensation of someone observing is there but it still feels very vague. When trying to locate it I keep getting back towards my heart-center or sometimes my head.
This is from the thread that Julian was linking to:
I'd like to go back to the original question: "Can awareness be a focus of inquiry?"
From a very stripped down point of view that is at once practical and very ultimate at once, all sensations are aware where they are. There is no separate observer, though the sense of one is contrived by a very complex process of layers of content, inference, habit, poor perception, false assumption, and in general poor perception of the true nature of one's sensate reality, and investigating that is direct wisdom practice.
Thus, investigation of "awareness" yields the following: one finds only sensations, and the more one looks, the more one finds that all the things that were pretending to be an observer, attention, consciousness, awareness, and the like were merely transient, ephemeral, implied by habitual patterns of association, and not the true nature of things. Even the looking is just a causal, transient process, not self, not other, part of a naturally unfolding field of experience that never needed to nor did contain any experiencer apart from that which is experienced.
Thus, taking on "awareness" or similar objects, such as "investigation" or "attention" or "consciousness" as object takes on an illusion to try to see through that illusion, and show it to be just a trick of smoke and mirrors, something that never actually was, and all that is there is the self-luminous flickering sense-field.
Daniel However strange it may be, the sense of self does seem to reside as physical sensations somewhere in the body (at the moment for me its in the back of the skull), but as it is something that can be objectified and noticed it is not a/the self. The easiest way to see this is to ask yourself 'Who am I' and watch where the question takes the focus - there will be a spot that appears to respond to that question, even thought it can't obviously be the right answer.
I think that you already kind of got this one (no-self) on retreat (
Got back into state where sounds arise and pass away without "self"-ing.), this is the way that all experience is (it is not a state, that is how things are moment-to-moment) - it all happens of its own accord, to no one. There is just the experience. Why that does not prevent it from being experienced gets explained in a similar fashion, thought insight practice, at a later time (and is actually explained in Daniel's response which I copied from Julian's link).
Keep the updates coming :-)