Day 78 of 100 – An Experiment
Image via Wikipedia
I’ve been thinking about the aim of zazen meditation being the quieting down of the neural net of the brain lately. Suzuki Roshi suggests meditating with no gaining thought…no holding on, no expectations, no goal, etc. But it occurred to me that when I sit with a timer for my meditation, I do have a gaining thought, a goal…getting to the end of the meditation, wondering when the bell is going to sound, etc.
So for today’s first meditation, I ran a stop watch app rather than my timer app. I wanted to see how long I would go without a predetermined ending. I would stop sitting when I felt “done”, but I had no definition of done. I just sat. I used my Zentor’s instruction of resting in awareness. That was all I did. No timer. No set end point. No goal. No gaining thought.
What a total mind blower! Meditating this way changed the entire energy of my sitting. I was able to just sit…shikantaza…didn’t have to cut my eyelids off or nothin like you know who in the pic.
The space it opened up was like a breath of fresh mountain air while looking out over huge blue skies.
Cool shit.
