Today before meditating I read my earlier post on shikan-taza again.  I wanted some refreshment of method, a sharper sense of practice, and this form of meditation has more or less been my attempt throughout this challenging year—though more rigorous, I now recall, than much of my own recent sitting.  I attempted today, as I haven’t recently, really to concentrate the mind on the fact of sitting, and on nothing more: on the fact of the body, in the cross-legged position with the hands in the circle of thumbs and palms; on the fact of the breath, without disciplining the breath.  It shouldn’t surprise me that one paradoxical consequence was a greater freeing from the fact of the body than I usually attain.  At the same time, I felt the pull of gravity on the body, the weight of myself in my seat, to a new degree.  Though I concentrated quite steadily without great imposed effort, I did not much study or cognize the mind to the same degree.  Still, I had some sense that this was hard work, but in a good way akin to the hard work one does with the body in the garden.  I could understand why some practitioners sweat hard in the midst of shikan-taza and should not stay in that practice for more than thirty minutes—though I can’t claim any such sense of exertion.

One passing effect of this method: my memory was freed up strangely.  Glimpses from the trip to Lisbon arose abruptly in my mind: more than memory and much more than snapshots, but actual embodied presence in the past.  I recently read a news item claiming that scientists had come much closer to understanding the phenomenon of a dying person’s life flashing before his eyes in the moments before and after death.  It has something to do, they say, with the brain’s allowing the floodgates of total experience to open in that crisis—gates that must be kept closed against the vast entirety of one’s memory of life in the day to day business of action and purpose.  Perhaps meditation can also take us to that point at which the brain releases the past, because there is no longer a present to be dealt with.  There is almost a euphoria associated with this sudden irruption of the past in the midst of meditation.

22 December, 2023.