One of the important beginning principles of meditation is finding a method that will take one to something more fundamental than thought. Is there something that isn't a thought? Descartes once said, "I think, therefore I am", but what about the sense of just being? Is "being" a "thought"? If being is just a thought, who is the thinker of such a thought? And how can the thought of "being" be fundamental to being, if there is a thinker having that thought?
The initial stages of sitting are always designed to calm the mind of wandering thoughts. Such thoughts are not the true originator of all thought. Even what I call "the body" is a concept from which I derive all sorts of notions of location and identity. When I am sitting on the meditation cushion, can I really locate where the body is? Is this sense of embodiment something that I can treat as an object? Quite often, I do treat the senses as belonging to an object. For instance, I locate the sense of touch in various parts of the body. But from where does this sense of the body truly originate? Is it from these physical forms called "arms", "hands", etc?
Why should we ground ourselves in the feelings of the body when even these feelings themselves are mere abstractions or mental objects? That is, why do we go to the body when there is no sense of self? The answer is that the sense of embodiment takes a person one step closer to no thought. Bodily sensations are closer to original mind, in the sense that they are not mediated by language--they are often states that are actively and directly discovered by the mind, rather than simply given a conceptual label. When I am sitting and feeling pain in the legs, that feeling is not something I think about; it is something less mediated by abstractions and therefore closer to an original source of thoughts. But still, even sensations become objects of thought, and it's not possible to identify sensations as the true mind. Mind is what is needed to feel sensations, but sensations themselves, once isolated and labeled as such, don't encapsulate all of the mind.
It's important to ground the attention in moment to moment being. This is the starting point to investigation. But let's be clear--even the term "being" is a concept. It's an abstraction. So there is something else that must originate the concept of being. It's that something else --that "I don't know what"--which becomes the starting point of investigation. It's not enough to simply be content with the "just being", because that "Just being" is also a thought! So what has the thought of being? What thinks "being"? What makes being come to mind? That is where one must continue to investigate.
