Regaining my meditative concentration skills startlingly fast. Started slow, then took a big step upwards. Probably helps that that's most of what I did for years. Had forgotten how fun it is once you're half decent at it. (And, like physical exercise, how ass it is when bad.)
Concentration meditation is the best way for someone who has never meditated to discover, with horror, how fucked up their mind is and how little control over it they have.
but, having done years of Vipassana in the interim, I'm find that I'm much much more detached; regard most distractions as mere sense objects, and thus am much better able to ignore them as the petty if pesky meaningless crap they are. :)
I would add, that of all the meditation I've done except the few times I stumbled into Jhanas by mistake, that visualization concentration was the absolute most fun. Haven't done it in years though and it's a skill that degrades fast w/o practice.
deliberate hypnagogic hallucination was also fun, but probably a bad idea in the long run.
I do feel that the basic skills taught by meditation are things everyone should be taught when young. We become adults having never really learned to control attention or awareness and without decent equanimity and it makes unhappy and ineffective.
A few people get lucky, they learn the skills, often thru what amounts to chance. But there is no systematic learning of these skills in our society.
If there is reincarnation, I'd probably want to come back in a good taoist family with an internal martial arts practice. Health, physical discipline and a good basis for more advanced meditative practice.
But I imagine those slots, few as they are, would be hard to get.
But I imagine those slots, few as they are, would be hard to get.
Plus the internal martial arts oriented Taoists are about the sanest, most grounded spiritual people in existence. Get most of the benefits of real spirituality without most of the horrors of it.
and man, fucked up spirituality is super dangerous. It will drive you nuts or into the grave, in horror that is hard for most people to even imagine. Along the way, if you choose your teacher(s) wrong, you may get lots of physical abuse and use.
