The Force

Wonderful meditation this morning.

Yesterday I watched a video that reminded me of that six second time lag we have between when our brain makes a decision and we become conscious of the decision. It's hard to wrap our heads around the fact that we might not have free will.  And especially the idea that if we don't, why would this decision making energy make some of the poor decisions that it does?

But another way of looking at it is that we make some of the bigger decisions, based on reflection on previous decisions,  and our brain then makes the smaller ones.  One big decision we can make is to turn out lives over to the management of the energy that makes better decisions. This force field that created this magnificent world.

Combining some of the golden ball tai chi I'm recovering and the body scanning I've been doing in Vipassana,  I found myself this morning really being in a bigger, better energy. Really feeling what it would be like to let it manage me, and thus impact the lives of the people who depend on me.

For a good long while I felt this energy flip me around and take control.

May I continue today to be with this force.

Impermanence of Sensations

I'm midway now in the six month JOL3 program, where I'm trying to make these habits of wisdom intuitive.

This week I've been working on impermanence of body sensations.  But I'm admitting to myself at the end of the week that my practice on this has been somewhat impermanent itself.  There seems to be something in me that is quite resistant to this particular practice.  Probably because it starts with something that feels like pain.  But is merely discomfort.

The consquence of avoiding this practice though, is that I've missed out on a powerful lesson.  It's through these uncomfortable sensations that we reach a state of interesting, comfortable, buddah nature, or chi sensations.  Sensations of stability, stillness, lucid, clear energy running through us.  I guess I'll call them life force sensations.

I like to be in this energy, but one thing I've noticed more than usual this week is that I'm also uncomfortable with this energy.

What I realized this morning is that I'm uncomfortable with the impermanence of this more powerful energy. I'm uncomfortable with the fact that this energy is always in a state of flux.   But if I settle into that, if I watch this energy transform in the same way that I might watch television, suddenly my resistance begins to melt away.  I'm not so worried that I'm going to get sucked into some permanent loop because this energy is impermanent as well.

It's really just another layer of impermanence.