Piers Mackeown:
My anapanasati is pants. I can rarely hold it together for a minute. In a whole hour, the majority is spent rolling in thought.
When people talk about the jhanas, is it any wonder that I feel it's just totally out of my league?
Christ, I can't even get access concentration.
Piers.
Hey Piers,
Flashback! A lot of what you talked about, I went through myself. I would follow Tarin's advice to take up noting. i switched to noting from body sweeping (I was a Goenka follower for 9 years) and within a short time, stream entry was attained.
And account of the 10 day course where it happened: http://kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/page/An+account+of+stream+entry
I didn't follow instructions but did my own thing in order to get it done. Therefore I 100% back Tarin's advice if you want to progress quickly to stream entry.
For you comment above, have you tried giving your mind "more to do", so that it does not wander?
One way, which I believe could help yogis stay with the breath 24/7, would be to not allow the mind to wander off and get sidetracked by overloading the mind with enough work to do that it has no space to wander and get distracted. When we observe an object of concentration like the breath, I speculate that we don’t often lend a full 100% of our attention to that object. Perhaps 60% on the object and 40% caught up in pleasant sensations, a thought of an non-existent future or past, lost in some fantasy or story or distracted by sounds or bodily discomfort. The mind is giving fuel to the strong tendency to proliferate stories, mental reactions, judgments, fantasies, memories and just plain old mental masturbation.
So, what if you gave the mind no fuel to do that? What about giving that fuel to an “extra” job for the mind to do. When you observe the incoming and outgoing breath, you sense its touch at the entrance at the nostrils and above the upper lip. Along with this awareness, you could also become aware of the very act of perceiving the breath. That is, you are aware of the object, the breath as it goes in and out naturally, but you are also aware that that the mind is perceiving the breath. Try it! It actually works wonders in maintaining the mind in one spot and it is then able to truly pay 100% attention to the object.
"When the meditator breathes in a long breath, he comprehends that he is breathing in a long breath; and when he is breathing out a long breath, he comprehends that he is breathing out a long breath." The Buddha, The anapanasati suttaIn the quote above, the Buddha advised to "comprehend" when one is breathing in and when one is breathing out. If the yogi is just aware of the touch of breath but does not pay closer attention to comprehend how it comes in and goes out, the mind is left with a lot of space to start wandering and getting distracted. And this is what I mean when I say you could pay attention to the very act of perceiving the process of breathing in and out. This gives the mind more to do and less space to get distracted and thus will hone your concentration skills to greater heights. The more you do this, the more concentrated you get and you may possibly reach and access the jhanic territory (jhanas=mental absorptions).
This is some advice Tarin had for soemone else, which wasn't related to anapanasati. But in my opinion it can be used to recitfy the wandering, mental mastibating mind.
"What I mean by 'the sense of seeing' is, literally, what it is to experience seeing directly; to perceive is to be engaged in a lively activity and is what is meant by paying attention. Yet, such attention is likely to tend toward proliferating stories and fabrications, from persistent reflection and mental commentary on one hand (when concentration is weak and/or scattered) to outright hallucination on the other (when concentration is powerful and/or focused). Those proliferations are to be avoided. How may these proliferations be avoided? By otherwise engaging the proliferating tendency. How may the proliferating tendency be otherwise engaged? By applying the mind further. To what further apply the mind? To the apprehension (of more) of what is happening. What more is happening (that is not yet engaged)? The apprehension of (the apprehension of) perception itself.
To apprehend perception directly is necessarily also to apprehend that apprehension is occurring, and to experience in such a manner is to experience cleanly and clearly, entirely engagedly and encompassedly, incuding the bodily sense of such experience. To see not just what the eye sees but what it is to see is therefore to see cleanly and clearly, entirely engagedly and encompassedly, including the bodily sense of such seeing. Seeing in this manner engages the energies which otherwise fuel the proliferating tendency, and so avoids such proliferation. Further, experiencing seeing as a bodily sense leads to deeper insight into what the body is, and what perceiving is." TarinIf you are interested I wrote what one could do on a Goenka courses to up the odds of getting stream entry here:
http://thehamiltonproject.blogspot.com/2010/11/going-for-stream-entry-on-goenka-10-day.html
But seeing as you seem open to trying a different technique, plenty of yogis have made the switch from sweeping to noting and made fast progress to stream entry.
Hope this helps,
Nick