my digital garden

Meditations

Note: This is a living note, an auto generated page synthesized by my self updating second brain managed by Claude. While it's input was my actual organic writing, this is an AI summary/extraction/synthesis part of my The Living Notes section.

If you prefer to read my organically written words or work, please go to any of the other nav links besides living-note or a page, route, or tag without #living-note.

Meditations

Noting Practice

Primary technique: noting meditation. Observing arising phenomena — thoughts, sensations, emotions, perceptions — and labeling them as they arise without identification or following.

Method:

Key insight: The noting creates a split-second gap between arising and identification. That gap is where freedom lives.

What Ingram adds to this is the instruction to turn the hindrances themselves into objects. Boredom, restlessness, the desire to quit, the fantasy of progress — these are not obstacles to practice, they ARE practice when noted. The move is from caring about content to caring about whether I knew the sensations of what was happening. A wandering mind is not failure; it is a meditation object the moment I note "wandering." Ingram also names the three fundamental reactions — attraction to the pleasant, aversion to the unpleasant, and ignorance of the neutral — as the engine beneath all selfing. Noting interrupts this engine at the level of raw sensation, before the reaction can mature into narrative. At the deepest level, this is what the 7th fetter literature describes: the automatic superimposition of "somethingness" onto bare experience. Every time I note a phenomenon, I am briefly suspending the assumption that there is a solid thing there to be noted — and in that suspension, the fabricated solidity loosens.

Contemplative Inquiry

Directed investigation into the nature of experience:

Related to non-dual / Advaita inquiry. See spiritual.

DiLullo adds a practical method here: when resistance arises, ask "what belief am I holding?" — not analyzing the resistance but locating the hidden thought operating beneath it. Stress, defensiveness, tension — each has a thought doing the thinking for you, and the inquiry is to find it and see it directly. Sarvapriyananda adds the vertical dimension: the ground of all inquiry is Turiya — awareness prior to waking, dreaming, or deep sleep. Invisible, untransactable, beyond thought. The "Who is aware?" question doesn't lead to an answer; it dissolves into the ground that was never absent.

Daily Practice Structure

Notes reference a "Daily" and "Daily do" structure — regular tracking of intentions, reflections, inner state.

Dark Night Group / Dark Knight Journey

Community processing members of a small contemplative group. Dark night of the soul territory — the dissolution of previous identity structures. Not pathology; a recognized stage in contemplative development.

Facilitated by Shiv. The dark knight journey is distinct from the community group — it is Shiv-facilitated work. Significant breakthrough in this context (early April 2026): liberation of long-held tension with father (recognized as really tension with self); realization of deep similarity to father; desire for a direct, human-to-human relationship. Shiv also pointed to self-awareness expansion as possibly the most important project in Tawsif's life.

Program specifics (from Day One prep guide): Tawsif is in Group B — Tuesdays 3:00–4:30 PM Pacific, 90-minute sessions. The program runs September 16, 2025 through August 25, 2026 (50 weekly occurrences). Monthly private 1-on-1s with Shiv supplement the group work. Session format: 15-minute silent opening meditation, then dialogue and exercises. Props used in future sessions: extra chair (gestalt/psychodrama tool — empty-chair work for shadow figures and relational objects) and handheld mirror (direct self-confrontation). The program name is a deliberate shift from "dark night" to "dark knight" — the knight goes into the darkness equipped, not merely suffering it.

Body-Rhythm Meditation

Shiv's key teaching: meditation dictated by the rhythm of the body. Not technique-based or effort-based. The body moves at its own pace; awareness follows that, rather than concentrating on an external anchor. This landed as the natural mode for Tawsif.

Related: unconscious phone use as "doing to get space from doing" — using any activity as escape from being. The body-rhythm approach is the antidote: not another doing, but awareness of what the body is already doing.

