As I see it, spending all of one's time in meditation by following one’s breath and/or bodily functions has to be a complete waste of time. I really can't see how, in principle, such meditational exercises, as they are presented by various monk-writers, etc., in books too numerous to count, do justice to the Buddha's true teachings.
Meditatively attending to the psychophysical body (skandha) is not, one day, suddenly going to make us a Buddha! We can understand this if we think of the psychophysical body as being like a shabby suit of clothes which by force of wrong habit we've learned to call "myself". Cleaning our suit or patching it up is not going to reveal the real body which it covers and hides. If we are to see our true body, which in Tibetan Buddhism is called "naked seeing", we have to take off our suit of clothes!
From the aforementioned, it stands to reason that in the practice of Buddhist meditation we should identify with "what" we truly are—not with what we are not. In a word, we are not this psychophysical suit of clothes. We are not the breath, either, or any part of the body. In fact, we are thoroughly prior to this cheap suit of ours.
To engage in proper meditation is to remember (sati) that we are spiritually anterior the body which is posterior. The heart of Buddhist meditation bids us to tap into the anterior animative principle of the body before it converts into the psychophysical suit of clothes which is a consequence of karma.
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