Came to the meditation quite relaxed, a bit less physical pain each day over the last few days, so not a distraction beyond wheat stretching out, as I do before I settle into the meditation posture.
The meditation went well, I believe, though not clearly in the direction of metta. I repeated the mantra and was able to let go the body, such that it was not a distraction, hardly fidgeting at all.
Again I did not connect directly to a loving kindness within self, yet felt that it was a barrier I was presenting to the world, which did not let loving kindness in. With that feeling circulating, I thought of those that loved me or showed me love and how I deflected it, or did not soak up the warmth of it, so I revisited the love and in my meditation looked to let it warm me. This did not flood me with love or warmth but gave some sense that I could be more open to love, not skipping over that part of existence as if I understood it and did not value it.
How can I give love fully if I do not experience it fully?
When the mantra moved to wishing happiness for all beings, I felt a shift which is hard to describe, one that was almost a sense of conscious detachment beginning from my physical body, I imagined it may be the start of the experience transcendental meditators call astral meditation. But it did not develop once I had tuned my attention to it. I stopped the audio for the metta meditation and sat with no guidance, wanting to follow wherever my meditation was taking me without it being ended by Bhante Sujato's guidance.
I did not 'go' anywhere, I sat and felt that a defining unity of human existence is uncertainty, we do not know, we rarely accept; we mostly search, fear that this life is all, question our place or run from the questions.
Yet this is one umwelt, our experience of existence is but one and perhaps we are experiencing it as part of a stage of being. When it is is accepted and truly lived and felt, then we move on. Perhaps: if there is a human ideology that applied to existence, which is a very egotistical notion. But maybe we connect with the larger existence in these ways that humans feel common ties, we experience life as a journey, a motion through what we call time. A journey supposes a beginning and and end which we have, so we project that on what we don't know, as if what we don't know has a human correlation, or we dismiss it and project a larger stasis, as if existence is always, again only frameable in human terms. Well, what else can we do? Since we acknowledge we are limited we believe we may transcend our experience when our life's journey ends.
There was another personal consideration that cropped up in metta, that has cropped up several times since beginning meditation. That I have this internal good, felt with certainty at the most empty time in my life, an almost defining characteristic beneath all others, and that my life should be used to do good for others, others beyond my immediately loved. It may be that in attempting this I do not do good, that somehow I cause confusion and suffer cyclical rejection and frustration, but that argument only keeps my stuck. Most things I feel, or anyone feels, about doing good can be shot down, but only letting myself live that part of life will tell its story. I hope I do move from considering it, from my internal argument and fears, to doing it.
