27th Feb, 2024
Today's Exploration and practice
As I woke up, an intention of maintaining mindfulness and integrating insight into all six senses (thoughts, tactile, scent/taste, visual, auditory, feelings/emotions) was set. I started off the day expending a lot of energy on maintaining concentrative mindfulness, it felt penetrating, still, stable, speedy like a feather-light diamond. However, I was unable to integrate insight into this Samadhi (concentration). The Samadhi gave rise to a general sense of well-being, peace and joy, it also allowed more space for investigation. I noticed a lot of feelings in the body and reactions to thoughts and the external world where I normally would not have.
For example, after watching a video on dream yoga where one of the instructions is to label "this is a dream" in waking moments; I immediately thought "of course it is, it's emptiness", in hindsight I realised it was the mind reifying and understanding immediate, ungraspable experience. After this recognition, fear and anxiety arose but the samadhi and mindfulness allowed for more space to not react and feed energy into it. I felt into it deeply, with silence, equanimity, openness and spaciousness. This highlighted the feelings as the feelings themselves, without the involvement of the mind.
However, noticing that I was expending a lot of energy in concentration I started investigating the duality of effortful vs effortless. Even though all sensations self-comprehend, there is an experiential difference of penetrating insight and clear conscious comprehension of sensations and experience. The inherent belief is dropped, yet integration of perfect clarity and mindfulness in the conscious comprehension of all sensations as self-knowing is yet to be perfected. In other words, re-integration of conceptual knowing of emptiness into every tiny microscopic detail of sensations (ON TOP OF the openness for sensations to "cognise" its own nature - “comprehension”/appearance of phenomena is awareness itself and that sounds simply hear themselves, in hearing there is only sound and that all is void of inherent, independent existence) is needed. Moreover, there are leftover tendencies for the mind to grasp and create the idea of sound hears, in hearing only the heard “experience”, there is an intuitive inclination that there is no hearing, no seeing. However, the intention is to first stabilise self-comprehension and luminosity before emptying further. There is still dullness and a lack of effortless samadhi and there arises the duality of effortful and effortless.
This duality needs to be investigated, balanced, practiced in order to perfect and penetrate perfect wisdom into every “atom” of experience. The trickiness is that effortful concentration without mindfulness can sometimes encourage grasping and understanding with concepts, complete effortlessness on the other hand does not facilitate penetrative deconstruction of subtle inherent views.
It is much like walking on a wire, and finding the balance between effort vs effortless. In order to “tune up” the details, clarity of sensations whilst integrating permeating insight into every microscopic detail, disintegrating the karmic tendency of grasping.
Tonight’s formal sit (1hr)
experienced quite a lot of lethargy and dullness (had a very carby and big dinner), was not sleepy overall but general dullness in general. Knees were in a lot of pain, from heavy lifting today. Note: life as a whole IS the practice, each element supports one another, e.g: diet, sleep, health, practice in daily life, formal sits etc.
Used metta as object, progressed from j1-j3 (jhana 1-3; jhanas are altered states of consciousness that arises naturally when concentrated) then j2 - j4. But very very soft, not hard jhana at all. Mantra dropped at j2. Interesting to note that I was able to drop into deeper states of absorption (yet less absorbed ironically, haha) because of lower energy levels today, contrasting yesterday’s practice when the Piti was too energetic like water filling over.
I also discovered a trick today where instead of using effortful concentration use a sense of “concentrative” letting go/surrendering; this is the best way I can put it but I must stress that it does not feeling like surrendering, more like a relaxation of phenomena and expanded peripheral awareness.
Intentions for dream yoga
We spend on average 25-30 years asleep and if there's a way to have fun with it whilst being able to practice wouldn't that be perfect? There's a way apparently - dream yoga (being "conscious" whilst asleep, Tibetans call the conscious deep sleep the clear light). So I'm going to explore that.