The last couple of months have been too busy to post, and as natural counter-measure, I’ve been drawn to just quiet sitting.
Focusing primarily on just sitting and resting, with no objective, is radically different to most energy-oriented practices. What strikes me is that the long-term effect is diametrically opposite to what I feel in my regular Nei Dan meditations. In internal alchemy sessions, I feel a condensation, and an intensification of certain bodily oriented processes. I feel heat, vibration, pulsing, and often deep tension building and intensifying. Only later does the increased polarity within the body melt and dissolve. It can be arduous and even painful. It is a cooking, not a fire.
Pure sitting, on the other hand is just pure pleasure, and I feel deep rest. It evolves around the light of the heart, and opens a deep stillness. But more interesting is that my earlier experiences of sitting has been marked by mainly mental focus, this has now almost completely dissolved. The brain, thinking and “battling” the mind is still there, but I’m not entertained anymore. It continues unrelenting, yet it is deeply unsatisfying to focus on.
Instead of “detaching”, sitting in stillness is just listening. In this listening, I listen with the whole being. What comes up is the activation of the heart, and what is worked out is not so much “me” but a realignment with something that has been present through my whole life.
What is strange and unsettling when the long-term effects of this practice settles is that this space that opens up starts to work stuff out without “my” consent. All though there has always been a sort of yearning for a peace, or a longing for a sort of intimacy with my “self”, this movement has always gone from this person towards the “other”, to the transcendent. Only later did I realize that at one point one feels that there is a much greater force at work, and it has nothing do do with my own personal agenda, or my own spiritual aspirations. They are not important.
Instead, it has become clear to me that through this silence, something calls for me, draws me in. It’s longing for me is much stronger than the other way around. Something is waiting in the darkness. It feels like it is both death and eternal love at the same time. It completely mesmerizes me. It is as if I am in love, only able to think of my lover. At the same time, it feels like standing on the brink of being sucked into a black hole, into obilivion.
Inadvertently, the realization comes creemping up on me: I am no longer in control of this process.