Zazen again

I've done all the grading I'm going to do today, and I have sitting meditation in a half hour.

The last meditation session was unfruitful. I kept thinking about the zen slogan "form is sunyata and sunyata form" and developing the sneaking suspicion that really form is nothing like sunyata. This is a problem mostly because I am doing the sitting zen to clear my mind. Contemplating metaphysics is the exact opposite of what I want to do. I can do metaphysics at work.

To compensate, I began to repeat "Sunyata is nothing like form" in my head. A lot of meditation for me is subvocal chanting. It does an ok job of banishing all thoughts besides itself.

One nice thing about the zen group that I've been attending is that you are supposed to meditate with your eyes half open. If you sit long enough with your eyes unfocused you can start seeing shapes that aren't there. Last week, the light fixture across from me grew to look more and more like a winged beetle with preposterously long antennae. (The lampshades and the glare from the two light bulbs managed to look like two pair of wings; the long shadows cast by the stems looked like antennae. This is after 20 minutes with my eyes unfocused.)