Ra Method!
Samsaramom's retreat has ended. I was really enjoying the posts. Inspirational really. Makes me feel like a real sweetie eater. She seems to be using only the breath. I'd find that quite tough as I've never used such little support. I taught myself to meditate using Susquehanna, a mantra I made up. I thought with the mantra what might happen is that when you get some nice feelings, you might associate them with the sound, so that when you use the sound, the nice feelings should emerge faster.
I remember reading if you count the breaths and go back to one when you've had a thought, you'd probably stay at one for maybe the first eighteen months.
Just using a point in your body when you first start must be murder as well. If you're using a symbol to go with the point, that must be dead hard too because there won't be any symbol there for some time.
I got quite interested in some just sitting meditations a wee while ago. This is a method I really quite liked. You get calm however. You're sitting. Then a wee bit of your consciousness goes looking for your false sense of self. This is what causes the suffering and is what you're trying to negate in this stuff. So you look for it in your skandas. Is it in your body, senses, etc.? When I first started doing this, you can say, "It's no there!" and just go on. But it must be somewhere. So you continue to investigate and come up with the notion that it must be in your mental formations, the volitional impulses, the ideations, the thinking that arises in your consciousness. But it's not always there. And it's not there in every mental formation, I don't think. When you've done this for a bit ... looking for the object to be negated ... you might fancy going back to saying, "It's no there!"
I stopped using Susquehanna about nine years ago when I went to Nepal. I decided to use Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hum, but somehow I ended up using Om Mani Padme Hum an awful lot. I still like the sound of Susquehanna (sounds like suspicious!) and think I maybe should have stuck with it and not made any concessions to anything religious. Of course, then wouldn't have got a guru and taken empowerments, which are very good indeed, it seems.
I do sequences of visualisations and breathing and different kinds of routines. Anything to keep you sitting really. I'm sure tough guys just sit.
Once you get light and then ra bliss, of course, everything becomes a lot, lot easier!
I remember reading if you count the breaths and go back to one when you've had a thought, you'd probably stay at one for maybe the first eighteen months.
Just using a point in your body when you first start must be murder as well. If you're using a symbol to go with the point, that must be dead hard too because there won't be any symbol there for some time.
I got quite interested in some just sitting meditations a wee while ago. This is a method I really quite liked. You get calm however. You're sitting. Then a wee bit of your consciousness goes looking for your false sense of self. This is what causes the suffering and is what you're trying to negate in this stuff. So you look for it in your skandas. Is it in your body, senses, etc.? When I first started doing this, you can say, "It's no there!" and just go on. But it must be somewhere. So you continue to investigate and come up with the notion that it must be in your mental formations, the volitional impulses, the ideations, the thinking that arises in your consciousness. But it's not always there. And it's not there in every mental formation, I don't think. When you've done this for a bit ... looking for the object to be negated ... you might fancy going back to saying, "It's no there!"
I stopped using Susquehanna about nine years ago when I went to Nepal. I decided to use Om Ah Hum Vajra Guru Padma Siddhi Hum, but somehow I ended up using Om Mani Padme Hum an awful lot. I still like the sound of Susquehanna (sounds like suspicious!) and think I maybe should have stuck with it and not made any concessions to anything religious. Of course, then wouldn't have got a guru and taken empowerments, which are very good indeed, it seems.
I do sequences of visualisations and breathing and different kinds of routines. Anything to keep you sitting really. I'm sure tough guys just sit.
Once you get light and then ra bliss, of course, everything becomes a lot, lot easier!
posted by Hotboy at 10:41 AM
5 Comments:
Thats interesting...there are many methods to our madness! I was actually all screwed up for a while on retreat - we were advised to only focus on the outbreath. At some point I realized that I was actually fumbling with the technique...so I went back to focuing on the in-out. After a while, you can sort of let that go too. Figuring that I am a newbie and all, its a good place to start. (Sakong Mipham's "Turning the Mind Into an Ally" is actually a good guide for shamatha.) (Okay, I just felt like I was trying to pawn off a copy of the watchtower...)
I had no idea you were new to this stuff. Six hours a day focusing on the outbreath? Heavy duty. That's the stuff though. Brutal. Hotboy. P.S. I'll back read.
Checked back and with the 3 kids and the job and the life of fung harassment ... maybe ... naw, that's too too brutal. But you've probably got to dig in sometime. You'd remember a week like that! Hotboy
As Menzies Milngavie's old friend Henri Cartier-Bresson said, Buddhism is not a religion, it's a spiritual science.
rob mctangent.
The Case For A Buddhist Anarchism
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