November 2017

I am feeling less goal-oriented, like I don’t need to force things to happen.  The path is long & I feel a need to accept my place in it.  Each step is a realization in & of itself.  This entire reality is the buddha mind.

I’m relaxing & letting go more both on & off cushion.  I spent a lot of time just watching a whole range of feelings & opinions come up & pass in daily life instead of antidoting them, as I have in the past.  Antidoting is skillful but only with a higher quotient of acceptance behind it.  

My spiritual friend assigned me a new sequence for formal practice: perfect parent -> calm abiding on the body -> calm abiding on the breath -> earth descent.  Opening to the support of the ground beneath feels like riding a large spaceship or floating in the stars at times.  There has been a tranquil afterglow for hours after some of the sits.

I did have another deepening of perception.  It is an enhancement of the spaciousness aspect & seems at times like the energy of my consciousness is dissolving into the area around my body like a continuous waterfall.  Things seem more hollow & transparent as well.  The movement of my attention within the field is felt in wispier, more fleeting manner, as if it has been loosened somehow.  

My friend Jenny said it could be another layer to the initial spaciousness shift that occurred in July 2016, with the first one being related to the element of boundless space & this one being related to that of boundless consciousness.  This would parallel the fact that there have been two layers to the clarity (‘luminosity’) realization, with the first one (March 2017) relating to brilliance on the surface of sense objects & a more recent one (August 2017) involving volumetric penetration into the depth of sense objects.