Haven’t seen the first step? Visit RELEASE YOUR EMOTIONAL PRISONERS: The first step in meditation teacher Barry Long’s guide»
Most meditation methods start with watching thought and emotions. When you’re successfully practicing releasing emotional prisoners, you’re through that and it’s not necessary to watch your thought process. Troublesome or aimless thought is due to stored-up emotions. As the emotions are reduced, so is the thinking.
Step Two follows on naturally after Step One. All it requires is for you to have developed sufficient one-pointedness to focus your attention on the pure sensation in the body.
Your attention is the natural intelligence which enables you to be aware of existence. What you don’t focus your intelligence on, you don’t see or hear. So there’s nothing really difficult about doing this exercise.
You begin by understanding that there are only two realities in the body—pure sensation and intelligence.
These are all that’s used. Let us start. After you’ve read what to do, close the eyes, focus within and proceed.
Pure sensation meditation
Inside your hands is a vibration, a tingling feeling.
Pause and connect with that now.
The tingling can be subtle to begin with but soon becomes evident. This is pure sensation, ‘pure’ meaning it isn’t caused by any thought, emotion or external trigger. It’s always there.
The same tingling sensation is in your feet.
Right?
Now your nose.
There it is again.
In your chest is the same tingling.
Pure sensation isn’t the same as emotion, which sometimes rises in the chest as anxiety and thinking. Pure sensation never varies. Focusing on it requires no thought. In fact, thought distracts the attention and makes you feel you’ve ‘lost it’. That’s not the case, however. It’s always there when you’re still enough.
Now, close your eyes and go around the various parts of the body on your own—including the head, shoulders, legs, knees, buttocks and small of the back. One after the other.
Take your time.
Don’t gloss.
Pause for several seconds on each part.
Do it consciously.
Be there.
Eventually, after you’ve practiced often enough, the sensation of all the parts will merge into one and the physical body will disappear. Of course it doesn’t disappear for others, only for you. While you’re fully absorbed in the sensation with your eyes closed, you’ll discover that you wouldn’t know you had a body. But, due to habit, the mind will always try to recreate the body in the memory, and now and again an arm or a leg will appear in your consciousness.
Don’t let that distract you. Stay with the sensation, not the image, and the image will evaporate.
You can be in this state of absorption for a considerable time. But you’ll notice, as part of the exercise of becoming more conscious, that something invariably happens to bring you out. You’ll be made to move or reflect on something; the phone or doorbell will ring. Existence is a place of movement and something always happens to bring you back to the body—eventually.
Pure sensation has nothing in it—no mental activity, no conclusions, no interpretations. It’s the reality of the body without the physicality. The sense of having a body actually comes out of pure sensation. Pure sensation is the very origin of the senses, the source of the physical body which creates the world and the Earth around us.
When your intelligence merges with this sensation, you’re at the source of your existence. In other words, take away the physical senses, as in death, and the incredible reality of the body still is! But we must be careful not to go into idealism. Until we die, we’ll always have a physical body to return to.
Sometimes while you’re absorbed you’ll sense a thought on the perimeter of the stillness trying to push in. Thought can’t cross the stillness unless you give it your attention. So keep focused. Thoughts are like hovering jackals impatient to devour the silence. The silence/stillness is actually pure intelligence. Thought, on the other hand, is an inferior reflective intelligence dependent on the memory. Pure intelligence is direct, immediate, now! Thought is indirect and takes time.
If you do start thinking—and there’s little doubt it will happen—don’t try to battle with thought; you’ll never win.
It is self battling with self.
Start again: open the eyes, see what’s immediately in front of you, close the eyes and go back to focusing on the sensation in the different parts of the body.
By opening the eyes and returning briefly to the outer world, you break the momentum of the thought that’s already started. You’re then fresh and new again. Eventually your attention drops very quickly into the sensation of the whole of your body. But there are days when this doesn’t happen so easily. So your safety net, whenever there’s a difficulty, is to start again from the beginning by focusing on the sensation in the different parts.
