Element, thanks for the link on autogenic training:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogenic_training)
Some great history there. I didn’t use the “warm” patter but I sure used the “arm is heavy”, etc. bit, for self-hypnosis in high school!
Bloke, yer right, well-put, Nishijima doesn’t elaborate on how his understanding can be applied. Then again, we know that it’s not really possible to apply any understanding in practice; as the ancestor put it, it’s not that there’s no practice, it’s that practice is undefiled, meaning to me there can be no intent.
Having said which, I wonder if the use of “warm” in autogenic training is intended to engage SNS- I read that SNS can constrict blood vessels, which would affect warm/cold- whereas the “arm is heavy” in autogenic training is to engage PNS (PNS is responsible for “rest and digest” activities)?
I have mentioned before that the mainstay of my practice, when such exists, is reciprocal innervation of agonist/antagonist muscle pairs through activity associated with the occurrence of consciousness. Consciousness occurs in connection with sense organ and sense object, that is the Gautamid’s teaching (and the continuity of consciousness is illusory). There is impact associated with consciousness, and as a result of impact feeling, that’s also the Gautamid’s teaching. When the pleasant and painful enter back into the place of occurrence of consciousness, then the hypnogogic state becomes sufficient to sustain an awareness of reciprocal innervation- that’s the best explanation I have.
I put it this way, with regard to Dogen’s “One sage clarified True Mind (Reality) when he saw peach blossoms and another realized the Way when he heard the sound of tile hitting a bamboo”- is it not consciousness, impact, and feeling that breathes at the sight of blossoms?
That would be the two aspects of the autonomic nervous system attaining balance right there, impact and breath, through the place of occurrence of consciousness (with respect to the senses).