Collective wrote:Again, very similar to what I was saying about just being aware, and being aware of being aware. I can't get my head around the fact that watching the breath is a 'mind activity' - I find it easier to just be aware, of the moment, of anything and everything. It's like, when I'm aware of the breath, I'm not aware of anything else.
When I become aware of the mind, and not the breath, I find less mind chatter and deeper levels of meditation. Neverthless I focus on the breath because that's what others recommend.
I believe that the deliberate effort to focus on the breath could easily serve as a cause of disturbance. If I may say so, this is like putting a fence around an animal: Even if the animal was comfortable and relaxed about residing in a certain spot, now he starts to feel agitated, becomes wild and wants to break out. Similarly, a mind that is
forced to reside on the breath (or anything else) feels agitated, becomes wild and wants to break out. If you give a broad field to the mind, it settles down and becomes relaxed much more easily. And the place of settlement is most likely the breath, because, as we mentioned, it is the most prominent activity while sitting (Ajahn Sucitto also pointed out the same phenomena in a talk).
Previously I used to meditate with the method of forcing the awareness on the breath, and because of this the first stages of meditation were always rather loathsome. I had to "break in" the mind with force every time, by maintaining this forceful awareness until my "concentration" became so strong that I started to feel the ease of one-pointedness. Literally, I was raping the mind; quite nasty business...
In this way even though I had pleasant experience with meditation, I managed to build up a lot of "bad meditation kamma": I was very nervous about starting a meditation session, more and more force was needed to meditate, and eventually I ended up postponing and skipping meditation. Of course this might be one of the extreme examples, which was due to the kammic aggregate of roughness and willpower in my mind.
So, my priorities have shifted since then. Nowadays I would much rather "get nowhere" with meditation while being gentle and friendly, than to use force and "get somewhere". But usually I get at least to the same stages with this approach.
"Just as in the great ocean there is but one taste — the taste of salt — so in this Doctrine and Discipline there is but one taste — the taste of freedom"