Shadow Wall Gazing
As hard as it is for ones mind to be come still. the process only gets worse when to try to force your mind into stillness- a state of having no identification with your thoughts.
I tried my hand at wall gazing as in Chan or the Zen School, and found my self getting absolutely nowhere. One is supposes to sit erect facing a fall and just start perceiving non-duality by realizing the wall is staring back at you.
I tried to do wall-gazing for the past 2 days. and today something strange happened. i was sitting facing the wall, and apparently there was a window behind my back and the sunlight was just flooding into the room.and i noticed something , a shadow was being cast on the wall before me, and the shadow was a very hazy one, i could actually see many layers of the shadow being superimposed on each other. and there i was looking at a very opaque but not sharp image of mine. it was very unexpected , and i started to observe the shadow , and i notice that i could sit there and just gaze at the shadow for a really long time. I guess the mind it self just gave up arguing and complaining about a shadow of the very body which it had successfully deluded to be identified with it. At last! victory of the identification and the conditioning, albeit a very temporary one. but the fruits of such a dis-identification are very high indeed.
and so i have been shadow-wall-gazing for sometime today, and i feel its a great exercise to attain stillness , especially when the mind is very very restless.
3:04 PM |
Category:
meditation,
mind,
shadow wall gazing,
Stillness,
wall gazing,
Zazen,
zen
|
3
Comments
Comments (3)
Is this really the teaching to "see the wall looking back" ?
It seems such a dual notion for Zen, can you clarify please?
Well i have known of wall gazing only though the series of dharma talks [audio files] from www.freebuddhistaudio.com , and a few books i had read randomly.
u can look up a series of talks called "Tangling eyebrows with the zen masters" by Padmavajra at freeBuddhistAudio.com.
now i cant testify if his views are authentic or not, but i can only say that i had learned about wall gazing there.
well i can assure u that the view which was said By Padmavajra is not a dual notion, cause in that audio file he clearly explains why that is a non-dual perception... i think u can listen to that file...
here is the link to the wall gazing lecturehttp://www.freebuddhistaudio.com/talks/details?num=OM700
and here is the link to the entire series of lectures called "Tangling Eyebrows with Zen Masters", of which the "wall-gazing" lecture is a part of.
i hope i cleared your doubt.
as for the what the teaching really is, (as an inexperienced person) i don't think i am qualified to give an opinion about it.
thanks for your interest,
do leave a comment in reply.
thanks, plenty of interesting thing there.