I have a number of aspects that I want to work on and that I try to include in my daily practice. I want to increase my faculty of concentration, I want to soften myself using Metta and develop my energy by doing at least one MCO daily. So this evening’s meditation was comprised of these three items. I started out with 15 minutes of concentration on the sensations of the breath at the nose. This took an unexpected turn because of the Tiger balm my wife had put on my back because there is this muscle next to my right shoulder blade that had been hurting for a few weeks now. The scent of the Tiger balm is strong and it caught my attention. I tried to determine exactly where in the space of awareness that the consciousness of that scent was taking place. It was clearly at the nose and that got me thinking. How is it that we are able to know where a sensation is coming from? For example, when I touch something with my finger, the nerves send an electrical signal directly to the brain and then I can be conscious of the sensation and know where it is coming from. In comparison, if a computer needs to send info to a server it sends network packets to the server. These packets also contain the IP address of the sender so the server can know where the info is coming from. I can’t imagine that the electrical signal going from the nerve in my finger to the brain contains info about the location of the source. So the only possible explanation I can think of is that consciousness does not reside in the brain as I thought, but it’s present in the whole body; probably every cell. Interesting.
Of course, awakened people say that everything is consciousness, but that is theory for me.
Anyhow, this thought was during the first 15 minutes where I was supposed to be focusing on the breath. The next 15 minutes I did an MCO. No guided audio, probably will not use that again. It was a bit difficult this time because of the burning sensation of the Tiger balm on my back, that feeling seemed to bleed through in the sensations associated with the MCO.
I finished up with this Metta meditation, it was okay.
Feeling reasonably centered afterwards.