Practice is going well but this question keeps recurring so here goes.

I experience the annica of every sensation and thought - they arise and pass away and I observe then doing that. They are there, then they are gone, something else comes, is observed and is gone.

So the question might be naive like the heading.

How does making a resolve before sitting work?

I make the resolve, then without continuing to make it, I sit with bare awareness of phenomena arising and passing. So where is the resolve now ? How is it having an effect? - it has arisen and passed like all phenomena. Okay, it is in the memory stores, which keep renewing themselves, but so is a lot of other stuff that is not relevant.

I've been quite fascinated by this ever since I noticed that "resolving" (I didn't call it that) to actually, really and unhesitantly get up when I wake up in the morning when I was falling asleep was unexplainably effective.

Since then I've visited the question several times and this is what I've come up with so far:

NOTE: There are probably a thousand and one explanations of this on the internet. Might I suggest that you search for "auto-suggestion"?

There are many ways to go about explaining this. One is that you are tapping into a lower-function wordless store of information in your brain. You leave a little guiding note for yourself, a note that will be "read" whenever higher functions start to lack information about a certain aspect of your experience. And that aspect might be the meaning of the current situation.

For the geeks (guilty!) I prefer to phrase this as re-programming small parts of the loops that run in the operating system of the brain. Your brain has many programs that runs inside and on top of this operating system and those are the quite obvious behaviors and such that we have. But lower down in the system lies a couple of routines that are constantly looping. Like, "sex? sex? sex?", "food? food? food?", "am I feeling good?", "danger? danger? danger?", "socialize? socialize? socialize?" and the one that we're talking about here: "what now? what now? what now?",

If you're familiar with computer programming languages, these are like while loops with lots of nested "if"s. And what you are doing with resolves are writing some new "if"s.




The interesting part about this is how these loops are mostly subconscious. They would have the same effect as constantly saying to yourself "if I don't know what to do, then *insert resolve here*", except you don't need to use your conscious mind for this, as you already programmed your subconscious to do it.


Very nice catch Here we're venturing over from the relative, where what I wrote above is important and has meaning, into the absolute where it is utterly useless information (or not even information, just data).

Thanks Stian - very informative - I'm somewhat clearer
metta
H