How to set a focus before doing a meditaton.

Taking Apart Perception

Try looking around the area where you now sit and observe everything you see without naming or identifying anything.

Notice colors, shapes, smells, sounds, movements, but try to stop yourself from identifying anything as some particular thing - or calling it by its name.

Notice how strongly the mind wants to give names and how frustrating it is when one tries to willfully look at just what's seen without any identifiers, names or concepts.

Jasper is a beautifully patterned stone, often with many vibrant colors. Try holding a piece of picture jasper or some other simple object and focus just on that object. Try seeing it without identifying with a color or shape name. It's very difficult to leave the mind's conclusions out of whatever we experience with our sense organs.

In fact, it seems a bit like opening one's eyes and trying to see nothing. The mind is eager to find a meaning. The eyes automatically take in an explosion of color and other visible information. The mind is usually right there - naming "hard", "yellow", "green", "smooth" and simultaneously it mixes in information from all the other senses - bringing order by identifying and supplying concepts.

When we work with minerals, we have sensations which we may not have concepts for. The mind, so used to ordering our world, can step in and get busy either trying to form familiar concepts about the sensations - or it can dismiss real sensations as "imaginary" because it doesn't have a concept for them.

There is a way to be present in mind without either of these extremes. With mineral meditations, it is useful to stay suspended in wondering what one is experiencing - rather than trying to decide. One way to do this is to say to yourself " I don't know what this feeling is." and then to try observing the feeling as something completely new and unknown. These sensations aren't static concepts but moving, living feelings.