A play on light

[Michael David]

Starting with any meditation feel the light. Proceed to the sense of a light inside yourself. You can start with looking at a light and then bringing the sense of that light into your heart. As you meditate the sense of light will develop. You know you can do this. Let the light raise up to a sense of seeing it with your inner eye as a visualization of the light.

Take this meditative light and gently visualize it being pushed against the inside of the skin of your body. As you do this a pleasant feeling will develop somewhere in your body or on the outside surface of your face, hands or arms. Let the sensation be there. Keep the visualization of the light pushing against the inside of your skin but in the background as you focus your attention on the sense of ease, comfort and pleasantness of the pleasant sensation. That is not on the sensation itself but on its pleasantness. Do not do anything else. Do not try to increase the sensation or its pleasantness. Just focus on what is there; the pleasantness itself.

If you focus attention on wanting more or where did it go then what will develop is more of the wanting and not more of the pleasantness. The pleasantness comes by itself as a byproduct of the pleasant sensation. It has an automatic feedback mechanism but you have to stay out of the way. If you focus on wanting more you have stopped focusing on the pleasantness and it will stop. It’s a bit like being outside at night and looking up at the stars. The bright ones in the middle are easy to spot but then as you relax your eyes you start to perceive feint dots of starlight further out to the edges of you visual field. But if you shift your attention to the edges to see them better they disappear. This is due to the way the rods and cones of the eyes work and is really a different phenomenon but is analogous to wanting more of something and by focusing attention on it, it actually decreases.

So sit back and take in some light. Meditate which is forming concentration. Sense the light and raise that up to a visual sense. Then take the meditative light and push it against the inside of your body. Feel for a pleasant sensation even just a little one. When it appears feel its pleasantness and that’s it just sense the pleasantness and do nothing else. Enjoy.


Michael