Nowadays, what is now often termed ‘mindfulness meditation’ is becoming quite popular. Oftentimes people are advised to do things, like walking, very slowly, while paying attention to what they experience, in such case especially in the legs. Here I want to show how the process from attempting to become aware of sensations in legs and feet, may be taken further than is usually instructed.

What a meditator usually is trying to accomplish, is, to unify body and mind; at the very least for brief periods of time. This may be attempted in any posture. For example may a person while walking try to notice the movements of his legs, perhaps even internally reciting ‘lifting, placing’ and so on, in order to better focus his mind. While doing so, he may sometimes become aware of the hardness he feels when placing his foot on the ground. This perception in turn, if his mind is rightly tuned to know the inner things, may lead to a perception of the hardness of the manyfold bones within his body. Becoming thus aware of his various bones, at times his enthusiasm begins to spread, perhaps until it encompasses the whole of his skeleton. Getting such interesting perception of his skeleton in turn, brightens the mind; and his mind brightening, he perceives more and more the white colour of his bones. Becoming more and more fascinated with his meditation and with this perception of whiteness, he finds to his ever increasing joy, that he can play around with that white colour. Now, sometimes he begins to make it big, sometimes he makes it one small white particle. Sometimes he makes the ground below himself white and, allowing himself to dip into it, he himself becomes a pool of whiteness. Finding that his own form has fully diminished, he makes all other forms around himself diminish. Now he has become a sphere of whiteness floating in space. Seeing this infinite space all around himself, and perceiving the limitation of his white form, he lets his own whiteness fade into that space. Tiny stars of whiteness remain, which he spreads out in all directions.

Flowering ever more into that experience, he stops being interested in mere expansion of this space-like body, and begins to become an expanding observer.

Gradually however his energy diminishes, the vision fades and he finds himself back, a body of flesh. But he takes no longer this body to be his self, or material things to be of exceeding value or importance.