tarin greco:
when sensations appear in quick succession so quickly that you cannot keep up in verbally noting them silently (as thoughts of words), let alone in noting them aloud, i recommend either noting with repetitions of one syllable (such as 'dat) or 'hitting with the mind' (letting it make whatever 'sound' it makes, if it makes any). how many things (or pulses) can you note in one second? how fast does it get? 4 things a second? 6? 10?
Hmm, from my perspective, sensations usually don't appear as discrete pulses that I could count. Noting practice instructions that I have encountered usually sound as if experience were a sequence of pointlike sensations evolving in time: the practice instruction is to label each point as it goes by. My sensations appear more like (segments of) continuous lines, and I usually perceive many of them at any given moment unless I explicitly force my mind to focus on only one of them (eg., the breath). I haven't explicitly tried to focus on any single sensation to the exclusion of others because I thought I wasn't supposed to while practicing vipassana (as opposed to doing concentration practices). Now that I think about it, perhaps I was wrong - perhaps I should focus on only one sensation and study it as intensely as possible, only noting other sensations when they distract me from my chosen object?
What I've done lately is more like trying to be as intensely aware as I can of everything that I'm experiencing, which usually involves many different 'lines' occurring simultaneously, or at least alternating so fast that they appear simultaneous. Occasionally one 'line' will dominate for at least a moment (for example, if I suddenly hear a loud sound), but usually I will at least feel some bodily sensations and the breath at the same time. This seems to work well at least in the sense that I can do this without being distracted from my practice (as in daydreaming) for long periods of time. I just noticed today that I can easily do this while walking outside, perhaps even easier than sitting down, as there are so many more sensations to try to perceive (and hence even less time and space to get distracted by content). Does that qualify as the walking meditation you recommended that I incorporate into my sitting practice, or should walking meditation be performed in a more controlled environment (eg., walking back and forth in my flat)?
I think I may also have experienced some faint vibrations while practicing (on the cushion) like this the other night. Unfortunately my memory is a bit vague, as I didn't have a chance to write any details down before now, but I remember experiencing faint fluctuations in my breath and some other bodily sensations. The fluctuations were quite slow, perhaps around 2 Hz or so. As I tried to perceive more and more of everything, I felt a very subtle nausea and a kind of pressure in my head, as if I was going to have a migraine if I continued. (Fortunately, I didn't!)
I said above that sensations appear like fairly continuous objects, by which I meant that they seem to have infinite detail: I can just zoom in further and see more detail, but it's still continuous rather than discrete pulses. While writing this post just now, I tried to attend carefully to my breath to see if I could at least give you an estimate of "how many details per second" I can perceive or something like that. I noticed that there does seem to be a very subtle fluctuation in the continuity of the breath. The fluctuation has a frequency of about 2-3 Hz. The sensation still seemed continuous, but - maybe it's just my imagination, and I'm seeing what I want to see (or, erm, feeling what I want to feel) - but for a moment it did seem made up of short sensations, each with a beginning and an end, but overlapping to create the appearance of a single continuous but fluctuating.
So how does this sound? Should I do what I've been doing lately, trying to perceive as much of everything as I can, or should I try to focus on one sensation and 'dissect' it as carefully as possible? (Or is either approach fine?) Or something completely different?
Kristian