Hi everybody,
There's been a bit of talk of Mindfulness meditation around. I am curious about this, because it looks like it might be practical advice backed by a deep theory.
Unfortunately, all the tutorials on mindfulness meditation seem to be semi-practical advice backed by totally bogus theories (focus your energies, blah blah). I've been able to extract some useful stuff from such articles, but I don't know what I can trust, and I still don't fully understand how it's even supposed to work.
My current understanding is that you are supposed to pay attention to something and then pay attention to your attention, notice when you go off track, not judge yourself, and focus your attention back on the thing you were paying attention to. Or something.
I'd like to understand the technique at least well enough to judge success. When I'm doing chin-ups, it's easy to see if I did a chin-up or not, and how many, but I don't even know what this mindfulness stuff is supposed to look like.
If anyone knows more about what it's supposed to feel like, what the steps are an so on, I would really appreciate if you posted your knowledge here.
I perceive two kinds of vibrations. The first one is always associated with a sensory object and it's a subtle but regular variation between the object existing and not existing. I can compare the rate of these vibrations between objects and for slow vibrations I can even count individual waves such as my finger now vibrating at three times per one heart beat. For more rapid vibrations I sort of "hear" them but I cannot count the individual flashes of existence.
The second type of vibration that I perceive is of perception itself. My attention is constantly resetting itself and returning to the object of concentration. Sometimes it manifests as "bad key-framing". For a split second at a time the experience is frozen in time but still moving in a simple way until another moment of perception replaces it. The simple predictor movement from one "key-frame" to the next doesn't always line up and that's how I notice that my attention is resetting itself few times per second.
This is fascinating and I wish more people would describe experiences like this in terms of familiar metaphors like key-framing instead of metaphors which only make sense to other accomplished meditators.
Maybe it's just the writer in me, but I feel that any subjective experience can be communicated.
What is the difference between knowing consciously that identity is an illusion and intuitively feeling that identity is an illusion? I became a good reductionist long ago, but I still feel my own identity. I'm not sure if I would want to lose it.