You said it.
We begin with the attitude and intellectual understanding that we are whole already. The purpose of meditation is therefore not to become whole again, but to uncover the wholeness we are already, and always were.
Daily sitting meditation is very important. Once you start, don't stop. If you reach points in your daily sittings when you want to stop, examine and address the reasons for this resistance, attending to the resistance, eliminating this resistance, without stopping.
The best manual, a “how to” of meditation, with unplumbed deaths that I haven't yet explored fully myself after 26 years of daily sitting meditation, is “ Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind”, by the Japanese Soto Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki. This book is a must read, and remains a guide throughout the years, for life.
Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki: sitting meditation
As we are whole and cannot be anything but whole and complete, when we sit in meditation we sit with this inner attitude, known as non-attainment. As a beginner you could focus consciously on non-attainment, always directing your efforts in meditation from achievement to non-achievement.
Or, if you are experienced, or with a healthy dose of luck and skillful guidance, you discover how to be attentive in meditation without consciously thinking of non-attainment. The inner attitude of non-attainment is the flavour of the effort you make in meditation, without the concept even crossing your mind.
There are several elements in meditation to learn and master. Once you have learnt them, you will become a master of meditation.
The first and most important aspect of meditation is to become aware of the movements of desire within yourself. You can easily recognize when you don't understand and are unaware of them, whenever you suffer. Suffering, according to the Buddha, has only once cause: craving.
Most people misunderstood the Buddha by thinking they must get rid of their physical appetites: their supposedly “lower nature”, which has no reality to begin with, other than the stories people tell themselves. This is the least important aspect of meditation, and not its purpose at all. As a Zen Master would say: “If you make higher and lower, then higher and lower exist. But if you don't make any-thing, then no-thing exists! No higher to strive for; no lower nature to transcend!”
The way to see and understand the movements of craving within yourself, is to see your own mental reactions to what is, in and outside meditation. To see your own mental reactions as they are occurring, is to be aware of craving and its effects, in the Buddha's sense. When you see your own mental reactions, you see craving. To see craving is to not be craving, but the awareness that sees craving. The very awareness of craving is therefore itself freedom from all craving, and thus freedom from all suffering.
Seeing craving directly is easy if you know how to look. Knowing how to look means to know how and where to direct your attention.
For most people, the direction of attention is wrong. Everyone is aware of everything but themselves. The right direction is from what to who. Therefore, the first and probably the only step is to change the direction of attention. Instead of observing what you see, think, feel and experience in meditation, observe who is sitting! All craving issues from I. Therefore, to cultivate awareness of I, is to see the craving or mental reactions that emerge from I, as they are emerging.
The question therefore becomes: how to observe I who am reading this. The answer to this is very simple. Simply keep shifting attention from what I am reading (unimportant) to I (subject, very important!) who am reading it. Place your own attention at the very seat of your will, just behind the voice of conscious verbal thoughts in your head, observing your reactions to everyone and everything. When you do this, you see your mental reactions and their effect in the form of personal suffering. Thereby you are directly observing that nobody and nothing can add anything to who you already are, nor take anything away from who you already are. Your mental and emotional dependence on people, events, circumstances, and the environment therefore begins dropping, the minute you see this.
Once you have thoroughly learnt this kind of self-awareness, in and out of meditation, you can direct your attention to any meditation subject of your choosing, and easily experience complete success with it. Everyone already knows that meditation is like flying a kite: not too tight, not too loose. But there is lots of misunderstanding as to what this means, exactly.
My own personality tends to perfectionism and OCD. Does this mean I should not be so uptight about my intention and interest to observe the subtle sensations of the breath at my nostril tips, a practice that has interested me most of my life?
Not at all, I have discovered. All I needed to do, was to let go of all these ideas about what I should and should not do, and how much interest and attention is needed to easily and directly observe these movements. In other words, eliminate my own doubts about the kind of effort I can or should optimally make. To do this, is to drop my mental reactions to this kind of intense, obsessive, compulsive interest. Confidence in my own ability is all that is required, not instructions on how to do it. Self-doubt is surely the greatest obstacle in any meditation happening right here, now. These cause my mind to vacillate and react, producing the inability to simply, directly and effortlessly observe my own breath at my nostril tips. If you understand this, you don't even need to cultivate the kind of self-observation I so strongly advocate. All you then need, is to sit with confidence, and to cultivate your own confidence to perfection, in your own innate ability.
Self-doubt is skeptical doubt. Skeptical doubt is one of the five hindrances to skilled meditation. The antidote is obviously confidence in your own innate ability, without having to listen to anyone trying to tell you how you ought to do it. All the should's and should not's in meditation should be dropped, purged from your mind. Then you know your own innate ability directly, and you can proceed in meditation without wobbling or falling down.
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