The Shift You Cannot Want
El cambio que no puedes desear
A reflection on the movement out of identification with the body-mind, and why the stabilization of that shift cannot be pursued or even imagined in advance.
The Shift You Cannot Want
A reflection on the movement out of identification with the body-mind, and why the stabilization of that shift cannot be pursued or even imagined in advance.
What we do want is that initial experience of shifting out of the belief in being a body-mind, because there's a huge relief that comes from that. There are very real changes in the body-mind, and there can be very pleasant sensations. But the ending of that movement in and out is less something you can want. It just happens.
The end of oscillation
It will be known as preferred, but it's not something you can really want. You can't even imagine it. In my case, it actually took months before I was able to conceptualize anything around it. It was just this sense of, "What the hell happened?" It's so strange. I had been around teachers, listening to teachers, and very close to one of them for twenty-five years, and I could never have imagined that.
Natural meditation
Going a little further into this conversation about movement: what was being described earlier, the attention automatically moving out of thought, there is nobody doing that. There is a stage where that becomes more of what we might call practice, a "no-practice practice" or natural meditation, where you just do nothing and it starts going on its own.