Forum: Practical Dharma
This topic is being posted independently of another Dharma Overground discussion thread " impermanence via the visual field" (see http://tinyurl.com/q8yk6f )
I stumbled on this technique but doubt that I am the first to discover it.
Watching the water from the ordinary point of view (normal consciousness), I saw the usual flickering reflections of sunlight from the complex pattern of wave interference patterns on the surface of the water. Then I began practicing meditative concentration. Very quickly, I noticed a change in my perception of the sunlight reflected from the water. Previously, there had been some specific (albeit uncounted) number of reflection points on the water's surface. Now, in meditative concentration, I saw each those points broken into many more smaller points, each of which was moving at a faster pace than before.
To explain this, let's consider a single point of reflection. What had appeared to be a single point before—a point which appeared and then disappeared over the course of a fraction of a second—now appeared to be composed of several smaller points, each of which appeared and disappeared more swiftly than had the previous perception of a single point. These smaller points began and ended at different instants, but their duration overlapped, thus producing (from my original point of view) a single, larger point with a longer total duration.
This technique may have some value as a tool for gauging one's concentration. The more perceptions (or sensations) that one can observe per unit time in indicative of one's state of concentration. Finding the most suitable object of concentration for this purpose is somewhat limited. Most objects change very little over normal human time scales.
If you have the opportunity to experiment with this technique, please let me know how it does for you.
