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Meditation / Zazen question
Kotishka
Veteran
They say meditation is the practice of death. Allowing all the sense gates to relax does seem as a preparation for dropping body and mind physically, euphemistic way of calling death. I would consider that the ultimate goal is to avoid leaving too much homework for then. At some point, karma, genetics, experience, luck have played their cards as you withdrew them for the opportunities emerging at each and one of the presents moments that we then compile and call "existence".
Is this the deathless or hints of this? This calm abiding. The calming and serene existence even amidst the most disturbing and never-racking morning?
2
Comments
Are you sure you are even interested in the deathless?
Is it not better to just be with your aliveness?
Is meditation not closer to simply being, than death?
In some ways:
Death is a continuity of depth experience. Eventually we all die. Meanwhile, during journeying into death. We can:
NDE, shamanic, Zen warrior training, ascetic practices etc. all involve the theme of physical death and reborn/rebirth. The trick is to treat all such ideas of death in a number of ways and possibilities ...
Hope that is helpful. Otherwise Kill it ...
If the human condition is a dream state of our ignorance, then an awakening from that dream can be described as being truly alive when compared to one's former imitations of the walking dead.
Here, the meditations that manifest such awakenings can equated to deathlessness.
Thus have I heard.....
Meditation for the sitter is just sitting ,,,,
Meditation for the stander is just standing,,,,
Meditation for the walker is just walking
Meditation for the lier is just lying
Self is just a figment of mind's imagination... Mind is just a figment of self's imagination
And there is no permanently abiding self..... dead or alive.
It does get a bit uncomfortable and does make me become very hermit like to be able to follow precepts. The real world is truely tough but this is the epoch we live in and we all cannot/want go to the woods, abandoning the lay life, and entering homelessness; as if items in a bucketlist.
What I meant by uncomfortable is realising, in my experience, automatic and unwholesome traits, conducts. Self-criticism becomes ripe and the burden of sin and blame. I know these last concepts are very far from Buddhist knowledge, but ingrained in my cultural upbringing.
Very intellectual the understanding, but at practice level still fidgeting.
Time to practice right now
Fidgeting is a defensive response by one's ego structure when it's fiefdom feels threatened by one's meditative efforts. Fidgeting is a bluff charge by the human condition to ward off any challenge to its kingship. Fidgeting is just ones conditioned responses to phenomena being in fear of being seen for the prison, the bars, and the jailer that each of us has allowed them to be.
Fidgeting is just the precursor to either letting go or hanging on to the suffering that brought you to meditation.
Here, like anywhere else in a meditative practice, it's not about its existence, so much as it's about how you relate to it.