Counting the Crystal Ball — Place Your Power on Clarity is a concrete method of meditation. In one-minute units, you tether the Awaring with a handful of imagined crystal balls, pour the whole of that fierce, combative, anger-like force onto “clarity,” and at the same time keep the body relaxed. It is not an abstract manifesto of inner technique but a hands-on regimen that comes down to specific moves: how many to count, what to do when a ball vanishes, where to direct the force, what state the body should be in — each carries a clear instruction. The method is where the claim in Awaring-Force Against the Brain: It Is the Most Valuable Thing You Have lands at the level of meditation — turning “Awaring-force” from a concept into a concrete action drilled minute by minute.
Purification in One-Minute Units
The method’s temporal structure takes “one minute” as its smallest unit. Practice should “always keep to one minute as a single unit, purifying without end” — that is, you do not treat a session as one long, continuous stretch to be fought through; you slice it into one-minute units and, within each, purify the thought once before moving on to the next. The slicing is itself a piece of constraint design: a minute is short enough that attention cannot disintegrate over a long span, yet whole enough to hold one complete cycle of “tether — drift — re-tether.” Break a long task into the smallest completable units, make each one flawless, then string them into a whole — this is of a piece with the orientation in Awareness Reveals Self-Nature: Meditation Is a Finer-Grained Turning Inward, where “meditation is a finer-grained turning inward”: the finer the grain, the more precise the turning inward.
Counting Crystal Balls: A Vehicle for Tethering the Awaring
The concrete vehicle is a set of imagined crystal balls. Repeated experiment settled on ten as the preferred number:
For now, counting ten crystal balls still feels like it holds me best… Just keep striving to know that you are counting — to be counting clearly, that is all!
Here the crystal ball is merely an object for the Awaring to cling to; its job is to give wander-prone attention a definite point of purchase. The crux of the method lies not in the ball but in the unbroken fact of “knowing that you are counting”:
Counting ten crystal balls feels like it holds me best. When the earlier balls are gone, just imagine them up again; just don’t drift off or forget what number you’ve reached. Keep striving to know that you are counting — to be counting clearly, that is all!
From this it is plain that the method handles “drifting” non-combatively — when a ball vanishes there is no cause for vexation; simply “imagine it up again.” The one thing that must never be lost is the thread of awareness: “clearly knowing what number you’ve reached.” In other words, counting the balls is the means; sustaining clear awareness is the end. This is what sets it apart from plain counting practice: counting can proceed mechanically, whereas this method requires that the whole count be accompanied by awareness of the counting itself.
Turning the Thought Is the Awaring’s Thought-Force
The inner mechanism of counting crystal balls is laid bare as “turning the thought.” In the entry that records, “I’ve finally found the way to bring force to the crystal balls”:
It is the force of turning the thought — the force that lets you think of something else when you are angry. Counting crystal balls is this same force: fixing on a ball, then moving from this ball to another, like that. The Awaring’s (thought-) force.
That is to say, the very act of moving attention from one ball to the next is the same force as “making yourself think of something else when angry” — a force named “the Awaring’s (thought-) force.” This joins meditation practice to everyday emotional regulation: shifting attention from one ball to another while counting, and shifting the Awaring away from the source of provocation when anger rises, draw on the same “muscle.” So counting crystal balls is not only a stair into absorption but a portable, transferable capacity for working with emotion. The reason Awaring-force is held to be the most valuable capacity of all is precisely that it is one and the same force at both ends — in meditation and in life — as detailed in Awaring-Force Against the Brain: It Is the Most Valuable Thing You Have.
Place the Power on “Clarity”
The most counterintuitive — and most central — point of this method is where the power is set down. What practice must hold is a state at once fierce and combative, anger-like, and yet bodily relaxed, with that force aimed precisely at “clarity”:
That old feeling of being angry and unyielding, that feeling of going head-to-head with my parents in fierce opposition but staying perfectly clear — yet with the body relaxed — put that force onto “clarity”!
Contained here is a fine distinction: intensity and tension are decoupled. Ordinarily, when a person summons fierce force the body tenses with it; this method asks you to keep the all-out intensity of “combative anger” while withdrawing it from the muscles and from the object of opposition, channeling all of it into the single matter of “staying clear” — so that the body, conversely, slackens. The force has not vanished; it has only changed its destination — no longer spent on opposing the outer world, but on sustaining the clarity of awareness. This resonates with the orientation in To Apply Effort Is Already to Err: Awakening Is Seeing More Clearly, Not Believing More Deeply, where “awakening is seeing more clearly”: the direction is not to oppose harder but to see more clearly; force serves “clarity,” not “winning.” It likewise answers the model in Meditation as Phase Transition: Awareness Is Control, and Mind and Body Are One, where “awareness is control” — stake the effort on clarity (awareness), and the body’s relaxation is the natural result of awareness arriving, not a separate goal pursued on its own.
A Regimen You Can Carry Out
Put together, these points yield a complete meditation instruction you can carry out at once: take one minute as a single unit; within the unit, imagine ten crystal balls and count them one by one; when a ball vanishes, imagine it up again, without reproaching yourself for drifting — the one thing to hold is “clearly knowing what number you’ve reached”; the force used in counting the balls (turning the thought) is the very Awaring’s thought-force used to work with anger in daily life; and the whole intensity of that force is set down upon “clarity,” while the body stays relaxed. It compresses “practice” from a vague description of a state into a few checkable actions — whether you can hold awareness, whether the power has landed on clarity, whether the body is relaxed are all verification points you can self-check in the moment. And precisely because it comes down to such concrete bodily sense and action, this method belongs to the realm of direct personal realization rather than to teachable technique; by the stance of No Awakening, No Standing to Speak of Meditation: An Awakened Voice Disenchants the Doubts About Meditation, what kind of bodily sense “placing the power on clarity” actually is can be truly known only by one who has done it firsthand — words leave the opening here, and do not forcibly close it for the reader.
Sources
- Manuscript — “always keep to one minute as a single unit, purifying without end.”
- Manuscript — “it is the force of turning the thought — the force that lets you think of something else when you are angry… the Awaring’s (thought-) force.”
- Manuscript — “counting ten crystal balls feels like it holds me best. When the earlier balls are gone, just imagine them up again… to be counting clearly, that is all!”
- Manuscript — “that feeling of going head-to-head with my parents in fierce opposition but staying perfectly clear — yet with the body relaxed — put that force onto ‘clarity’!”
See also
- Awaring-Force Against the Brain: It Is the Most Valuable Thing You Have
- Awareness Reveals Self-Nature: Meditation Is a Finer-Grained Turning Inward
- Meditation as Phase Transition: Awareness Is Control, and Mind and Body Are One
- To Apply Effort Is Already to Err: Awakening Is Seeing More Clearly, Not Believing More Deeply
- No Awakening, No Standing to Speak of Meditation: An Awakened Voice Disenchants the Doubts About Meditation