Early Morning Meditations Pt. 1

 Find the energy of the morning, internally or externally.  Is there something wanting to come in?  Something that wants focus?  Where is the physical sensation, is it in your body or outside?  Find the energy of the morning that wants to come in.  Find the thought--and specifically the belief that accompanies it.  

For example, the belief that something wants to come in and inhabit the body.  Something that wants to permeate it.  Then the belief that there should be relaxation and welcoming, not constriction and fear. Feel how the belief affects the energy.  Creates the energy.  Modifies the energy.  The subtle belief is highly probative.  

Can the subtle belief be subsumed into the perhaps more pervasive belief of turning the focus from the head to lower than the head.  Letting the experience of reality "come in" as opposed to radiating out with a thought form presumably from the mind. 

Can I find the core of this energy?  Then it becomes almost a practice of active imagination as the core of the sensation becomes a thought which becomes an energy moving to a different thought.  Perhaps a more expansive thought.  It opens up.   The belief opens up to experience.

I'm very interested in the early morning bike ride and the denzien of the house on 11th with the stobe light in the back upstairs window that I can see from my meditative perch high above and a half mile away.

Going back to mediation though, the belief of the trance is very powerful.  Finding the trance that allows the experience of the outside as opposed to the inside thought being projected out.

Picking and Choosing Ain't So Bad

So in Zen and Non-Dual circles I guess it is considered bad taste to "pick and choose." Like this in the Xin Xin Ming:

The Great Way is not extremely difficult
It only criticizes picking and choosing
But if you can neither hate nor love
This cave will certainly be unblemished and bright
But deviate the width of a hair
And heaven and earth are held apart
If you want it to appear before you
Do not be subservient or rebellious
To pit obedience and defiance against each other
Indeed causes the heart and mind to grow sick
Not understanding the profound purpose
The practitioner labors to silence thoughts
The Way is complete like vast emptiness
Without excess or lack
When you have a reason to accept or reject
There is no place for Suchness

(Interesting that the image of a cave is used.  They seem to be cropping up everywhere from Plato to Parmenides.  And I like them.  I wish I could sleep in them.  As long as they had a door with a lock on them:-).  But I guess where I live now is kinda-cave like for being on the 9th floor. )   

Anyway---my sense is that not picking and choosing can be just another way of picking and choosing.  And to support this, I rely on my favorite imaginary being, the Buddha himself.  When the Buddha was challenged by the so called demon Mara, he resisted her/it not by giving into or following her ministrations, but by pointing (in my view) and hence choosing the earth.  And of course there are many nuisances to this, but for my belief, he "picked and chose" the earth.  

What did he pick and choose from?  What were the alternatives?  Well ,he could have had the usual BS, wealth, fame, sex, power etc.  Or he could have chose confronting Mara and playing her game.  She was challenging him intellectually asking him to justify his authority.  In other words, she was tempting him with mind games.  He did not choose the mind.  The flickering candle.  Instead, he chose the earth.  The body.  The heart.

And each moment we face a similar choice.  We can pick and choose the body/heart/mind, or we can choose the life of the mind.

By the way, have a happy weekend everybody😄