Also, you have to guard against slipping into a trance before you’re really in the stillness. Here again, being with the sensation will keep you conscious or alert; whereas in a trance, you lose the presence of the sensation and drift along in a kind of comfortable near-sleep.
The purest state of meditation
You can’t think or be emotional when you’re focused on pure sensation. However, the movement of emotion can be mistaken for pure sensation. The difference is that emotion contains personal feelings whereas pure sensation is utterly impersonal. In short, during absorption in pure sensation the sense of ‘I’ or any identifying feelings vanish and the two realities of intelligence and sensation merge.
Pure sensation is the state of the embryo before the baby starts to leave the womb. It’s the edge of existence. At death from old age or disease, the physicality of the body gradually gives way to pure sensation. Pure sensation is the last thing coming into existence and going out. So, being fully absorbed in pure sensation is the purest state of meditation and a kind of preview of before and after existence.
Stay with the pure sensation and if there is anything to be revealed, that state of intelligence will reveal it.
Don’t look for esoteric or psychic happenings you’ve heard or read about. Discover what is new in your own experience.
The merged state of pure sensation and intelligence—absorption—has enormous virtue and truth. It’s the key to the deeper levels of the unlimited psyche which you can access.
All this is a deeper than usual way of looking at things. It takes a lot of intelligence to break the common addiction to scientific rationalism and materialism—and to the notion that there’s something out ‘here’ that’s real. Focusing on pure sensation speeds up the intelligence so that false notions, no matter how popularly held, are seen for what they are.
It’s an extraordinary transformation to be able to see things realistically. It brings a deep sense of relief from tensions stored in the body and from some of the burden of existence. And it begins now, inside the body reading these words.
Before we proceed, repeat the exercise of going around the pure sensation of the body parts with the eyes closed.
Be easy.
Relax.
Stillness is the way.
Don’t connect with any feelings in your belly or chest because that is emotion, false sensation. If the emotions are too strong for you to start focusing on the hands or feet, it’s probably best to try again later.
Meditating with the eyes open
The next important exercise is to practice meditating with the eyes open. You start by meditating with the eyes closed and, when comfortably absorbed, open them. The idea is to remain focused on the pure sensation within and to not be distracted by what you’re seeing. This means you refrain from subtly naming anything in front of you. You see it all as a whole, as a scene, without particularizing.
This does take practice because we’re all taught from infancy to recognize and name things and it’s become a subconscious habit. In time, the practice of absorption will break the habit.
Learning to meditate usually begins with setting aside, say, 30 minutes or so, twice a day for practice. This is very much a beginner’s routine. We’re much further advanced now and need to see that meditation, finally, can’t be a partial thing. It has to be something that can be practiced most of the time—and for most of the time in your daily life your eyes are open.
Stating the obvious to make the point, if you walked around meditating with your eyes closed you’d soon bump into something. So we have to learn, by practicing, how to meditate consciously while walking down the busy street without being distracted by the passing scene.
Again, the art is to not particularize what you’re seeing. You have to let the scene keep changing, as it will, without holding on to any particular aspect.
Of course if something in particular grabs your attention, you’ll be momentarily, or for a time, distracted.
But that doesn’t matter.
It’s the overall practice of disidentification that counts.
You practice letting the passing parade pass without joining in.
Eventually you’ll get the idea and it will become easier and easier.
You’re not having to invent anything; this is the natural way of detached perception.
To reach this stage it will help to practice staying in your senses while walking down the street. This means simply being aware of the whole scene as presented by the senses without thinking or interpreting what you’re seeing. Since you’re aware and not thinking, you won’t bump into anything and your body will automatically look both ways before crossing the road.
The mind names objects because it works off the five senses of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch-feeling. The five senses are differentiated—not connected in themselves. Connecting them up so that our perception of the world ‘makes sense’ is the mind’s job. But as each sense is reporting a different sensation, our impression would be quite disjointed except for the amazing speed of the ego behind the mind.
The surface mind vs. the ego
Here you need to understand the difference between the surface mind which names objects and the ego. The surface mind is completely dependent on the ego, but doesn’t know it. The mind thinks it’s the only intelligence in the body. But really it’s a limping reflection of the intelligence of the ego. The ego, in spite of common misconceptions, is the innate intelligence of the body, the instinct the body is born with.
