http://www.goldenflowermeditation.com/the_method/
I originally wrote this not for the blog but on my journal. I decide to post it only because it turned out to be quite a piece of work, me believing that I managed to capture in it the one feeling, the one passion, which is pervaded in the consciousness when the practice is going right. I believed that that character in this work would be of inspirational value to others in their own practice.
I wrote this after I started the practice with certainty for the first time, what with the time needed to be sure of the actual technique... the original SGF text itself notwithstanding, Semple's method explanation has some obscure points, perhaps because each point requires so much explanation, as the original manual itself shows! My last deep understanding of another method, detailed in earlier posts, which I truly believe I "received", did very little with passing time, as it requires an understanding that involves a similar form of abstract thing that has to be felt within as this method, in order to keep moving. That feeling, the Void, is long unfelt, but with this method there is a better anecdotal evidence, and I decided to post this, mere impressions, before I got my own.
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I remember J. J. Semple saying something about the interdependencies of the different steps. With the abstract aura with which the very method is pervaded, his saying comes to have a deeper meaning to my experience.
"The center in the midst of conditions"--the translators say it refers to the point between the two eyebrows. Semple himself opts for vagueness by referring to a "center" which one has to find for oneself: nothing more said, except a hint--that after time, one's very being expands from the center. I remember my own experiences during meditation when I pierced through the darkness behind closed eyes, sensing things beyond the limits of my flesh-and-bones, growing beyond them.
And the well-placed understanding of the hint does point at the former meaning of the phrase again--that The center in the midst of conditions is the point between the two eyebrows, the seat of the ajna chakra, or 3rd eye. But this sense of no-certainty augments the vagueness. One ultimately turns to the one entity the vagueness and void open up to: one's true self. It signals, it shows, and there is a queer certainty within the empirical--or rather anecdotal--uncertainty.
So one's own self reveals the center. As of yet (at the time I write these words) these very few days into the practice, I have started to believe this: the Center is a process.
Like all the abstract truths, all the thought-archetypes, this one has some more truth or idea within it. The center is a process--that is the deeper meaning of the saying regarding the interdependencies; aside from the original meaning that is explained in the above link, this is the other meaning.... my personal one.
The actual practice is, as said, pervaded by the vagueness of the instructions. One seeks to keep the gaze pointed at the tip of the nose; seeks to keep the eyelids low; seeks to focus on the sensation at the root of the nose produced as a result of the gazing; and lastly one seeks to breathe deep into the belly and focus on it. When these all integrate as one progresses, when the breath is deep, slow and easy, when one truely feels the breath and the focus moves with it, one grasps hold of something invisible in the stream of consciousness, in the beam of focus which tells, with that queer certainty, that the work is working. A sense of optimism, that something turns out to be, or a sense of being "in the zone"; a feeling, which Semple says, dawns when one puts one's heart to the center.
Ergo, the center is not a place; it is a process. For only when that progress works properly does the sense of rightness and progress come.
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