Letting go as a meditation
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
I tried this yesterday, inspired by an Osho lecture, letting go of the body and the mind and just letting everything stay completely still and being total in that. It was quite beautiful, very peaceful within with only hints of things that would arise and go. I completely lost track of time — I was lying down — and when I looked on the clock four hours had passed.
Even in your sleep you are still somewhat present in the body, you move when it’s too hot or cold, you turn in your dreams. To just let go of body and mind and withdraw was a really interesting experience, you seem to slow down and end up in a kind of space where the small sensations of the body are magnified, I felt some rushes and taps and streams.
“Let-go is the atmosphere in which witnessing flowers. They are almost two sides of the same experience — they are not different. One cannot allow let-go without witnessing, neither can one be a witness without being in a let-go.”
— Osho, The Golden Future, Chapter 18
Comments
Interesting take... I was thinking you meant the mental exercise of coming to terms with the fact that every single thing, solid or ephemeral, seen or thought, felt or experienced, will one day fall away and dissipate... but then of course, the focus should shift to one's own vehicle; the body....
It little matters what happens to all external phenomena, seen or unseen, felt or un-felt.
It's you.
You are the main impermanent factor among all other impermanent factors.
Other 'things' are irrelevant: What is relevant is your own significance, your own role, among all other phenomena.
With this thought foremost in mind, I go about my day.
Nice post, @Kerome; bit of a wake-up call....
From my perspective meditation on so called 'emptiness' is the foremost 'Letting go-meditation'.
Different strokes for different folks.
There is definitely something similar about it, that’s true. But it depends on your understanding of emptiness and how to think about it... i’ve come across several different takes on emptiness, from “things being empty of an independent essence” to “emptiness of self-nature”, but none of it seems truly satisfactory. I think I still have a ways to go to learn about emptiness.
But I think @federica got the point of my talking about meditating on letting go, we are often so full of things that we hold onto for dear life. The Buddha once said when asked to give a one-line summary of his teachings, “nothing whatsoever should be clung to”. Now letting go goes a step further, moving beyond not clinging and gently holding to actively letting go, but it can take you to a beautiful space.
I really recommend you listen to these two podcast episodes, @Kerome.
https://zenstudiespodcast.com/two-paths-to-concentration-samadhi/
https://zenstudiespodcast.com/letting-go-as-path-to-samadhi/
I found them really informative. Domyo Burke frames letting go as an alternative to what she calls “directed effort”, which is placing your mind on an object (like the breath) and then noticing when it wanders and placing it there again. She says that letting go is the method applied in Shikantaza, which has no meditative focus. Really worth a listen.
I’ve found a concentration on renouncing language to be useful. Many thoughts that come along are only words, and don’t have a deeper reality beyond just the word itself.
Before something can be let go of one must have it but since in reality one doesn't truly have anything from the outset there is nothing to let go of. Only after conditioning oneself to believe that there is truly something to let go of does the intention arise. But instead of investigating into these conditionings one is chasing the shadows of these conditionings.
What the dhamma says is one thing, but what one experiences in meditation is something else. In order to make sense of the inner world one needs to preserve the relative correctness of the experience, and with that comes accepting that we have baggage, things to let go of.
Conditioning functions within the realm of the mind. If you explore the inner world through other senses, like sight and touch and hearing, you will find things that seem to be independent of thought. One of the things that can help you is letting go of language temporarily, to reduce the amount of irrelevant things the mind talks about.
Dear Dharma friend Kerome,
my post was not meant to reject your way of approach. My post only expressed my individual perspective.
Since the Dharma has a variety of approaches for a variety of individuals we cannot expect that the practice of all individuals is the same.
I think that’s very true, friend @herbie... we all share online things of our unique experiences, in the hope that it may be of benefit to others but it’s very much a question of what resonates with them and fits with their current state of learning.
But I think it’s good to do so, because it gives all of us a glimpse of what is possible. Some members of our online Sangha do not have a teacher living nearby, and for them having a bit more shared information is a good thing, I feel.