I am still a beginner at meditation. Some days it goes well, others, like today, badly. The nagging question at the back of my mind is this question of concentration on simple awareness, nothing more. There is a feeling that I should be doing something, praying perhaps, otherwise I will not get anywhere. I do not believe this is true, nevertheless the nagging doubt is there. There is also the temptation to deal with this rationally, by thinking it through. There is plenty in my reading to persuade me otherwise. Yesterday I came across this in Nishitani:
Our ability to perceive reality means that reality realises (actualises) itself in us; that this in turn is the only way that we can realise (appropriate through understanding) the fact that reality is so realising itself in us; and that in so doing the self-realisation of reality takes itself place.
(Religion and Nothingness p. 5)
It is a hard and difficult struggle getting there – it may, perhaps, be the most difficult thing I have ever done. Meditation is like trying to balance on a knife edge. Once one is out of the mind and focused on the simple awareness of breathing there is the danger of habituation. There is very little new sensory input and so the body and then breathing, gradually disappear. I notice tension round my eyes, a sign that I have begun to think. Back to concentration on counting breaths again – and so the cycle goes on, back and forwards. Yesterday and the day before I managed to hold the concentration on counting the breaths quite well. Today I did not manage it at all. It struck me that this problem I have of making sense with simple awareness is similar to that of wrestling with koans. There is no rational answer. Insight, enlightenment, satori, or whatever, will only come when one has broken through that barrier.