on watching the breath
It amazes me that I cannot sit still and watch my breath without being carried off into thought.
Is this simple Buddhist practice showing me what I’m really made of? That because I cant control my thinking, any thinking really is just robotic response mechanisms?
Perhaps I’m taking the wrong viewpoint. Who said there is a me, a breath, and a visual thing to focus on. maybe floating starts way beyond this. Beyond the physical assumptions of that breath practice.
What I find in the tank is constant floating of thought – no ability to hold a thought train. What I find in shamatha meditation (the breath thing) is that I fixate on certain thoughts which aggravate or excite me.
So one practice draws me into a bee’s hive of attraction or repulsion if I am not aware. The other keeps thoughts surfacing and falling away if I am not aware…. hmm..
Now, if you can have a thought and not react to it, then that means that you have weakened its effect on you. So maybe floating is dropping the charge in my thought bank automatically. While I have to work at it in shamatha?
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