Here are some recent contemplations of mine:

I was thinking about the expression “it’s at the front of my mind” and comparing it to the expression “it’s in the back of my mind.” I noticed how I subtly literalize these expressions by subtly imagining that what’s in front of my face is also at the front of my mind. I then fooled around with changing that feeling by looking in front of my face and getting myself to feel that this is what it’s like to look at the back of my mind.

Next topic. I considered phenomena and how I generally think of them as presences. So there may, for example, be a presence of a tea cup on the table. But a tea cup is not just a presence, I thought. A tea cup is also an absence, a non-finding of a keyboard, or a skillet, or a pencil, and so on. In fact, if I were to consider the tea cup in terms of its concrete absences enumerated, then such absences would be infinite. So in a sense, a tea cup is a finite presence and an infinite absence. Then I thought how everything I experience is a kind of infinite absence. And I paused here to let myself feel it more.

Next topic. I then considered how I was on the verge of letting go of my body, even as I was walking. But I felt a subtle fear, a reluctance to letting it go. I felt that if I did that, the body will drop to the ground.

Then I probed into the cause of this fear. And I saw instantly that the main subtle cause is that I have a notion that the body is “something that it’s like of itself.” So I thought, without my intervention, of itself, the body is an inert object. So I have an experience of being embodied, but I also have this fantasy about the body being something beyond my experience of it, as an inert object. What if I were to cease such a fantasy and replace it by a better, more skillful fantasy?

I thought how the vision would unfold if I didn’t have the sense that the body was something of itself. What if the body is a doing rather than a thing? Then when I give up budy-ing as a kind of doing, nothing drops to the ground at all, because only an activity was given up and not an object/thing. If I were more fearless, then I’d experience a gradual fading away of the experience of my body walking, without the body ever appearing to drop. The moving picture of walking would just fade away. And then my mind would be in a different dimension, in its own secret place. Then I could “return” by paying attention to the sensation of being located somewhere and walking, and gradually an experience would get brighter of walking, and at no point would I see myself (in my body) rising up off the ground and dusting myself off.