these are two posts from my practice log in 'awakenetwork'. sorry If it's a little unedited and messy:
it's been well over a year now since I first heard of people doing practices like looking at candle flames and experiencing things like becoming the candle flame and it was a few monthes ago that i really started to wonder how it is that i didn't get such experiences in spite of what i thought was good quality high quantity practice. The answer was that long after i started expanding my practice from my original Mahasi background and even after the newer influences, like Shinzen, seemed to become more or at least equally dominant, there was still a trate of non-indentification (or NoSelf, to use a more common term) wraped up inside my mindfulness. This idea, that 'whatever i observe is not me, is not the observer', was a big part of my Mahasi training and became a centeral part in the way I intuited or 'felt' what mindfulness is, when was I really doing it right and when I was not. realizing all of this, I also realized the flip side, that I could integrate mindfulness with identification, eso I started have cool, fun, interesting, deep experiences of becoming stuff: apples, walls, emotions, the sky... everything I wanted! Certainly this is bringing flexibility into the sense of self. I believe this is also leading me in the direction of nonDual awareness. this is sort of 'mini nonDuality'. Not the great nonDuality of myself with everything at once, but rather only one thing at a time, but it's a start, and it feels like I'm going in the right direction. More theoretically, and with the risk of sounding grand, I believe this is the difference between Vipassana and Tao~Zen style mindfulness: identifying vs. non-indentifying.
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here is what i'm interested in: when you focus on an object, be it for a very long or very short period of time, do you experience 'becoming' that object, 'unbecoming' that object, neither, or this whole terminology just doesn't mean a thing to you? other possible wording: identification increasing/decreasing/not changing. typical vipassana example: I am in Pain (physical or emotional) -> I have Pain -> there is Pain = process of identification reducing. typical Zen example: There is me and there is a wall -> I am connected to the wall -> I am the wall = process of identification reducing.
