Counting the Crystal Ball: Place Your Power on Clarity is a concrete method of meditation. It refers to a way of practicing in which you take one minute as your unit, tether the Awaring with several 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 method; it is a hands-on protocol that comes all the way down to action: how high to count, what to do when a ball vanishes, where to direct your power, what state the body should be in — every one of these is spelled out as an explicit instruction. The method is the meditative landing of the judgment set out in Awaring-Force Against the Brain: It Is the Most Valuable Thing You Have — it turns “Awaring-force” from a concept into a concrete action you rehearse minute by minute.
Purification in Units of One Minute
The method’s temporal structure takes “one minute” as its smallest unit. The governing instruction is to “always insist on one minute as a single unit, purifying without cease” — that is, you do not treat a sitting as one long continuous stretch to be fought through, but cut it into small one-minute units, purifying the thought once within each unit before moving on to the next. The cutting itself is a piece of constraint design: a minute is short enough that attention will not disintegrate across some long span, yet whole enough to hold one complete cycle of “tether — drift — tether again.” Breaking a long task into the smallest units one can actually complete, doing each one flawlessly, and then stringing 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 the Crystal Ball: The Vehicle That Tethers the Awaring
The concrete vehicle for the practice is an imagined crystal ball. After repeated trials, the count that proved best is ten:
For now, counting ten crystal balls still feels like it tethers me better… Just keep doing your utmost to stay knowing that you are counting, counting clearly and distinctly — that is all!
Here the crystal ball is merely an object for the Awaring to cling to; its function is to give the easily wandering attention a definite point of purchase. The crux of the method lies not in the balls themselves but in the fact that “knowing you are counting” never breaks off:
Counting ten crystal balls feels like it tethers me better. When the earlier balls are gone, just conjure them up again; the only thing is not to drift off and not to forget what number you’ve reached. Just keep doing your utmost to stay knowing that you are counting, counting clearly and distinctly — that is all!
From this it is clear that the method’s handling of “drifting” is non-combative: when a ball disappears there is no need for chagrin — simply “conjure it up again”; the one thing that must never be lost is the thread of awareness, the “clear and distinct knowing of what number you’ve reached.” In other words, counting the balls is the means; maintaining clear awareness is the end. This is what separates it from mere counting drill: counting can be done mechanically, whereas this method requires that the counting be accompanied throughout by awareness of the counting itself.
Turning a Thought Aside Is the Force of the Thinking Awaring
The inner mechanism of counting the crystal ball is laid bare as “turning a thought aside.” In the record of having “finally found the way to apply force to the crystal balls”:
It is the force of turning a thought aside, the force that, when you are angry, makes you think of something else. Counting crystal balls is exactly this force — fixing on a ball, then moving from this ball to the next, like so. The force of the Awaring (of thought).
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 you are angry” — a force named “the force of the Awaring (of thought).” This joins meditative practice and everyday emotional management into one: 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 the crystal ball is not merely a stair into absorption; it is a portable, transferable capacity for working on the emotions. Awaring-force counts as the most valuable capacity of all precisely because 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 the method is where the power is placed. What practice must sustain is a state at once as fierce as combative anger and yet bodily relaxed, with that force directed precisely toward “clarity”:
That old feeling of being angry and unyielding — that feeling of fierce, head-on opposition with your parents, but clear and distinct — yet with the body relaxed; place that force on “clarity”!
Here intensity and tension are decoupled. Most people, when they summon a fierce force, tense the body along with it; this method asks you to retain the all-out intensity of “combative anger” while withdrawing it from the muscles and from the object of opposition, pouring the whole of it into the single matter of “staying clear,” so that the body, on the contrary, 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 chimes 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; the force serves “clarity,” not “winning.” It also answers the model of “awareness is control” in Meditation as Phase Transition: Awareness Is Control, and Mind and Body Are One — when you stake your strength on clarity (awareness), the body’s relaxation is the natural result of awareness being in place, not a goal pursued separately.
An Executable Protocol of Actual Practice
Put together, these points yield a complete, immediately executable meditation instruction: take one minute as a unit; within the unit, imagine ten crystal balls and count them one by one; when a ball disappears, conjure it up again, without reproaching yourself for drifting; the one thing to hold fast to is the “clear and distinct knowing of what number you’ve reached”; the force used in counting the balls (in turning a thought aside) is the very force of the Awaring used to work on anger in daily life; and the whole intensity of this force is placed on “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 force has landed on clarity, whether the body is relaxed are all verification points you can check for yourself in the present moment. And precisely because it comes down to such concrete bodily sensation and action, this method belongs to the realm of what must be realized firsthand rather than to skills that can be transmitted in words; on the stance of No Awakening, No Standing to Speak of Meditation: An Awakened Voice Disenchants the Doubts About Meditation, just what kind of bodily sensation “placing the power on clarity” is, only one who has done it firsthand truly knows. Here the words leave the matter open, refusing to close it on the reader’s behalf.
Sources
- Manuscript — “always insist on one minute as a single unit, purifying without cease.”
- Manuscript — “It is the force of turning a thought aside, the force that, when you are angry, makes you think of something else… the force of the Awaring (of thought).”
- Manuscript — “Counting ten crystal balls feels like it tethers me better. When the earlier balls are gone, just conjure them up again… counting clearly and distinctly — that is all!”
- Manuscript — “that feeling of fierce, head-on opposition with your parents, but clear and distinct — yet with the body relaxed; place that force on ‘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