Shiv's "living on edge" writing asks the deeper question underneath: why does thinking happen at all? His answer: dukkha — unsatisfactoriness — is the engine. The body-mind generates thought because it's perpetually uncomfortable with what is. Body-rhythm meditation doesn't try to manage or redirect the thought-loops; it rests awareness in what the body is already doing, and the thinking settles on its own because there's nothing left to solve. OSHO describes the same principle: witnessing as the only stable balance — not emotional flattening but totality of action. Let what arises be seen without identification, and the body finds its own rhythm. This isn't technique; it's the absence of technique.

Sitting With It

The core practice described across many Rosebud entries: sitting with discomfort — not solving, not strategizing, not transcending. Feeling into the body. The gap between knowing and living the practice is "sitting with it" — again and again, until awareness catches the reaction earlier in the chain. Not through effort; awareness becomes more aware on its own.

Shiv's "7 Minutes of Nirvana" names this precisely: the practice is sitting with the void rather than filling it. Every human strategy — ambition, pleasure-seeking, spiritual seeking — is an attempt to fill the hole. The hole IS the wholeness. Dukkha isn't something to solve; it's the unsatisfactoriness of a mind that hasn't stopped trying to solve. His "art of learning how to suffer" extends this: peace is a byproduct of making peace with suffering, never a direct goal. Trying to achieve peace through sitting is another avoidance strategy. The agents of peace are those who've stopped trying to escape pain. Tollifson's "no hope" lands similarly: hope is the ego projecting past onto future. Sitting without agenda — without even the agenda of being without agenda — is the only honest posture.

Buddhist Inquiry: Anatta, Anicca, Dukkha (from Day One journal, 2023–2024)

Active investigation into the three marks of existence during the Long Island NY period — before the Rosebud year and the Austin move.

Anatta (no-self): The self cannot be found in body, brain regions, thoughts, emotions, memories, or sensations — all are empty of inherent existence. Yet the felt sense of self persists: belly tightening, chest tightening, elevated heart rate. The gap between conceptual knowledge and felt realization is the central problem. "I know this intellectually but not in the heart."

Sunyata (emptiness): Everything is causally, mereologically, and conceptually dependent. Fork → metal → molecules → atoms → quarks → nothing holding itself up. Color is fabricated by photoreceptors. The monitor is empty. The self is empty. Emptiness itself is empty. "It is empty all the way down."

Bahiya Sutta framing: "In seeing, only the seen. In touching, only the touched. In thinking, only the thoughts." No seer, toucher, thinker — awareness is at the point of contact; the thought "I am aware" arrives after the contact itself.

Madhyamaka / Nagarjuna: No ultimate existence for any phenomenon, including the witness or awareness itself. Just phenomena: "keys clacking, thoughts thinking."

Typing meditation (discovered Feb 2024): Writing without volition — just observing the words arrive. "These words write themselves. The fingers have been typing without me being aware of it." Writing as a samadhi vehicle.

Jhana (March 2024): Brief concentration meditation experience that felt like entering jhana states — described as equanimous and pleasant.

Daniel Ingram influence: Three-track structure of morality, concentration, and insight/wisdom. Noting not just thought content but type: planning, anticipating, worrying.

Investigations

Bear note titled "Investigations" under meditations tag — three open inquiry questions:

  1. Can awareness/attention zoom in and zoom out?
  2. What causes attention/awareness to zoom in or out? Why is it behaving the way it is?
  3. What is the phenomenological difference between being and awareness?

The third question is the deepest: is pure awareness (turiya/rigpa) the same as simple being/presence, or is awareness always "of" something while being is prior to all subject/object structure? This remains genuinely open across Advaita, Theravada, and Dzogchen.

Gratitude Practice

Expansive, deliberate. Gratitude for:

Not gratitude as positive thinking performance — gratitude as recognition of radical interdependence.

Open Attention

Alongside noting (which is systematic, empirical, effortful in its way), there's a complementary orientation: open attention as the whole practice. Tollifson is the clearest voice here. Here/Now is not a state or experience to attain — it is the experiencing itself, equally present as every experience. Meditation isn't about correcting what shows up; it's about beholding it. The instruction is absurdly simple: attend. Not to anything in particular. Just attend.

