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Dancing with ideal and the actual in stillness & activity?
how
Veteran Veteran
How different is your relationship to phenomena within your formal meditation practice, from that relationship to phenomena outside of your formal meditation practice?
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Little to no difference, but I also don't meditate enough. One little difference that is constant is my perception of ordinary sound, such as the hum of distant traffic. Low volume sound in meditation takes on the import of the deathly silence that sometimes occurs during the big moments in life, like witnessing your child's birth, or even not so big, such as stepping out onto a skyscraper's observation deck.
Could something that small expand into other senses, and then emotions and thoughts, if I meditated more? Dunno.
By phenomena are you including anything in awareness such as thoughts or 5 senses?
@Jeffrey
Yes, I was referring to our relationship with all the sense gate impressions from what we see, hear, smell, taste, feel and think in formal meditation as compared to our relationship with those same sense gate data feeds in daily life when we are not formally meditating.
Yes. Now you know
I don't really go into a meditation mode or come out of something ...
I just sits.
However if I just sits in a deck chair mindfully I do not call it or consider it practice.
So what is the difference?
Because I am still closing my eyes during formal meditation, I do not fall asleep. In a deck chair I am 'allowed'.
I guess I am still a hard nut meditator ... not enough Tao ... 🤗
Well first I will mention that I do sometimes experience interesting phenomena in meditation, voices or sensations of the body. So I do tend to try to stay as relaxed as possible, and just let things come and go. It can be pretty distracting sometimes.
When I’m not meditating or getting ready for sleep, then I tend to approach things more normally, I’m not as laid back.
Interesting question @how...
I found the difference in relationship seems to be in the awareness level and the speed in which events arise and depart....
In cushion time, there seems to be more space between the events a slowing down, the movie plays out frame by frame in slow motion, so to speak...and familiarisation with this psycho-physical phenomenon's function/flow starts to take place...
Off the cushion things speed up, to keep up with conventional speed of events as they unfold (well they seem to happen at speed)...the conventional becoming slightly more psycho 😜 than physical ( psycho in the literal sense of the term, more time is spent outside the NOW with the thoughts charming nature... However, the more familiar "I" become with mind matters (mind& matter) the more manageable this outside becomes )
There always seems to be a sense of knowing as the psycho-physical phenomenon interacts with the conventional world...It's like awareness is holding the reins always at the ready to pull back if "I" start to go astray....
This is not to say that "I" never go astray, (the sense of self if given half a chance will bolt and has done so on a number of occasions ) the difference is I 'now' know I'm straying and can bring this sense of self back on track, before too much damage is done...
This becomes easier the more "I" become familiar with the empty nature of my self ...and "I" guess....therein lies the paradox of knowing without a knower
🤪
Which reminds me of this....
"Awareness is fundamentally non-conceptual before thinking splits experience into subject and object...It is empty and so can contain everything, including 'thought' ...It is boundless..And amazingly, it is intrinsically knowing"
The degree of attention I am able to remember to pay.
I am at the point now that there isn't too much out there (out here) that doesn't remind me of what goes on in here (in there). And vice versa.
Even posting here is practice for paying better attention.
Good post @Shoshin
This experience of slowing or pausing is definitely present in concentration or involvement type practices for eg. chanting, walking, prostrations as well as 'sitting awareness'. ☸️
As far as I understand it, there is nothing wrong in exploring and stating our practice and how it unfolds/manifests. I also feel we can trust/evaluate/understand etc those opening their practice experiences. 🤔
For example yesterday I was angry and swearing. It was the stress of setting up Zoom so I can participate in online group meditation. Oh the shame! 😳
Was I mindfully aware of the ridiculousness of the situation? You bet your cushion!
... and now back to the dance ... 💃🏼
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barachum
I asked this question of you folks because of the difficulty I had in answering this for myself.
I think one of the un necessary complications of this question are that the setup of the phrasing of a formal meditation practice as opposed to being outside of a formal meditation practice creates a duality that most meditation practices endeavor to transcend.
It was interesting to see how folks varying meditation practices bypassed that particular duality to address the differences between one's awareness of phenomena within stillness as opposed to the awareness of phenomena within activity. (which more accurately addresses my question).
Thanks all.
Hmm, so who wants to know ?
No idea actually, not even sure if anyone even needs to.
There is a short stanza of a Dzogchen document that a Zen Roshi once shared that has occasionally offered a little balance to the meditatively myopic.
We shouldn't make a division in our meditation between perception and the field of perception. We shouldn't become like a cat watching a mouse. We should realize that the purpose of meditation is not to go "deeply into ourselves" or withdraw from the world. Practice should be free and non-conceptual, unconstrained by introspection and concentration.
Vast unoriginated self-luminous wisdom space is the ground of being - the begining and the end of confusion. The presence of awareness in the primordeal state has no bias toward enlightment or non-elightenment. This ground of being which is known as pure or original mind is the source from which all phenomena arise. It is known as the great mother, the womb of potentiality in which all things arise and disolve in natural self-perfectedness and absolute spontaneity.
The fullness of potential.
Love it.