Meditation

Running list of things I notice during meditation

• Meditation feels like the practice of tuning more of my awareness to the ‘real world’ (albeit this is slightly problematic to define, so whatever is our best approximation to this), as opposed to the simulated or cached worlds in my mind. The interesting effect is that the real world evolves at a fixed pace, with old states constantly rendered obsolete, while imaginary ones don’t necessarily have this property, so experientially tuning into the real world can have the effect of ‘clearing my mind’.
• One way I’ve noticed how much of my awareness tuned into the world vs my mind is how vivid colours, imagery, sounds appear relative to other times I’ve seen or heard the same things. If something feels less vivid it’s likely I am more in my head. I also found it helpful to meditate at the same place, so small differences can become more noticeable.
• In the past I’ve often found people praying a weird activity, to me it felt like they concretely believed a being is receiving it on the other side, and maybe that’s still true of some, but I’ve noticed ‘praying to buddha’ as an activity at the end of a sit helps me discern what’s important from what’s trivial, becausing asking the buddha for help with something trivial feels deeply silly.
• Being able to sit and observe sadness or joy arise and dissipate unattached to any event that might’ve ‘caused it’ was one of the most shocking experiences I had in meditation. It helped me understand a little bit what centeredness or confidence meant.
• Lots of more complex emotions after scrutiny seem to just be different manifestations of fear, although in normal life I’d be hard pressed to point them out as fear. I’ve also not been able to let fear arise out of nothing so far.