Inside Shinzen's Brain

I'm interested in what happens inside your brain in any given day.

Obviously from doing this practice for as long as you've been doing it your functioning in a different way.

An I remember you telling me of how they hooked you up one time to get your brain studied. Maybe it was University of Arizona someplace and the technician came into you instead now don't start meditating yet until we turn on the equipment and use as if I could stop and you use the analogy of saying it's as if you asked someone with a lot of muscles to just don't have muscles for a minute, so much a part of how you function.

I would like you to give.

Me us a taste of what it's like inside your brain and any given day as best you can just in terms of your processing are you. I know you've talked about meditating in the visual field or I would just give me a taste.

How you process your experience and what's deliberate?

Applying a technique in which just happens if I were to.

Give the big picture of what my days are like.

I would say that typically on any given day.

My experience ranges from.

Scattered and unconscious.

In a sense as though I had never meditated. I'm choosing my words carefully in a sense as though I've never did never meditated. It ranges from that to direct contact with the spiritual source involving literally seeing through this world.

As I'm bopping around within it, which is also an experience of myself and world arising from and returning to the source.

Um.

So my experience ranges between.

Something like

A person that has never meditated.

And something like absolute oneness with absolute fulfillment.

And it ranges.

Between those and the main feature what the impact of the 40 years of practice is is I don't have much preference between those 2 states.

Someone wants astero, she in my presents what the definition of Enlightenment is.

And he said, Soto little subtly deny to know Kupets, who got Knockroon Arico to Daschle, which in Japanese means I guess you could say Enlightenment is the passing away of the distinction between an alignment and non alignment.

That was that rather that was my 0 she very famous Roshi in Los Angelus as many students all over the world great students that are doing great work.

So anyway, there's not a it, ranges from completely deluded to quasi enlightened without a preference.

Between those and that's what's just naturally rising that's not within applied effort of any like that's correct if there's an applied effort, then obviously it starts to valence towards.

That state of of energy and emptiness.

But the main feature daily Life Is there's not a preference, which is in stark contrast. When I began. When I practice and probably in stark contrast to just about wherever you want begins because when you begin you want something you want to fit your getting somewhere. You want certain experiences. So my early years of practice where preoccupied with comparing Maps and finding every possible experience in every description.

And then needing to have all of those experiences and wanting to have this or that happened, which is what I think a lot of People when you gotta start somewhere. So that's sort of natural so I could see the biggest change that has taken place is that I don't have that big a preference between Enlightenment and non enlightenment.

That's sort of the big picture.

Then if I'm intending to meditate what in action in in life. As I'm like I'm talking to you now OK, so if I'm going to be intentionally meditating now. I just started to intentionally meditate us. We're talking an typically meditate in the visual external visual field and I typically a meditating on the process of simultaneous expansion and contraction, causing the world in front of me to arise.

The men disappeared so that I'm now applying a formal technique. I'm arising and disappearing revising and disappearing from the source moment by moment. Therefore you appear to me to be the source and therefore very effortlessly lovable. I'll take it but.

No more available in the flower next to you, or the garbage can outside.

So that would be in and now if I'm doing formal practice where I'm seated and my eyes are closed. I will do any of the five ways that I teach I use all my own my own techniques. Just sort of depending on interest opportunity and necessity, although recently I've been tending to default to the technique that I call do nothing.

But do nothing technique that's what I've been using recently for my own formal practice.

Do you find that subversion of focus on rest in terms of it 5 way formulation that I use when you were talking about everything dissolving into having no preference. You could in a sense defined could you set it. I now have no preference for enlightenment or not enlightenment, but is enlightenment. Then this process of having no preference that's a stage where In other words.

1st when you start enlightenment is a figure and the world is a ground you in the world are the ground and you have this fantasy of enlightenment. That's a failure at some point. There's a shift of figure ground reversal and you and your world are the figure.

And the actual experience of Enlightenment is the ground.

And you may may go through many years and in fact, decades of preferring to be in that state.

But then that tends to pass away with time.

And if you want to know what I'm preoccupied with I am preoccupied just like anybody like somebody wakes up and they're preoccupied with money or their health or sex or drugs or whatever. I'm preoccupied. There's something I default to as a sort of obsession.

If you understand that someone in quotes but it would be my version of being obsessed. What obsession is in my consciousness. The obsession is? Can I figure out better ways to bring masses of People?

To what I experience.

That's what I default to like.

How smart can I be? How creative can I be?

In the service of the world.

Not a bad default.