The seeker is double-edged. On the one hand the curiosity and willingness to investigate is invaluable for the journey. On the other hand the seeker gets caught in the seeking. Come to recognize in your own practice how the seeking becomes all consuming. Then at some point begin to drop the looking for and start being more. You must start questioning your seeker, the one that wishes to “get” something. This questioning is what Zen master Hakuin pointed to when he said you must have “a great ball of doubt”. See how the seeker is circular. Look at how much time you spend conceptualizing what it may mean to be in Samadhi and grope your way in trying to figure it out. You may find yourself reading the commentary instead of the original text. At some point, as you begin dropping the dialogue of what it is going to look like and begin to rest, profoundly in the “original brightness” of mind and heart, then the part of you that is pursuing, seeking loses its grip. As you rest in the ground of being, you can feel how this being-ness, like prana, permeates everywhere throughout your body and mind. It is valuable to notice the difference in the opening between the right and left side of your body, the difference in sensation between the right and left hemispheres of your brain. The sensation of spaciousness will pervade the right hemisphere much more readily than the left. What shift toward spaciousness can you experience on your left side?
As you rest in this ground of openness, keep in the back of your mind’s eye, that the state, ultimately is inconceivable. Like space itself, it is empty. Any attempts to label or i.d, any attempts to recognize it conceptually are merely mental elaborations. It takes some guts (if this phrase can include a real softening of the gut) to stay in the non-conceptual, the non-doing, the non-grasping. Fortified with the patience and calm to rest there, the feeling of serenity can spread. Any further impulse toward deciphering what the state must be like is witnessed as a mere abstraction. The process of conceptualization loses strength. As the mystic Shabkar wrote, “This all penetrating intrinsic awareness is a vast expanse of space. All experience of samsara and nirvana arise in it like rainbows in the sky.” This sky is also ground, the ground of prana-citta that pervades all the cells and all the synapses, all thought, all activity and perception.
