My Meditation

So you have a cold and you meditate. The #1 thought is: I have a cold this is going to make my meditation not very good. My mind if foggy I will struggle and so on.

But this is the best opportunity for a particular realisation. Who does this cold and foggy mind belong to? Surely there is just a cold and a foggy mind and in fact rather than go through the mental gymnastics and thought processes to determine ahead of time the nature of our meditation if we just meditate on what there is we would see that our thoughts do not represent reality.

Now this is not to say that meditation when the body is ill is not of a different quality. We have less energy, we are more easily distracted, and the feelings we have are not so pleasant, perhaps nausea and even difficulty breathing. There is a lot of noise that is not usually present.

And yet the reason this affects meditation is just attachment to the body. When someone else's body has an illness does it affect "our" meditation? Why should our body affect meditation? The only reason must be that we see a difference between this body and that body. Intellectually we know there is just one universe and this body and that body sit side by side. And indeed the phenomena that are present are linked to this body not that body. For instance you close the eyes of this body and everything goes black, while the eyes of that body close the "world" remains unaffected. And I take this association between this body and the phenomena of the eyes as proof of attachment. But there lies the mistake. There is no attachment beyond that idea. True these eyes are linked to these phenomena via cause and conditions but that is all there is to say.

So actually nothing in the field of meditation is "mine" and nothing in the field can affect meditation. All things that arise, arise from cause and condition. And all things that have arisen will decay through changing condition. There is no distinction separating things into mine and not mine.

If meditation is affected by having an illness, then this highlights the present of ignorance and points towards the work to do.