Q6-19890426-Larry_Rosenberg-UNK-conscious_breathing_i_reflections_on_anapanasati_i-1566 Leandra Teje

Talk: 19890426-Larry_Rosenberg-UNK-conscious_breathing_i_reflections_on_anapanasati_i-1566 Leandra Tejedor Start_time: 00:38:31 Display_question: What does the teaching say about having any kind of visual image while you're doing meditation? As opposed to simply being aware of a physical sensation. Keyword_search: visual images, sensation, nimitta, samadhi, concentration, aperture, cave, attention Question_content: Questioner: What does the teaching say about having any kind of visual image while you're doing meditation? As opposed to simply being aware of a physical sensation? Larry: Like what? Questioner: Well, for example, I guess I can use my own experience. I could start out with just perceiving a physical sensation, like the heart, or dealing with the whole body, or something. And then after a while, half hour, 45 minutes, it's almost natural. It seems that I somehow form a kind of visual picture. Larry: It just comes. Questioner: It just comes, yes. And it seems to even get me deeper into whatever. Larry: Yes. That's called a nimitta. And we didn't have time. But that can come up, in this practice. Sometimes the samadhi can become very, very deep and quite spontaneously. It's not contrived. An image can be like, what is your image like? Questioner: Kind of like a fire in the center of my body, that has a bellow attached to it. The breath of the bellow. Larry: Yeah. I wouldn't call that... to get real deep samadhi. That's too much. It's too big. I think that would be limited. But it's in that direction. What you can learn to do is, you then use that as the object. But this sounds too… it covers too much. But let's say what you could do is, eventually this is just sometimes, and this doesn't happen for everyone. One other path is at a certain level of concentration. These images come up. It could be one that for me, what comes up looks like an aperture looking out of a cave. It's just like a round thing, and it looks like there's just great light on the other side of this. It's as if I'm in a cave, and I can see through it to light on the other side. And it just comes up now. And it can be a tuft of cotton, or it could be any all kinds of things. Break_line: You then can use that because that's even more subtle in the breath, and you can enlarge it, and shrink it, and play with it. And that can also help with samadhi. But that's one way to do it. I would say that for this practice, what's emphasized is, developing the ability to pay attention, to what is. And in this case, as long as you haven't put it there on your own, that can be used as well. But you have to be careful, you don't get caught up in it. You like it, or you feel that it's exciting, or that this means that your practice is developing. Questioner: It just seems to have evolved and it's what captivates my attention. Larry: Yeah, probably what I would say, maybe a fair number of other people, who came in on an interview, would be go back to the breath, just be more reliable in the long run. I'd have to know you a little bit better to say more than that. End_time: 00:41:46