Thanks, Ben
I am thinking of one of Thanissaro Bhikkhu's essays (
One Tool among Many http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/auth ... etool.html). I remember very clearly the first time I read this and felt very surprised that the Buddha wasn't teaching two separate things or two different things. I read this soon after a very senior monastic said flat out that we
didn't bother about jhana. I suppose there's nothing like being told not to do something or not to be curious about something! Because that now seems a turning point in my practise.
I'm trying to put together for my own reference an outline of what I have learnt and from whom and then shuffle that into what I consider a reasonable and pragmatic order ... which of course can only be the order most reasonable temporary working order for me. Going back to material I have already mentioned, it seems that one has to begin by intellectually understanding what "mindfulness" is all about without becoming like the expert on Caravaggio who never looked at a Caravaggio painting! Then, one should develop full mindfulness/awareness of breathing. Here Larry Rosenberg was very helpful in teaching me (Breath by Breath) about belly breathing. Up until that point, after many years of meditation, I was still meditating without actually fully relaxing, letting go physically.
Then, of course, the other factors of
satipatthana need to be intellectually understood (and some of the standard definitions simply do not work for me and I have littered much marginal space in texts with micrographia explaining to myself why this or that word chosen by the author isn't the choice I would have made).
Here is where I was very surprised to find my thinking converting from thinking that vipassana and insight meditation were the key to penetrating the mystery of samsara! This was my detour through the paths of Mahamudra and Dzogchen until it dawned on me (
and maybe that's a signal to get out'cher red flags???) that it wasn't about vipassana and insight at all, but about simply being aware of awareness, aware of mindfulness until there was just mindfulness.
I often wonder how many words of his own two teachers the Buddha was repeating when he defined samma samadhi. I have do doubt that he understood precisely what he was saying/teaching and his immediate followers did, as well. Yet, and here's a difficulty I am wrestling with, did the elders remember the words long after their direct association with direct experience was not so clearly understood?
I don't know how, in any way, to articulate my present experience. I only know that, as far as I think I am able at this time (yep, I have hedging down to a near science) to portray it, it is flowing from my understanding of the Buddha's words: master breathing awareness, apply that awareness to the four foundations of awareness, let go, always let go. Letting go is facilitated by the intellectual understanding that all things lack permanency, that all things are incapable of proving anything but transitory notions of satisfaction and no one and no thing possess anything that can be interpreted as an immutable essence.
I am, at this point, content that I am experience jhana/dhyana. I only know, at this time, that I should persist in letting go.
Does this make any useful sense at all?
corrections, a swat, smack up side the head, suggestions ... it's all good, all welcome