Become The Frustration

Here are my favorites among 112 meditations on consciousness as told to Devi by Shiva. Enjoy them but remember: If you try to become enlightened by practicing these meditations, you may experience great frustration — then, become the frustration.

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Consider your essence as light rays rising from center to center up the vertebrae, and so rises livingness in you.

Eyes closed, see your inner being in detail. Thus see your true nature.

Bathe in the center of sound, as in the continuous sound of a waterfall. Or, by putting fingers in ears, hear the sound of sounds.

Consider any area of your present form as limitlessly spacious.

Focus on fire rising through your form from the toes up until the body burns to ashes but not you.

Abide in some place endlessly spacious, clear of trees, hills, habitations. Thence comes the end of mind pressures.

Sweet-hearted one, meditate on knowing and not knowing, existing and not existing. Then leave both aside that you may be.

Feel cosmos as translucent ever-living presence.

When eating or drinking, become the taste of the food or drink, and be filled.

In summer when you see the entire sky endlessly clear, enter such clarity.

See as if for the first time a beauteous person or an ordinary object.

Simply by looking into the blue sky beyond clouds, the serenity.

Just as you have the impulse to do something, stop.

Feel yourself as pervading all directions, far, near.

Feel: My thought, I-ness, internal organs—me.

When some desire comes, consider it. Then, suddenly, quit it.

O Beloved, put attention neither on pleasure or pain but between these.

Toss attachment for body aside, realizing I am everywhere. One who is everywhere is joyous.

The appreciation of objects and subjects is the same for an enlightened as for an unenlightened person. The former has one greatness: he remains in the subjective mood, not lost in things.

Feel the consciousness of each person as your own consciousness. So, leaving aside concern for self, become each being.

As waves come with water and flames with fire, so the universal waves with us.

Feel an object before you. Feel the absence of all other objects but this one. Then, leaving aside the object-feeling and the absence-feeling, realize.

Wherever your attention alights, at this very point, experience.

Each thing is perceived through knowing. The self shines in space through knowing. Perceive one being as knower and known.

Beloved, at this moment let mind, knowing, breath, form, be included. *

* from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A collection of Zen and Pre-Zen writings. Compiled by Paul Reps. Anchor Books edition.