Meditation can be very purifying. When you do long periods of sitting, or when your practice becomes more regular and consistent, you go through a period where the stored pain in the body and in the subconscious will begin to emerge. It's like meditation is very pure, clean water and you're pouring it on hot coals. Those hot coals are all the difficulties you've had, your previous history, your traumas. Doing meditation doesn't necessarily mean it always feels good. You're supposed to go through those difficult periods.
Every time you have an ascending arc in your practice, your mindfulness is pretty continuous, you're feeling very happy, don't be surprised if the next day all of this stuff comes up. It's part of the learning process. It doesn't mean you're doing it wrong.
Sleepiness
Sleepiness in long sits can come up because your body's not moving for long periods of time. Sometimes you just do need to rest. There's this thing where you can fight sleepiness and be in a war against drowsiness for hours, and it would have been solved if you just took a fifteen-minute nap. So instead of slugging it out, rest, wake up, and then proceed. You can alternate sitting with walking, walk faster, even do heavy exercise, and that will get the blood into your brain and dispel the sleepiness.
The Five Hindrances
The five hindrances are sensual desire, restlessness, sleepiness or dullness of mind, doubt, and anger or irritation. When you're still pretty new, you're going to have more doubt than someone who's been doing it for years, more restlessness, more sleepiness, more sensual desire, more of the afflictions that continue to take you out of being aware. Just because a practice seems to not be working doesn't mean it's not working. You're still within the territory of the five hindrances. You have to work through that territory, relax through that territory, let go, until your continuity of mindfulness and presence becomes more the case than the hindrances.
It's like you're digging holes in the ground for water. You dig five feet deep, but the water is actually twenty feet deep. You dig another hole, another five feet, but the water is still twenty feet deep. If you had just stayed on the first hole for four days, you would have hit water. Structured variety in practice works. Unstructured variety, with no real rotation and no continuity, and you'll find yourself spinning your wheels and getting frustrated.
Working with Hindrances
When your mind wanders to something of irritation or sensual desire and you just keep pulling it back, you can actually have the effect of bringing that hindrance into the meditation, making it more prominent than it needs to be.
The way to work with it is to actually let the hindrances be there. If irritation comes up, if resistance comes up, you give it permission to exist. You acknowledge it, you're here, I see you, and you just let it be there. Then you relax. You continue with whatever mode you're doing. This one step of letting the distraction be there diffuses a massive amount of tension. This whole thing gets circumvented by just letting it be there. When you allow the distraction to be there, your mind is already aware again.
The Two Modes
There are really only two modes in meditation: the mind when it's aware, and the mind when it's unaware. The moment of the arising of unawareness is very similar to the moment of falling asleep. You never actually see the moment you fall asleep. If you remembered the moment you fell asleep, you would have the experience of the physical body falling asleep while your consciousness remained awake, and that's not what happens for most people. Falling asleep is literally the absence of consciousness. In the same way, you never see the moment of mind wandering, because by definition it's the absence of the awareness that would register it.
Both of these moments arise spontaneously. They both happen on their own. The only part where you're involved, where intention is being exercised, is when you're aware, when you're mindful. In those moments of mind wandering, there's no way to exercise intention. You're in some fantasy until your mindfulness returns.
Once you're past the five hindrances, you can actually take your hands off the wheel and know that this alternation between awareness and unawareness will happen on its own. By fully pulling the fuel out of the mind, the reaching, the intending, the needing, the wanting, by actually surrendering that, you find the mind has more continuity in being aware naturally.
Immediacy
Experience is continuously immediate all the time. Immediacy is always the case. Your doubt is immediate. Your sleepiness is immediate. Your anger is immediate. The mind wandering is immediate. The unawareness is immediate. The awareness is immediate. The body is immediate. Everything is immediate.
The meditation doesn't start when the mind gets still. Really, meditation is happening all the time. You're never experiencing anything outside consciousness, never experiencing anything outside reality. This is always immediate. It's always occurring. It's always constant. It's never broken. It's never interrupted.
There's no path to immediacy. There's no path to reality. There's no path to this, because it's already this. Every path is reality. Every way that has existed, could exist, or will exist is immediate. You're always in the citadel of immediacy.
Meditation techniques like mindfulness of breathing, mantras, and visualizations serve one purpose: to help the mind enter a state of quietude, so that from that quietude the noticing of this immediacy is more palpable, less prone to distraction. You begin to have the direct cognition that everything arising is awake. Not something I said, or whoever said it. It's through the immediacy of experience that those shifts begin to open up.
Pointing Out
When I first met Namkhai Norbu, he explained all of this. It made no sense to me. He did the pointing out instructions and nothing happened. I came up to him afterward and said, nothing occurred. He just started laughing and said, yeah, just keep doing the practice.
I saw him again a year later. I went up to him and asked, how do I realize the nature of mind? He paused and didn't move. He said, how do you feel now? I said, I feel present. He said, now relax. I said, that's it? He said, yeah. That's it.
I still had no idea what he was saying. But seven years later, when I read Ramana's statement, liberation is to know you were never born, I realized what he was pointing at. Be present and relax. Be aware and relax. It's that which is experiencing thought, that which is experiencing sound, that which is knowing. This bare knowing, this bare awareness. This awareness is what gets pointed out initially.
Awareness is not an intention-dependent phenomenon. You don't have to intend for it to continue. In meditation you intend to notice from one moment to the next, but the awareness is not limited to that. It's there whether you intend it or not.
The Field
When this becomes clear, your personality narrative reveals itself as a stream of data, a stream of processes within this experiential field. In the same way that seeing is a phenomenon in this experiential field, hearing is a phenomenon, thinking is a phenomenon, so is intention, so is attention. They're all phenomena within this experiential field.
When it becomes apparent that your thoughts and feelings are just as awake as the object you're looking at, it becomes harder and harder to take your own thoughts and desires as seriously as you're used to. Because you see that there's just this river of happening, and that the so-called me, the so-called self that is suffering and moving through time, is really just a set of characteristics within that river, within this field. We label it that, and due to attachment based on those designations and preconceptions, we suffer.
Nothing that you do as a person has any relationship to this state. Experience was always the case before you got into meditation. It was the case in the moment of awakening. It was the case after awakening. Experience is not produced. This is not something you need to create. What the practice produces is a greater continuity of your noticing of the awakeness that is already the case, of reality that is already the case, has been the case, will be the case. There's just this, and nothing that you do or don't do as a person affects this.
In Your Father's House
In your father's house there are many rooms. You could see each moment in time as a different room, but fundamentally the rooms are within the father's house, within experience. What happens is we go into these rooms of life and identification occurs with whatever is in that room. But these are all happening within experience. They're not apart from reality, from consciousness.
Every single moment on the timeline leading up to the present, all experience, all reality, all awake. You go back in time, you remember being a child, you remember your first memory, that was within experience, that was within reality.
When you look for presence, you only find experience. When you look for awareness, you only find what appears. Why? Because they're the same thing. The father's house is none other than the rooms which comprise it. You never leave the citadel of immediacy.