| thank you, all, for your posts. i have been doing some reading on the recommended topics, and will continue to do so. as i mentioned above, i have some apprehension about reading too much about what i am experiencing. i am an over-thinker, and as such, worry about being intellecutually ahead of my experiential knowledge. i have done some reading about the first jhanas, and have to say that i am unsure if i have experienced those, either. i often suspect that i am not practicing enough, or regularly enough, to be making real progress on this front.
also, this is perhaps a topic for another thread, but i have also been slowly becoming aware of the lack of depth to physical sensations. when sitting, i pretty much always get the same pain in my left knee. as i have been focusing on that, i've realized that there is nothing 'more' there than the sensation. as in, there seems to be no deeper meaning to the physical feelings. i've tried to explain this to one or two people in my life, and no-one seems to find this quite as significant of an observation as i do.
i have found this to be true for both pleasant and unpleasant sensations, whether it's pain, warmth, cold, etc. i look at a sensation, like pressure, say. so, the feeling of one leg resting on the floor, and there is nothing there. i mean, i can feel it, somehow i can identify it, but when i look closer, there is nothing there. the closest i can come to describing it is: "i don't even know what pressure feels like". this has been a very odd realization. it has always felt like there was something more there than simply that sensation, like, if i looked into it, there was some meaning there, except i didn't even need to look into it in the first place, because the meaning was obvious.
another example of this would be tastes. i've never liked pickles. so, in the last few months, i have made it my mission to like pickles. when i eat them, i try to identify what it is, exactly, that i dislike about them. and i have no idea. on some level, i know it's the vinegar, but when i look into that as i'm eating, i have no idea at all why i don't like vineagar. that feels like a very parallel realization as the one i spoke of above.
finally, yet another topic that probably deserves it's own thread, i've realized the same of emotions. i have struggled with mental illness, specifically depression, for much of my life. i had a few awful months this year, where i could hardly practice at all, followed by a few very good ones, where i was practicing alot. medication also helped spark this change. i am prone to low self-esteem, jealousy, all the negative stuff. when that stuff comes flowing in, it is so strong, and yet, i'm still unable to put my finger on exactly what it is. it has way more power over me than physical sensations, although i am starting to be able to identify what the physical sensations associated with these emotions are. sadly, in the last two weeks or so, the negative thoughts, the darkness, has returned, stuff i thought i had fully put behind me. how this is all related to meditation, i do not know.
i hope these rantings do not seem too out-of-place here, and i will likely start other threads to deal with them, but it felt worth it to get them out here. it's a strange thing to be contemplating these things without anyone around you to discuss them with!
as always, comments, insight, thoughts are all welcomed. thank you!
j |