I discovered something today meditating in the garden after cutting the grass. I managed to achieve greater concentration for longer at a time than I had been able to previously. Distractions come. Intentions, even strong ones, and wishful determination do not bring about change in a person. Even though I want to meditate and I get frustrated and angry with myself when I cannot concentrate, I am still the same person with all the wants, feelings and desires I seem to have had forever. The fact that I am trying to meditate does not mean they have gone away and that in my meditating I am a different person. As long as I, the same person, am trying to meditate then the will to meditate is just one desire among all the others. The others will assert themselves as soon as habituation, or boredom, weakens concentration.
This afternoon concentration went well and I found that I could let the ‘person’ go. There was just awareness of breathing. Everything else, sounds, body, mind, feelings – I let them all go. For a few brief moments there was no ‘me’ just awareness of breathing. Of course I have read about anatta, and I have puzzled over it, and wondered, and thought I had understood it – but it was only an intellectual grasp of a concept. You only experience the phenomenal ‘me’ when you let it go, and you have to let it go to experience the ‘not me’. Only then is the ‘phenomenal me’ seen for what it is – as the ephemeral and insubstantial, constantly changing kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings and emotions.