Today is a day off work. Slept in, started laundry and set dirty dishes to soak, then sat.

Really, there’s not much to report from today’s sitting. Nothing really new or different. I sat, did body scan (now tied to breath), and then Wandering Mind and her family, Thoughts, Equanimity, Chakras, Pain, Curiosity, and Moments of Emptiness, came to visit.

I thought about last night’s class on the Diamond Sutra. Sometimes things seem funny to me that no one else is responding that way to, and I keep my mouth shut. The way Subhuti and the Buddha spoke to each other sounded exceedingly formal to my ears, and some mischievous part of me wanted to insert the word “Dude” in there. So pardon this indulgence.

“Even so, Dude, if a noble son or daughter should set forth on the bodhisattva path, how should they stand, how should they walk, and how should they control their thoughts?”

“Well, said, Dude! Well said. So it is, Dude. It is as you say.”

I am probably not cut out to be a scholar.

The gist of it is a paradox, which in my admittedly limited familiarity with Buddhism, seems most characteristic of Zen. “…I shall liberate [all beings]. And though I thus liberate countless beings, not a single being is liberated… And why not? Dude, a bodhisattva who creates the perception of a being cannot be called a bodhissatva. And why not? Dude, no one can be called a bodhisattva who creates the perception of a self, a being, a life, or a soul.”

Who creates the perception? See, this is something people struggled with in 400 BC too. Maybe creating a perception means interpreting experience. Maybe creating a perception means naming. We did an exercise in knowing and softening to not knowing.

Flint Sparks, the Zen priest who taught this class, brought up Jill Bolte Taylor’s video and book, My Stroke of Insight, and her description of right-brain awareness, as a way, in my perception, of helping us grok the shift in awareness from ordinary left-brain thinking that the Dude is pointing to.

But I could be wrong.

This morning’s zazen was heavily influenced by a book I’m reading titled The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body. Les Fehmi, biofeedback pioneer and director of the Princeton Biofeedback Centre, and Jim Robbins, science journalist, are the authors.

The major premises of the book are that (1) the way we customarily pay attention is using a narrow focus on objects and details, (2) that this habitual narrow focus produces chronic stress and is useful only in limited circumstances, and (3) that there are other ways of paying attention that are immersive and diffusive — ways that alleviate physical/emotional pain and optimize performance and well-being.

I’m about halfway through reading it. The book comes with a CD with a couple of recorded trances on them, and that’s what influenced my meditation.

Simply put, one of the trances is becoming aware first of your thumbs in a three-dimensional way. Then you do that with your forefingers, then thumbs and forefingers together, then the space between them.

You add an awareness of a subatomic level in which the distances are vast. We are made mostly of space. You gradually expand to include the whole body and the space in and around it.

Doing this felt a little different from sensing my energy body. The feeling was denser, less like light, and more like pulses, currents,  and vibrations. It was not chakra-centered. It was more centered on the physical layer.

John Daniewicz, a member of my sangha, recommended a book called The Alphabet Vs. the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, which seems to have a related premise: that when humanity became literate and used our eyes for reading and writing, we rewired our brains into left-brain dominance and lost our right-brain way of awareness. Or at least that is my second-hand understanding of it.

I’m adding it — not ironically — to my to-read list, along with Buddha’s Brain. With a note that I wonder what it would be like to read and write nothing for a year. Sounds restful.