Detach

The last few days have been pretty busy. I had hoped I would have more time for meditation, but .. hmm, I just have to detach and take it.

Even though I had only slept something like 5 hours, I managed to spend the whole day quite productively yesterday. Slept the whole night till the morning and no longer woke up in the middle of the night. Hopefully the "refresh rate" of my body hasn't decreased..

Ah, I wanted to see if the radiometer vanes would spin faster if there were no wobbling due to unstable moment of inertia. Used pk to keep the axis of rotation stable for the vanes. It no longer clicked against the iron support, but the vanes didn't seem to have sped up either. Anyway, the force of a 150W halogen lamp is pretty great on the radiometer (just a couple of inches away from the lamp). Haven't stopped it yet, but there have been a few close calls.

I think I just realized the actual point of these so-called 'chest' exercises. All this time I have been forcing them with almost sheer visualization power (with some detachment from the result) to keep them stable.

I started meditating on the whole room, while visualizing a pot filled with water above my head. With visualization, I could keep the pot almost stable. Occasionally I spotted a feeling of stillness that filled the whole room and the visualized pot stood completely still, even water didn't ripple inside. What I thought was still is no longer still for me. Perhaps this was what I had unconsciously wanted to teach to myself all this time. This 'chest' exercise was unbelievably difficult when done like this. Maybe that's what Naruto learned on Mt. Kyoboku while sitting on a balanced stone plate.

Just found out what detachment meant in Zen Buddhism - detachment from one's own thoughts (wiki). So far I have only associated detachment with being unaffected by desires, worries and relationships.

Practiced pk on the tin can again, hoping that I would spot that stillness I got earlier. After 30 minutes of pushing the feeling of movement and letting go repeatedly, I couldn't get it to wobble enough to make it rolling yet. I guess the stillness moments were too short-lived.