Stacks and thoughts in meditation

 Consider a stack used in a cafeteria for plates. It is spring-loaded to work on only one plate at a time. Plates are inserted into the stack singly, one on top of the other. To take out the lowest plate one must take out all the plates above it, one at a time.

Now imagine a thought is like a plate. When your attention is upon it, it is at the top of the stack. The next thought adds to the stack and one gets back to the previous one by letting go of this one. Related thoughts can keep piling up in this stack until attention shifts to a different stack altogether.

This is a limited metaphor since the mind need not behave like a stack or even a set of stacks. Still it is useful for describing meditation.

When practising meditation, we start with one point/location or thought or idea or concept and then rest our attention upon it for a while. When we realise our attention is no longer on that initial object, we try to come back to it. So, there is one plate on the attention stack first, and then another plate appears on top of it. Take out the second plate and the first one pops up to the top and regains our attention.

The effortless (or less effort) part of meditation lies in the ease with which one gets back to the first plate. One idea is to understand that attention is a gripping action. Relaxing one's mental grip or letting go of the thought causes that thought to drift away or somehow disappear. Engaging with the new thought - in any way whatsoever - gives it more attention and thus more energy or effort gets used to remove the second plate.

By this metaphor, meditation should ultimately be a stack of just one plate for a long time. As long as 12 seconds first is dhaaraNa. Then 12x12 - 144 seconds is dhyaana. (Beyond that, an exponentially longer time, comes samaadhi.)

The first 12 seconds is defined by a "location", which normally denotes a physical location for one's attention. But it could also be a mental location. A list of possibilities shows its generality - an idea, a feeling, an attitude, the mental counterpart of a physical activity (like an audible or subverbal japa).

Simplicity and generality result in fewer and fewer words or thoughts. Feeling is more subtle than thinking, being even more subtle than feeling.