Watts arrives at the same place from a different angle: there is no separate thinker apart from thought. The watcher dissolves when this is seen directly. Zen says it plainly: in summer we sweat, in winter we shiver — total non-resistance. De Mello: awareness (not technique, not willpower) is the vehicle; fighting a thing ties you to it. Shiv's "matter of fantasy" cuts to the bottom: you are already awake. Feet on floor, breath in body — here it is, this is awake. The part that cares about awakening could never awaken. The part that is awake doesn't care.

This isn't anti-practice. It's the recognition that the gap between "practicing" and "living" is the last illusion. Tollifson calls it exploring (as opposed to seeking): present-moment contemplative inquiry that allows experience to reveal itself rather than grasping for revelation. See no-self for where this leads.

The Fetter Path

The Buddhist fetter (samyojana) model from Simply the Seen provides a technical progression framework for what noting and inquiry point toward. After the first three fetters (self-view, doubt, attachment to rites/rituals) are broken through the initial no-self insight, the path continues with increasingly subtle layers of selfing.

Fetters 4 & 5 — Desire and Ill Will: The gap between sensation and reaction is where these operate. Desire is the assumption that there's an inherent reason to respond to sensory experience in any particular way; ill will is the assumed entitlement to react against what one doesn't want. The Simply the Seen author weakened these through a specific inquiry: pausing before a reactive email and asking "so tell me again why I need to do this?" — then sitting in dynamic tension, holding the issue without acting on it, finding nothing actually requiring the reaction. Breaking them produced unconditional equanimity and patience — not theoretically but structurally. Suffering vanished with the reactions.

Fetter 7 — Perception Itself: The deeper layer. The belief that there's a faculty of perception that detects tangible, inherently existing "somethings." This creates the experience of living in a world of solid objects. The four formless jhāna states map to the four layers of this assumption: perception itself, somethingness, consciousness infrastructure, and finite space. Each layer peels off in meditation, but the jhāna states are symptoms — the belief that generates them is the fetter.

This maps directly to the noting practice: every time I note a phenomenon, I'm briefly suspending the assumption that there's a solid "something" there. The fetter framework names what noting is actually doing at the structural level.

Surrender and Non-Doing

The anti-method teaching runs through much of the reading. Krishnamurti: seeking a system is the desire to escape; no method can free you; in the acuteness of suffering lies its own dissolution. McKenna: surrender as freedom from hope, desire, expectation — not passivity but the recognition that "I control nothing yet am in perfect control." Tollifson: meditation motivated by a future result is suffering again; there is no doer behind practice.

Hesse puts it narratively through Siddhartha: searching means having a goal, and having a goal is the ego's need for certainty. Finding means being free, open, goalless. The shift from searching to finding isn't an achievement — it's a release. Think-wait-fast as freedom from urgency. Surrender to flow as the inflection point where the ego stops fighting fate.

Brown (Liberation Beyond Imagination) adds the phenomenological frame: seeing is doing. Direct contact with experience prior to story is not something extra that must be generated; it's what's already happening before the narrative machinery spins up. The shortest path is noticing presence in its rawest form. There is nothing to add.

Writing as Contemplative Practice

McKenna's spiritual autolysis turns writing into a demolition tool: pen as sword, paper as arena, you as your own mortal enemy. Write what you know to be true and keep refining until nothing remains that's actually true. The imagined recipient method — writing as if to someone who needs to understand — forces clarity the mind alone cannot achieve. This is not journaling; it is forensic self-honesty.

My own typing meditation (Feb 2024) was an independent discovery of the same principle: writing without volition, observing the words arrive, recognizing that the fingers were typing without "me" being aware of it. Writing as samadhi vehicle. McKenna's autolysis framework names what I stumbled into: focused writing as a co-creative interface where intent meets attention and something beyond personal narrative emerges. The road is the goal (Nisargadatta via McKenna) — the writing itself is the practice, not the insight it produces.

Listening as Non-Doing

Unresolved Blind Spots

2026-04-10 (from ingest of readwise/Books/Who Am I.md): invisible, untransactable, beyond thought;

#contemplation #daily #living-notes #meditation #noting #practice