Just sitting?
There is seemingly nothing simpler than just sitting and yet people avoid it like the plague, they are too busy to do nothing, or it is too much effort, both can not be true and where there is a paradox, it just means that there is an underlying truth we have yet to find. The act of completely stopping seems to tap into a deep fear, it might just be too close to dying for some people, which provokes avoidance with distraction, or an apathy that manifests in fatigue so that they do not have to face that which terrifies them. However fears must be opposed or they will control you, they will pull on your strings and lead you a merry dance through your life, stopping is the only way to untangle yourself, and you closest you can get to absolutely stopping is by sitting.
To be clear this is not the unconsciousness of sleeping or everyday lazing about, it not binging on a boxset, reading a book, playing on your phone or daydreaming (not to say that it does not have it's pleasures), we are talking about truly doing nothing, just sitting and being open to everything that is happening within your consciousness. That is tough, we are always doing things, thinking, feeling, emotions flow as energy around your body, there are physical sensation firing, scratching, itching, cold, hot, moist, dry, ache, pain, tightening and releasing. There is a whole rainbow of distraction in our minds and bodies, and we are multi-tasking our attention, the mind switches from one to the next, as rapidly and randomly as it can between them, only stopping on whatever is causing us the most distraction in this present moment, we experience this rapid unveiling and switching of attention as the flow of time.
What chance do we have of slowing down that chaotic unveiling and why would we want to, well we have underneath this stream, discrete moments of attention, at the moment you are watching the frames from a hundred different films or streams of consciousness. What trained stable attention does is allow you to watch just one stream of consciousness at a time, just to be clear, there is always a stream of consciousness that is coming from your breathe, sight, hearing, feeling, they are always on, and your subconscious is listening (or at least one of them are, there are lots), you are just paying attention to one of them at a time with your conscious mind, the stations are always being broadcasted, you are just changing the channel all the time, so you never get to relax and watch one of them. As you can imagine, even the most boring channel is a relief after channel hopping for a lifetime, you get to untense and just see what is there.
Also as you might know multi-tasking is simply doing a lot of things badly, there is no peak performance possible in trying to write and skate board at the same time, just bad poetry and falling over. The trouble is all we have been doing for almost the whole of our lives is multi-tasking, it is our normal pattern of behaviour, to change that takes time, you do not suddenly start paying attention, which is what you need to just sit, you have to pay attention to the whole of your awareness, there is only two ways to know the world, through attention and awareness. You can train attention through using it, and there is no other way, regular boring practise, there are no short cuts and no special talents required, just time and effort, of course you might have already have some skill in attention, athletics, musicians, craftspeople, have had to pay attention to their skill in order to increase their expertise, so they have practised general attention but not the specific skill.
However it is still a step up to actually just pay attention to a single thing, that is what paying attention to your breath is, it is the practise of stable attention, and it a master skill that makes you better at everything you do, you learn faster because you can pay attention in a stable manner for long periods of time. No research has been done on how much faster mediators learn, as it is difficult to establish the quality of your attention in an objective manner, I can only tell you that it seems to be true for me, however what percentage more stable my attention is, is anyone's guess, but what excites me is not just that all that paying attention to the physical sensation of my breathe has had a real world benefit, it is what I get to use it for now in the current moment, the act of paying attention to the whole of my awareness is beautiful, in and of itself. It does not solve all your problem, but you do get to choose when you pay attention to them (late night problem solving only causes tension so you can not sleep and does not give you the answers that a good night sleep would), and it allows you to be at ease with discomfort, and that pain is a feature not a bug of life, the sooner you accept that the better then you can concentrate on having a better relationship with it, even grow to love it.
Which is a surprising, that you could love that discomfort, however what it gives you is far greater than what it takes, it gives you contrast, it shows you what you have to learn, it provides motivation and when you accept it, it gives you the ability to have a healthy and happy ordinary experience of how consciousness should be, in that it is ordinary in the sense of it is our default condition o flowing with events. I know we are all told that we are special little flowers, common sense tell us that we can not all be special or that word would have no meaning, and yet it turns out, that when we actually experience our consciousness (which is reality as far as we are concerned) it turns out to be a special kind of beautiful, not in a pretty as a picture way, as there are no static moments in consciousness, just movement, a changing picture that unfolds, and underneath that is just vastness, like a fractal, the closer in you get the more detail there is as if you were zooming into google maps with the scale just getting smaller. That is the promise of just sitting, you get to see the show, the ordinary turning of our consciousness, and it is available where ever you go, it is there already with you, you are already flowing, it is just that at the moment you are swimming against it and drowning.
Before enlightenment is carrying water and chopping wood, afterwards is just the same, the only thing that changes is your point of view, we are a process, we want things, we do things to get them, and we repeat for as long as we can. You can not increase the length of your life, but the depth is all up to you, you get to notice what is happening or you can do nothing on your sofa, that is a choice, and the second one can even be a good choice at times, especially at the end of the day after satisfying work, however if you really want to relax into that chair, you want to be able to pay attention to it, not still be multi-tasking on the rest of your problems. You do not get to stop, you do get to notice slowing down into dreamy awareness, and you do that by noticing what is happening in the process of being you, you get to see how one things effects the others, how relaxing the tension in your stomach causes your thoughts to slow down, how presence with you heart brings you the feeling of love and joy, how awareness is a flow and not a static picture.
That is one of the secrets of awareness, it never stops as long as you are aware of it, it changes, discomfort comes and goes, everything is interconnected and yet ultimately empty, form comes from that emptiness and collapses back, there is always flow, we are the processes that moves through time and has awareness of that movement. It is such a unique survival technique that it utterly dominates every other creature on this planet and can even change the planet, we can see the future and do something about it, it is miraculous, however the benefits of miracles are only available to those who are open to them. There is no use in seeing the future if you do nothing about it, you are just turning a train wreck into a slow motion experience, the same is true for you, once you have insight it must be turned into action.
Just sitting might seem counter-intuitive, the opposite of action but you have to ask yourself, is it better to spend ten hours chopping down a tree with a blunt axe or spending an hour sharpening that axe and an hour to chop to slice through that tree. That is what just sitting promises, it is an investment in being a better, sharper and more direct axe, it is being able to see the weak spot in that tree, where you want to fell it and to keep you on target so that all your motion travels through that point of contact. Then when you multiply the power of that efficiency, when you can ignore everything that is irrelevant to the task at hand, that is how just sitting becomes the mother of all action, and how her children will inherit the earth.
We sit so that we are open to experiencing life exactly as it is, we give up our expectation, regrets and just accept what is flowing through our awareness, we notice our attention and keep on relaxing it back to the whole of our awareness, opening up to the next attention grabbing sensation that pops up. There are not instant moments of change, the practise is training not just our consciousness decision to relax our attention but in turn is training our sub-consciousness to do the same, we are model the behaviour in our conscious mind so that the rest of us follow the lead, in just the same way that we learnt to ride a bike, we try and fail until we ride, then we forget how to ride. That is the destination that we seek, to ride our consciousness as a flow without ever drowning in it again, to see the unfolding of the process that is our experience, and when we love what that is, we get to sit in harmony with it, which is what just sitting is.
