Hi,

None of what I'm about to write is meant in any way to conflict with what you have written so eloquently. I start with that because I'm going to talk about meditation lying down! (which is actually one of the 4 poses the Buddha suggested)

Consider this:

1. You arrange to be in a very peaceful, quiet room.

2. You let your body become very still.

3. You simply allow your thoughts to run on without getting absorbed in the story-line.

4. As your attention softly releases the experience of the body, breath, thoughts and related emotions, you become spontaneously aware of an openness, an unbounded, vast spaciousness. Your sense of the ordinary bounded 'me" begins to loosen.

actually, I could have described meditation or the process of going to sleep. Over 8 billion people go through this process (going to sleep) at least once a day.

Of course, I've described an ideal version of this process. But if you understand it at all, it can give you a key to why meditation is often so hard, and how it can be easier.

To give a final clarification, B Alan Wallace has taught meditation for over 50 years. In his brief book, "The Attention Revolution," he lays out 'stages of meditation" according to two Buddhist masters. It corresponds almost exactly to the process I described above.

As Alan said in a workshop I took, when you get to step 4, a state in which thoughts have - without effort to control - simply calmed down into silence, you "turn around" and look - what is it, here and now, that is aware? (which is actually related directly to two Zen Koans, "What am I' and "What is your face before your parents were born?"