Normally it is said that the mind is always engaged in
projecting itself outwards and that it should ‘somehow’ be turned inward. So we
need to use the mind like ‘an eye’ to look within. The mind is similar to an
eye. The eye is used to choose the area of looking or seeing and the mind is
used to choose the area onto which attention can seem to be focused. So when we
meditate, we put awareness or focus of awareness on hands, legs, frontside,
backside, centre of the chest, head etc.
For a while, like breathing on purpose, it feels like, such
focus is with a freewill. But such a governing force, soon escapes, leaving the
mind wandering on its own. It’s not possible to keep control on the mind, as
there is a controller and there isn’t a mind. It only seems probably possible
to have control on mind.
The looking within is specifically interesting. For a year
or two, we are trying to put our attention inside the body, as if within and
without are addressed to the frame of the body. In any case, one fine day, you
would know, how mind keeps playing its tricks.
To focus anywhere, inside the body, or at the right of the
heart or between your eyes or at the far off landscape, is called without. Its
opposite is ‘within’. The word ‘within’ seems to refer as related to the body,
but in this case, it is pointing to look within the mind, as if the other sense
awareness were as if happening outside of the mind. You cant look outside of
the mind, because one does not know much about the boundaries of the mind. So
to know what is being pointed, we have to use the nature of ‘projection’ of the
mind.
The outside world is termed to be the projection of the
mind. The world or Universe includes our body frame, so that the whole featured
world, with the ’we’ as a body based entity in it, is actually the outside
world or just World. However, the mind interprets the world as different from
what we are, so as to make an outside world vs an inside ‘me’. This is the
world as we normally know it or the world of ‘duality’. The mind knows the
world with the sense of non-duality, but interprets it with a sense of duality.
So sensing the world as a bundle of sensations and interpreting the world in
terms of ‘me’ here and a world of objects out there, making sense to such a ‘me,
is totally mental work or the work of the mind, which is said to be a projection.
The difficulty is to use the projector to project light on
itself. Like a torch trying to shine on itself. It requires a lot of circus, to
the extent of turning the mind / torch inside out to make this happen. So, many
years pass away, trying to hang around to get a hang of how to hang this upside
down or inside out or both.
The mind is a ‘looker’. It has to keep looking. Presence,
absence, changes, beauty, ugliness etc etc are its contents. The day it stops
looking, it is dead. It cannot dye because, it is still looks at death and
conveys the emptiness that is sensed as the ‘dead’ or conveying a sense of
emptiness all around.. So looking has no limitations of time, precisely because
it is ‘time’ that so looking everywhere and featuring contents. So stopping to
project, reveals an un-projected perception or the emptiness of the contents
featured in sensation.. We cant call it the world anymore, because world is a
sensible story. When the projection, as learnt is taken away, what remains is ‘raw’
staring at itself. Its like saying that sound is sound, until you can recognise
what the sound is, and when so recognised, its called words or English or
French, but no more as sound. Sound is not what English is, even though English
is sound. Similarly, world is not what perceiving is, even though, the world is
a perception.
So to look within, only means to look without conditioning
or interpreting or judging. To look within is to perceive and to look ‘without’
is to conceive. The purpose of mind is twofold. It is sentience or whole mind
and is knowing wholeness as featured and then has to convert the knowing into
the feel of a knower as one part of such perceiving and ‘known’ as the rest of
the perception. The only way it can be memorised is make a story of such
subject object world in time-space and interpretation of such inseeing is
outseeing.
So looking within, is to ‘just be’ or still the mind or
relax to the fullest etc. This opens up the sense of focus until the focus from
a point, becomes wholeness itself. It starts with the game of focusing on chest
and shoulder etc and slowly trying to go over to focus, what coming up in the
mind. Then you start seeing your thoughts more loudly as they come up. The game
continues to subtly focus in the field from where these thoughts arise or its
source. Now you are inseeing mind itself as a field. The focus will learn how
to rest in the field until the focus gets absorbed as that field itself. Its
like the focal centre becoming the circle itself. This suddenly becomes the
open field of sensations and thoughts. Thoughts don’t come so much now. The
external sensations cant be stopped. But all the while, the thoughts were
pulling the attention and the outside sensations and inside sensation were kept
at bay. Now all sensations starts to dance in the field. Keeping eyes shut can
help. But not allowing the ‘focus’ to focus on visuals, but be focused into the
mind, is as good. The sensation now that come up are more like ‘sounds’
happening, feeling happening, movements happening etc, as if, whole of
perception is just a happening in the mind and such field where it occurs would
be the ‘I am’ field that you are. Even
the body is a sensation in that field, just like external sensations. So all
sensations, external and internal will be named sensations and the focus of
attention dissolving into becoming the ‘mind’ or field in which such sensation
appear, would be whole mind. The thoughts are now ’not’ interpreting the
sensations, and so you are in touch with ‘life’ directly`. Here the you is just
a impersonal mind. All sensations in its raw direct feel is 100 times powerful
in clarity and is a good feeling. You start loving it and become one with it,
as if Love was you, embracing all sensations.
Personally, I realised, while focusing within, that I was
hearing sounds like a Tinnitus problem, until the problem was used as a tool to
jump into inseeing any time of the day, for every little space of time that I
could accumulate for this purpose. It was a 24 x 7 hobby. So look and look and look, until all is within
and there isn’t a in or out, because you as a body boundary is myth. That is real meditation.
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