Actually, this is a good time to bring up something you mentioned, Galen, on another thread.
What you describe may be a lovely and powerful Practice, but it is not what I would call goalless
Shikantaza as we Practice here. Why? The reason is rather subtle.
When we sit, we just sit, radically dropping all need or encouragement of some "super-consciousness" or deep experience of
samadhi. The reason is simply that, to the marrow, we drop the self's need to get somewhere other than here. Now, if "here" happens to be some deep flavor of samadhi or the like ... that is fine. However, neither do we sit with any desire or attraction to be or remain there over here. In fact, we tend to move on and return to this ordinary awareness, right here in the room where we sit. If "here" happens to be boredom or thinking about the laundry, that is fine too ...
although we likewise drop all desire for such thoughts too. We drop all desire for any thoughts ... even thoughts that we want to be either free of or filled with desire (thus realizing true freedom even from such desire!). We let them drift away too without grabbing. We simply sit, dropping all clinging and "running after", thus letting thoughts and emotions (of greed or anger and attachment) drift out of mind without grabbing or stirring them up and becoming all tangled in their net.
The radical forsaking of both "special or unusual states of mind" and "getting tangled in ordinary emotions, thought trains and attachments" --IS-- a most special state attained. By repeatedly falling into either some deep concentrated samadhi which pulls one from this world (much as if one were always sitting in some drug induced trance) ... or indulging in thinking long trains of ordinary, unspectacular thought such as "
how much I love/hate peanut butter" ... one is losing the point and power of
Shikantaza.
Now, of course, rising from the cushion ... we can engage in all manner of activities as a form of "
Shikantaza". We can chant the Heart Sutra, change a tire or baby diaper, clean the monastery kitchen or the kitchen at home, work in the garden or the office, with the same core of non-attachment amid attachments, peace at the heart of life's messy pieces, non-doing
in/as/through-and-through the 1000 things in need of doing in our busy day. That might include, I suppose, a period devoted to tasting some samadhi as much as making peanut butter sandwiches (both sacred acts, by the way, when the magic of the most ordinary is realized as such).
However, when sitting ... we just sit. We do not seek to feel peaceful, to feel bliss, to feel some other-worldly state or anything such. We simply sit ... crossing the legs and holding the hands in mudra as the only place to be in all space and time, the only place one can be, the only such action to do or which needs doing in that moment.
It is not the
samadhi state so much or lack thereof (
Dogen and others' definition of "Zen Samadhi" was unrelated to attaining or not attaining such states), but your words "
and it is getting better and better."
For us, the Buddha's revelation in seeing the morning star was most ordinary and wonderfully extra-ordinary at once! Here, just here, is here all along ... when one's eyes are finally open, and the mind is open to see. Peanut Butter from the jar is, when tasted with a Buddha's tongue beyond and piercing right through both aversion and attraction (and peanut allergies and the moderation of a healthy diet
), the flavor of all time and space, simply ambrosia.
Gassho, Jundo