AskingQuestions105

I just came up with this technique, but I think its a really good one. It's called: "If there were no past..." The meat: We are always either seeking something or wanting to get rid of something, which ends up taking us away from the present moment, and creates much affiliation and emotional bondage to the object at hand. Let's say if a desire comes up, such as masturbation: Simply say to yourself and contemplate in a sense "If there were no past..." You may be feeling tons of sexual desire, and it leads you to an emotional decision. But when you say "If there were no past...", you begin to think about how, if you had never watched porn, masturbated, or even knew of such outlets, then that leads you to directly experiencing the sensations as it is in the present moment. You now see them as merely just sensations arising. If you take the mindset of there never have been a past experience, then the past no longer has any control over you or your emotions, and you can more easily just watch observantly and objectively the sensations at hand and thus realize impermanence, not-self, and unsatisfactoryness a lot easier, especially for the things that trigger an emotional response rather quickly. You can do this for anything, including fear, unpleasantness, etc, even happiness. You merely just take away the past and look at it as if you've never had an experience of that nature before, which also helps to take away impulsive actions and the proliferation effect.

To give a little background of myself, I've gotten to 1st jhana twice in regular sitting meditation. I'm still very familiar with the feelings/sensations of 1st jhana. How it happened: I was dreaming that I was in school, and we had new seats in our classroom. I found my seat and then class started. But it wasn't a normal class, we were told to meditate, and I insantantly knew to go for jhana. I sat on the floor in the dream and began meditating. There came a point in the dream where I had so much physical sensation in my head, and the teacher was actually feeling my head. This sensation became so intense that I sort of realized that I was actually doing this physically (non-dream) during my sleep. It was as if the physical me was using my dream of meditating as its anchor, but the dream me was using breath as its anchor. Even though physically I was laying down, it felt like I was sitting like I was during the dream. After I realized I was having the same piti physical sensations in real life, it grew even more, but its as if my desire for jhana came back, and I wasn't able to enter. It was kind of cool though, because whilst I was having the dream, my mind was able to use the dream as its anchor very well to physically almost attain jhana without any feeling of effort, wantingness, or control. However, once I realized I was having piti in real life and getting close, the effort, wantingness, and control came, which hindered me if you will. I guess I'm just wondering if there's any significance in this. I'm not really asking if this was a 'true' experience, because I can tell it was happening in my physical body. Even though I didn't attain jhana, it felt even more profound than my cushion jhanas I've experienced and basically all my other meditation experiences, as my mind felt way more concentrated and one-pointed with the most inexplicable ease. I guess I'm also wondering, why? Why'd it feel so much more highly concentrated, with so much less effort, practically none? I'm not even sure how I'd go about 'replicating' this to an on cushion experience, because it all just sort of 'happened'. Thanks. Sidenote: This was not a lucid dream either. I kind of just recognized piti sensations in the dream, and then shifted to recognizing them in my physical body.