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Thanks, folks, for helpful comments on how to get
rid of irrelevant thoughts when trying to meditate, both recently and when I
last brought up this topic. Suggestions seem to fall into three categories
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1. Accept them calmly, briefly register them
and then let them go;
2. Expel them from the mind as soon as they
appear. A recent comment (sorry, I've lost the name of its author)
proposed visualising them being flushed away as though down the
toilet.
As I probably mentioned before, my favourite
visualisation is to imagine my mantra (with a sibilant and then a hard,
forceful sound - resembling "SSSay your MANtra" - as the sound of oars
feathering back and then pulling: I'm sitting in the stern of a small
boat, being rowed by a hooded, shadowy figure (I couldn't be rowing myself, as
I'm fully relaxed; the figure is vague so I don't give any thought to its
features). The boat is moving down a dark, still canal towards a distant
brilliantly illuminated region which I enter when (hopefully) I attain the
alpha state. In this scenario, I try to push any extraneous thought up
onto a bridge which carries it away overhead.
3. Block them from entering the mind at all.
In a similar scenario, the boat is being rowed through a cave or tunnel with
rough rocky walls; on its prow is a torch with a guttering flame (which
also helps to keep the rower in deep shadow) whose light plays on the walls
and the slightly choppy water. If I concentrate on this flickering
pattern, it seems to shatter the details of any extraneous thoughts before
they fully register.
The only problem with this is
that a visualisation is, in itself, necessarily a thought. Is developing a
visualisation in fact obstructing the objective of meditation rather than
helping to achieve it ?
Tony N-S.
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