Cattāri Brahmavihārā

The propensity for the mind to forget both fascinates and disturbs me. In one sense, forgetting is a necessary process without which it would be hard to learn anything new but the flip-side of that is that it can be incredibly difficult to get things to stick.

This morning was a perfect example of the mind’s capacity to forget: despite having practiced a particular method of anapanasati for months now I realized that I had forgotten a technique for evaluating the breath: simply posing open-ended questions and watching the breath for these qualities. What strikes me as doubly odd about this is that I had devotedd a number of posts to this in the not so distant past but to no avail. What is the cause of such forgetfulness? I want to reach immediately for delusion as the explanation but it seems to me that a good amount of aversion and greed have something to do with it. It takes energy to work in such a way and is not a rote technique so this may go a long way in explaining it. Regardless, I am happy to have actually realized what I was doing because anapana without sati is simply breathing.