These days, I have made it a habit to meditate in the morning.
Until recently, saying that I meditate would have had a strong occult or religious image, but recently, meditation has come to be treated as a health practice and has become quite common.
Still, when I tell people about it, I get some dubious looks from some of them, but more and more people are doing it, and they often share my opinion.
However, my own way of meditating is only self-styled. I started by reading books on zazen and introductory books on meditation.
It may be completely different from those who are serious about yoga or Zen, etc. So, if you are wondering what I am doing, please read those books. If you are wondering what I am talking about, please read those books.
The definition of meditation for me, at the risk of offending some, is simply “to disconnect from thoughts.
In other words, as long as we are alive, we cannot stop various thoughts from floating around. Of course, we are always thinking something. Or we feel them. Even if it is not as exaggerated as that, we are always thinking about a game we are playing, the continuation of a drama, the result of a baseball game, and so on, even when we are in a daze.
In other words, while we are awake, our brain (whether or not our brain really thinks about everything is a topic for another time) is running at full capacity.
On the other hand, you may be under a lot of stress, and your mind may be in overflow, dominated by one thought all the time. You can’t think of anything else. Depression may be such a situation.
I believe that by training ourselves to cut off these thoughts, we can give our brains a break, a time to not think about anything else. Meditation is the most useful means for me to do this.
Perhaps a higher level of meditation would be to completely forget oneself. In other words, I might be able to free myself from the various troubles that come with it.
If being free from fear of birth, aging, sickness, and death is what is called enlightenment, then I may be at least enlightened while meditating.
However, like the Buddha, I am not a great man who has become completely enlightened, so I am only meditating (and only for a short time).
However, as those who have been meditating for a long time will know, it is difficult to describe the state of being in which one feels a unique sense of clarity and omnipotence. It is easy to understand why Master Daruma spent so much time in zazen meditation.
The problem is, however, that it is really difficult to do this meditation well, even though it seems easy. I have been doing it for many years, but I only get it right once every ten days or so.
I go into meditation following the usual procedure, but I soon end up being swept up in daily worries, past events, regrets, and small concerns. Still, I manage to try to smash (image whack-a-mole) the thoughts that keep coming up one after another.
However, there are really rare moments when I am able to erase the “self” and become one with something like heaven (although there are many different ideas of what heaven means). We do it in search of that, and perhaps that is what Soseki Natsume calls the state of “Noriten ko me.
In Soseki Natsume’s novels, there are several times when the protagonist, tired of worrying, goes to a Zen temple. However, most of them end in failure and return to the lower world.
He cannot escape from his troubles until the very end. I don’t want to be lumped in with these heroes, but even the great writers may not have been able to master complete meditation. That is how difficult meditation is.
This may be a technical problem, but it is probably the reason why many people try various ways to concentrate, such as staring at mandala pictures or Sanskrit characters, concentrating on a certain sound while opening one’s eyes dimly, or climbing a high mountain where the air is good.
But sometimes I think it is all just an illusion, that I am just satisfied with what I have done. When I watch TV shows where people carry yoga mats all the way up to the top of a mountain and meditate after doing yoga, I worry that they are really meditating, as if they are looking at themselves. I know it’s bad to say, but I wonder if I’m not done because I “like myself doing yoga in this kind of place.
On the other hand, I don’t recommend intense practices (such as being hit by a waterfall or doing gomagyo). I believe that meditation can be done on an airplane, in a Starbucks, or even while lying down (I recommend on an airplane).
When I meditate, tens of minutes fly by (I can only get there once every few years). As a result, my head is clearer anyway. I can think better (I think). You might imagine it as a tripping sensation, which is the opposite of drinking.
Just as Soseki Natsume called the feeling of being at one with the heavens and forgetting oneself “sokuten ko me,” if I were to compare this to my own style, I might say that my ego has become one with the heavens and I am “sokuten yui me.
So, if you have read this far, and your mind is filled with various worries and thoughts, and your head is on the verge of freezing up, I think it would be an interesting experiment to try meditation.
However, I hear that some people enter the world of meditation and cannot come back to it successfully, so I would recommend that you start by reading some kind of guidance, though.
Nakamura learned that the word “thirst” in zazen is not to wake up the sleeping or to warn against laziness, but to make thoughts fly away by the physical force of blackmail.
See you later
