Thanks! Yeah, when I was reading this book I thought this was an important insight worth sharing from it and actually moved me to want to write this post because, without this model, it’s hard to understand why I would want to get really good at pretending to be a rock.
My personal journey with this has been first to try to follow instructions like the above because I had so much restlessness it was hard to stay seated for an entire meditation period and so I used techniques as a way to fight myself into staying on the cushion. Then I had a kensho experience that left me able to effortlessly meditate, but this has lead to a lot of time on the cushion that wasn’t bad but also wasn’t very effortful and probably wasted a lot of time getting settled rather than going straight to the intended practice. Now I find I’m motivated again to apply effort since I have some reason to believe it will do something other than to simply do the practice being handed down to me.
Thanks! Yeah, when I was reading this book I thought this was an important insight worth sharing from it and actually moved me to want to write this post because, without this model, it’s hard to understand why I would want to get really good at pretending to be a rock.
My personal journey with this has been first to try to follow instructions like the above because I had so much restlessness it was hard to stay seated for an entire meditation period and so I used techniques as a way to fight myself into staying on the cushion. Then I had a kensho experience that left me able to effortlessly meditate, but this has lead to a lot of time on the cushion that wasn’t bad but also wasn’t very effortful and probably wasted a lot of time getting settled rather than going straight to the intended practice. Now I find I’m motivated again to apply effort since I have some reason to believe it will do something other than to simply do the practice being handed down to me.