Stop the doors of the senses when feeling the creeping of an ant. Then.
- The ant is only an example — any bodily sensation serves: a thorn, a wound, a headache, the cold of a sheet, pain anywhere. Do not wait for a cooperative ant; take whatever you are feeling now.
- Two equivalent ways to seal the senses: (a) stop the breath for a single moment — all five senses close at once with it; (b) imagine you are a stone, a statue, unable to move even a finger — make the imagining so convincing it becomes actual.
- Example: a bedridden friend in severe pain (no sleep without tranquilizers) was told to become a stone statue. For thirty minutes he could not open his eyes even when he wanted to; the pain first receded ‘as if happening to someone else, very far away,’ then vanished entirely for ten minutes. He opened his eyes ‘a different man.’
- Mechanism + marker: the body belongs to the world, not to you; close completely to the world and you are closed to your own body too, so the sensation loses its medium. You are thrown back to your center, and once you look at the body from the center you can never be the same man again.
- The closing ‘then’ is itself the instruction: stop, seal, and wait — the happening comes of itself. Do not engineer or force the second half.