shinzen Young retreat in LA 1 and a half

/2/11

           First entry for the new year. Most interesting insight that I have had at this retreat  dealt concentration on outer phenomena. . Shinzen had us do a practice run of meditations on the sensations of the body, spatial hearing; back, front, side ,above, etc  . And seeing.

           The results  are that I came to see that with deep concentration I can see things continually in motion , the leaves on the trees, the grass in the process  of growing , a city transforming from cars moving to buildings rising and being  taken down again. It is all a process that is continually changing.

           This is not a new idea it is one I have had before and is very common as an insight.

           The second part of the meditation was a deep concentration upon the moment by looking at finer and finer moments everything came to a halt. The plane in the air , the car on the freeway, the sound of fan motor with finer and finer one pointedness everything ceased to be in motion but is completely static. The only moment in which all of us live, “now,” when brought completely into awareness is fixed and  static . Nothing has any prescribed future since the moment now is all that can exist.

           This reminded me of a story of two monks arguing if the flag was moving or the wind. The master came along and said that it is your mind that moves. I\

           I had heard that story but did not grok what it meant until that moment. Werner Heisenberg  , the great quantum physicist , wrote that one can tell the position of  a particle or one can determine the direction of  a particle but one cannot tell both.

           At the  deep level of understanding that intense concentration of the moment brings that becomes self evident. The car going down the freeway is in the moment at a certain point the  more certain that the observer is of its location the less certain the observer  is of the direction.  Is that the moment of  ; an empty tank,  tire failure , an accident, the great California earthquake,  all of  which have declining percentages of probability but that was what Heisenberg was postulating.

           All that stuff I have heard about for years was demonstrated during that meditation.

           My reaction has been ,”so what”, how can that help me with what I have to deal with .  Last night I got the answer, there is a scientist in Chicago who demonstrated that by merely focusing intently and a relaxed and equanamous manner that the health of the focuser improves physical and emotional.  We will see.

           To catch up on what transpired while the blog was being written  I am going to write a parallel entry.