Darrin Rice:
I have been meditating with my eyes closed. Does the above mean that you are meditation with your eyes open?
I switch between eyes open and eyes closed. Sometimes I feel drowsy and meditate with eyes open. Also, sometimes I feel a need to increase focus and momentum by staring at a spot on a wall as a sort kasina practice without an actual kasina. It gets me into the 1st jhana very easily. I can then distinguish the other jhana as I progress into them by the area of visual focus, which keeps on expanding and getting less focused. Towards the 5th jhana, I tend to want to close my eyes again. I tend not to deliberately get into anything other than the 1st jhana, I just focus and let the whole thing expand (and then contract back, expand again, etc...). I sometimes also do the visual focus thing with eyes closed or just observe the strobing closed eye visuals.
I generally continue to note while doing the 1st jhana in this way, though not always. I care about noting while in jhanas 1 to 3, less in the 4th (it depends) and generally not at all in the 5th. Currently when doing doing this sort of practice, I tend to get into the 5th really quickly, so I tend not to do much noting, unless I'm getting mental chatter, which tells me that the mind has extra processing power left over for noting at that moment. Basically, the noting helps me get going and I've been dropping it progressively as the jhanas get more pronounced and going back to it as I've been getting more used to these mental states.
This all sounds like samatha, but as far as I'm concerned, it's what vipassana is producing at the moment.
A lot of energetic stuff also happens when I do this. I tend to use the 3rd eye point (I'm used to the Chinese terminology, so in other words, the yintang point) as point of focus, throughout any sort of jhanic focus. When I'm staring at a point on a wall, I both focus on that point and focus on the yintang, which tends to remain the case at least in the four four jhanas. The yintang again becomes a focus in the 6th (sort of, it's hard to characterize, since the way immaterial jhanas happen for me is changing a great deal at the moment). I find it hard to figure out what exactly is going in the 7th and 8th, though it's becoming a bit clearer. Easy and clear access to the 7th and 8th is new to me. Before the 2nd path, those two were states where I had no idea what was going on and where my mind felt like it had been partly turned off and then shortly after turned off some more.
I can do immaterial jhanas with eyes open, though I just find it more comfortable with eyes closed. This stuff is going to come up for you if it hasn't already. Are you going into recognizable jhanas? Frequently, I don't bother with any sort of eye focus, or even any effort, the mind just latches onto and gets absorbed into the energetic sensations at the yintang and goes into jhana and I let it do its thing while observing it. There are also other points that get "lit up" as a result of doing this. This is basically a very simplified and vipassanized way of doing my favorite section of my old qigong practice (the Shen Zheng Gong). Among other things it involved alternating between open eye and closed eye meditation at the yintang and a point above it on the top of the head (the xingmen point) for energy accumulation, circulation and jhanic focus.
None of that really matters for vipassana purposes and someone else may well have very different energetic patterns (and I've only described part of mine). I no longer really care about doing qigong, since I'm focused on doing a choiceless awareness noting practice that at the moment happens to mostly produce jhanas. Eye focus just happens to be the way that my system gets into jhanas 1 through 4. Also, since I did my qiqong practice for a few years, by the time I got to vipassana and stopped doing deliberate energy manipulation and just did noting, my body just kept up the old energy patterns anyway while I was doing vipassana. I think this is essentially because the qigong practice I was doing was a deliberate way of cultivating energetic patterns that develop that way anyway. There are plenty of threads on this forum and the KFD forum about doing jhanas through eye focus and getting absorbed on the 3rd eye by people who have only done noting practice.
You were previously mentioning vibrations. What sort of vibratory phenomena do you get? How are you tracking it? Also, when you use the term "vibrations", is that your catch-all term for "energetic" sensations or are there other energetic sensations that come up that aren't covered by that?
When I was doing shikantaza I would keep my eyes open but I actually feel like I make better progress with them closed. I realize that the best way to meditate is what works for me but my OCD screams at me to make sure I'm doing it "right".
The OCD sounds like a very useful thing to do noting on. I've gotten that, too. It's what kept me from meditating on a chair for the longest time, despite lower back pain. One of the lessons of vipassana is to just stop believing what the sensations produce and just treat everything as value-free data. It's easier to do that in equanimity. Can you describe the OCD mental and physical sensations and break them down into parts? Are there unpleasant physical sensations that go with the obsessive compulsive mental sensations? Since this may be a product of (or just exacerbated by) the dukkha ñanas, do you find that it stops when you feel you get into equanimity? Can you tell from the contrast what changes when the unpleasant emotions drop away (do they?), and is there an accompanying change in physical sensations?
About the eyes open, eyes closed meditation, what makes eyes closed better for you? Is it a focus thing, does it feel more jhanic, trancy or rapturous, are there strobing closed-eye visual patterns? Is there a change in the sense of space and the width of focus? What happens if you test what your OCD is telling you, but trying eyes open and then switching to eyes closed during the same meditation? Also, are you meditating with your eyes half open, or wide open? Are you staring at a focus? If not deliberately, do you find yourself staring at a spot anyway (this also happens for me with eyes closed)? Do the area and width of visual focus change, especially as you find yourself getting into equanimity? Alternatively, are they fixed? Do the physical and mental sensations change at all? As you get into equanimity, do you ever find yourself focusing more within an expanded headspace, rather than the body?
One interesting thing is that because of all the things that are happening, it's possible to do several different mini-meditations on different focuses, as the focuses arise on their own and draw attention to themselves by standing out or by seeming interesting. Examples of these are my eye focus meditations (the method for doing jhanas, the eyes up, the forward or down attention-checking meditation I was mentioning in my last post, and the noticing of closed eye strobing flicker rate), the focus on vibrations you were mentioning, checking on mood and its relationship to pleasant or unpleasant physical sensations, like tension or muscular relaxation, the desire to open or close the eyes, checking on posture and many other focuses that may come up. Focus shifts, it's interesting to make use of that.
FWIW, the "standard" way of doing vipassana that the Burmese monks teach is eyes closed. I think the Mahayana traditions all do eyes open and the Theravada traditions do eyes closed (except for most kasina meditations). In my very brief stint in zen, I was taught to focus with eyes half open, the Tibetans had me practice with eyes open, the Burmese Sayadaws taught vipassana with eyes closed, Kenneth Folk was flexible, but assumed eyes closed and both of my qigong teachers had me do mostly eyes closed, but alternating with eyes open for specific exercises, such as the one I've described above.
Also, recently I have been experiencing a sense of apprehension prior to meditation that has actually kept me from meditating at times. I hit equanimity and suddenly meditation became great and still is, but now I am finding it hard to sit down. Does not make sense. Any comment about this?
The apprehension sounds like the fear part of reobservation. Is it that you always sit at the same time every day? It could be that your mind is ramping into meditative gear right before or when you usually sit. Since reobservation is right before equanimity, it sounds like you're transitioning out of it, to more fully get into equanimity. You'll be in it essentially all the time, soon enough. How about treating the apprehension as a sign that you've actually started meditating, regardless of posture and do whatever noticing or noting practice you like best to deal with this when sitting?
Also, what sensations make equanimity great, exactly?