Meditation and sneezing.  A sneezing jag halfway through.  Yet the concentration and clarity I was experiencing at that point was not much shaken.  The top of my head, a kind of pressure, where the everyday self resides.  A skullcap worn within.  Delightfully, surprisingly, it lifted.  Perhaps halfway through my sitting, a sense of a new landscape, silent, clear, open.  The timelessness, a little: memories flashing in and out as recovered realities.  The place of peace is not full of colour or sound—the light is a warm white, ever so slightly cloudy.  And in the middle of that, the sneezing jag: eight of them, derailing my breathing, forcing me to breathe through my mouth.  Yet the clarity was undisturbed.  The sneezes were like thoughts, carrying the reality of the body, but they did not trouble the brief landscape of calm I had gained.  I have not seen that landscape in several weeks; meditation was seeming fruitless again.  The sneezes were the world, were the thoughts, were the self that deceives with its illusory stratagems and verbalizations.  They came and went, and the meditation remained.  The skullcap had frayed to nothing for those moments, the pressure was gone.  I was untroubled.  The body was troubled by sneezing, but I was untroubled by the body.

13 January, 2024.