You know from your own experience that instinct is infinitely faster than the mind, as demonstrated when you touch a hotplate and the body withdraws instantly before the mind can work out what’s happening.
The ego is continuously and sleeplessly poised and alert for any sign through the senses of a threat to the survival or normal functioning of the body. In the event of an unusual smell of smoke, the ego alerts the surface mind and sends it searching for a confirming sign in one of the other external senses. The mind checks the sense of sound by listening intensely for the crackle of fire, or the sense of sight for a sign of flames, and so on.
The ego works through the nervous system and its speed is comparable with electricity which approaches the speed of light.
Because each sense is independent of the others, the mind has to go from one sense to the other for confirmation—and this ‘slowness’ introduces the sense of time we’re all familiar with. The ego is of an infinitely swifter time. The ego works through the nervous system and its speed is comparable with electricity, which approaches the speed of light. The mind, working through the memory and emotions, lumbers along at the comparable speed of sound.
What we’re endeavouring to do is reduce our identification with the surface mind so that our intelligence is more in line with the swiftness of the ego—a time beyond.
The mind’s habitual switching from sense to sense gives an unreliable picture of what’s happening in the external world. So much so that if we’re honest we seldom know what’s really going on out ‘there.’ The continuous mental activity keeps the mind subconsciously busy, apart from, as we all know, constantly referring as thought to the unreliable memory for confirmation of what is happening. Changing over to be more in tune with the intelligence of the body gives an inner perception of the outer that eliminates much, if not all, the confusion and misidentification.
The big question for you to look at now is whether you actually have a complete physical body as the senses and mind imply. And as a corollary, whether the intelligence I refer to as the ego or instinct is in fact the amazing intelligence implicit in pure sensation. And then, whether it’s the genius of pure sensation creating in the lesser medium of sense the whole fantastic impression of a sensory body, world and life.
In what follows, let us examine the validity of the senses. You do this by examining each point made in your own experience. This means in the moment of reading. If it’s not true in your own experience, it’s not true for you—or you haven’t looked closely enough at the fact.
Each sense gives a separate impression of the body and the world, but not one of them gives a total view. Neither can the mind present a complete picture—although it tries by filling in the blanks with imagination. You can’t see the back of your body while you’re seeing your toes; you never see your face direct: your impression is dependent on a mirror—an actual mirror or the mirror of the unreliable memory.
The fact is that no one can show you with your senses a complete physical body; because there’s no such thing. The physical body is a sensory impression held together in the mind, by the mind. Its only reality is in pure sensation—behind the mind and the divided and partial senses.
The nucleate sense centre
So now, focus once again on the pure sensation with eyes closed, then open them and witness the scene in front of you without thought or naming.
The value of this, as mentioned, is to interrupt and finally break the mind’s habitual momentum that, despite every effort to stop, expresses itself very painfully in sleepless nights of worry. Interrupting the unconscious continuity of the mind also helps to eliminate aimless thinking which, when intensified by emotional disturbance, turns into worry and anguish.
In walking around and witnessing the scene without interpretation, you’re preparing for an extraordinary potential revelation in consciousness. This is, that in a profound level of the inner psyche, far behind the divided physical senses, is the unified sense centre, which I call the ‘nucleate’ sense centre. This is the very origin of physical/material existence.
The nucleate sense centre is in the radiant depths of the inner psyche close to where the psyche adjoins spirit, source of all. The human brain, being an instrument of separation, divides the incoming radiance into the five physical senses. To the brain the senses must always remain differentiated, but in consciousness able to resonate at the speed of the radiance, the truth behind the physical senses is revealed.
Barry Long’s first book on meditation was published in 1982, just a couple of years before he taught a young Eckhart Tolle and many others at meetings he held in London. Now, Right Meditation: Five Steps to Reality brings together the spiritual wisdom of a lifetime of teaching meditation in a short volume of simple, practical guidance.
The above extract is from ‘Right Meditation’ by spiritual teacher, Barry Long. Copyright The Barry Long Trust 2024.
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