This flavor of meditation mandates that we keep our eyes closed,
Fearlessly,
Deeply penetrate this moment with your presence.
Resist the temptation of the mind going out and grabbing at experience.
Stand firmly in your own presence and let things come to you.
Let the sound of my voice come to you.
Let your thoughts come to you.
Let the sensations of your body come to you.
Resist the temptation of thoughts taking you away.
Allow the breath to come to you as well.
Let the in-breath happen gently and slowly.
Let the out-breath happen gently and slowly.
With your eyes closed,
Everything external is paused.
You can't see it.
Be in this innocence of not knowing.
Let the arrogance of,
Even though I don't see it,
I know that it exists.
We are in the exploration of truth.
When our eyes are closed,
We can't see,
Hence we don't know.
It's as close to true as possible.
I don't know it firsthand.
I can't experience it.
This innocence,
Wisdom,
Insight,
Honesty allows us to go deeper into our experience in the search of truth.
Even if our mind tries to convince us,
Flashing memories or images of the past,
Allow your discrimination to discard the images as stale and not the current experience.
We are trying to explore truth in the context of our body,
In the context of our current experience.
Any past knowledge is irrelevant here.
Any past experiences,
Degrees,
Qualifications are invalid here.
You don't have to fight your mind.
You just have to see through the facade,
See through the illusion that the superimposition of an image cannot be that thing.
For instance,
Become aware of your nose,
Your upper lip.
And the only way you can do that is by becoming aware of the sensations in that area.
Our eyes are heavily worked,
Our imagination is heavily worked.
Pause them for a bit and allow your sensory experience to give you the same knowing of your nose,
Of your upper lip in a different way.
These sensations are not the sensations that you feel when you touch something.
Although they are still sensations,
They are felt from inside the body,
So to speak,
Without touching anything.
The sensation of heat,
The sensation of cold are other such examples of the pure sensory experience giving us that knowing.
With eyes closed,
There is no sense of directionality.
There is no childlike honesty as a first-hand experience.
If you were newborn,
With the intelligence to understand my words and answer my questions,
But nothing else,
You wouldn't know what is up,
Down,
Right,
Left.
That childlike honesty is what is needed to dive deeper.
This mechanism of superimposition of images,
Superimposition of memories,
Ideas,
Beliefs happens so seamlessly that it fools the smartest of us.
What we are doing here is sticking to the first principles of human experience.
As a human,
We only have five sense perceptions,
Thoughts and sensations.
There is no other experience that we have at the core.
We can only see,
Smell,
Taste,
Touch,
Hear,
Think and feel.
Everything else is add-on.
We are stripping off everything except the basic building blocks.
Even within those basic building blocks,
We are focusing on sensations,
Which is your only experience of your body right now,
With eyes closed.
Any contours that you see,
Any shapes that you think you are seeing for your legs,
For your face,
For your hands,
Is purely imagination.
We are re-familiarizing our relationship with our body.
Actually,
There is no body right now,
There is only sensations.
Take your attention in your chest region and stay only with your experience of the chest.
Discard my direction of chest as a communication tool.
The moment you get it,
Drop it.
Feel the chest rising and falling as you breathe in and out.
Feel the balloon of sensations expanding and contracting as you breathe in and out.
Explore the chest on your left,
On your right,
And feel that entire section rise and fall.
You can't help but notice that it's not just the chest.
It's the belly,
The abdomen,
Entire belly and chest region ballooning slightly and collapsing.
The space within you is expanding.
Feel the truth of these words in your experience.
Forget about the anatomy class and strictly stay with your current experience.
With our eyes closed,
There is no concept of inside and outside.
The space is expanding with more space and the space is contracting with less space.
With every breath,
Space is being added to you and being removed from you.
If we zoom in,
We'll realize that not only is our belly expanding,
Our back is expanding into the chair or the sofa as well.
Space within space.
Space without space.
It might feel like you are still,
But notice how your upper back,
Your shoulders are being lifted with each breath and lowered with each out breath.
Offer all and any thought that arises into this space without drifting into your virtual world.
Let these sensations anchor you in this moment,
In this now.
Notice how your experience of your hips is completely reduced to a thick cloud of dense sensations.
You and the sofa have become one.
The sensations have merged.
If your eyes would have been open,
It would have given you the idea of separation,
That this is my hip and this is the chair.
But if you stay true only to your experience of sensations,
There is just one dense blob of sensations.
Your feet have become one with the ground.
Your knees,
Your calves are like stars in the sky,
Twinkling with sensations on and off.
Seems soft in comparison with the dense hip sensations and feet sensations.
Sensations nonetheless.
Any discomfort,
Any pain,
Any restlessness,
Offer it to the space in which they are arising.
You are not the sensations.
You are the one in which the sensations are arising.
Verify the truth of these words in your experience.
Are you the one that is flowing as sensations or are you the one witnessing the flow of sensations?
Is your body a solid body or is it a fluid body?
Do you have any experience of skin right now?
Or are you in a warm bubble bath of sensations?
Notice how your head has become transparent with only sensations pulsating all over your head,
On your face.
Feel the space inside your head,
Inside your mouth,
Behind your eyes.
Feel the space entering through your nose,
Merging with the space inside your throat,
All the way to your chest and your belly.
More space.
Without your eyes,
There is no way to know whether you are breathing through your nose or you are breathing all around.
Does breathing even mean anything or is it just sensations expanding,
Flowing,
Rising,
Falling?
Offer any thoughts into this fire of sensations.
Lose all directionality and witness this play of sensations.
Sensations throbbing.
If you have no sense of directionality,
See if you have any sense of borders or limits in your experience.
Do you see a start of anything,
An end of anything?
Do you see a start of yourself and a border to yourself?
Don't let the memory of having a skin convince you.
Let your current experience drive this exploration.
Even with your eyes closed,
You are as much you and your experience is as much your experience right now.
Trust your experience.
Based on your current experience,
If someone were to come along and ask you,
Hey,
Are you a man or are you a woman?
How absurd would that question sound?
Because right now you are in a pool of sensations that do not communicate any information other than them being sensations.
Are these sensations 20,
30,
40,
50 years old or are these sensations fresh?
Do you have any experience of age right now?
Actually,
Based on your current experience,
Do you know any concept of aging right now?
Does space ever age?
Are you the sensations in the space or are you the space in the sensations?
Or are you the sensations itself?
Are you moving or are the sensations moving?
Have you ever moved or have the sensations always moved?
Set your sensations free from this straight jacket of the shape of your body that you are used to seeing.
This cloud of sensations cannot be contained.
Let's not allow our eyes to limit who we are,
What we are.
Feel the immensity inside you.
Feel the immensity of you.
Be this formless you.
Be this borderless you.
Thank you.
