Day One Hundred and Thirty

Touching. The stone strikes gently against skin and bone of my hand. Understanding that the doors of the mind are a large set of historic files set against touching helps, because that set is different from the door of skin and bone. Touching will reveal the nature of the door by and by with effort. For now I see the mind making up a story and I go back to touching, to the feeling of the touch, to the touching that is not the stone, to the one point of impression. I build up a year of stories about touching and then I start again, bare.

Day One Hundred and Twenty Nine

Returning to touch. Returning to touch. Returning to touch. I tell myself to do this, over and over.

What is the sense door of touch? Where is it?

I know that I pick up the touch with my mind door. My mind discusses the feeling and this is all I see; hard, soft, finger, touching, meditation, are how I define my experience.

There is experience right at the door, before I wrap around it; before I develop my 'I' around it.

Day One Hundred and Twenty Eight

Working from http://www.paauk.org/files/knowing_and_seeing_rev_ed.pdf :

When a material object strikes upon its material door, a cognitive process of the first five doors arises: this is called a five - door cognitive process (pañca dvāra vīthi) . But a cognitive process of the sixth door, the mind - door (the bhavaïga), is called a mind - door cognitive process (mano dvāra vīthi) . As also mentioned before, when one of the five types of material object strikes upon its material door, it strikes at the same time upon the mind door (bhavaïga):
When discerning mentality, you first discern the different types of cognitive process, which means you discern how many consciousness moments (cittakkhaõa) there are in each cognitive process, and discern the different types of consciousness moment.

and from page 117 and 213, to look for this that happens:

1. Five-door cognitive process that ‘picks-up’ the object; in the case of the eye and a colour object, it cognizes only that there is colour.
2. Mind-door cognitive process that perceives the colour; compares the present colour with a past colour; knows the past colour.
3. —"— —"— knows which colour it is; knows the colour’s name.
4. —"— —"— knows the ‘meaning’ of the object; sees the whole image, a concept, determined by past experience (perception (saññā)).
5. Mind-door cognitive process that judges and feels. This is the beginning of true cognition, when mental proliferation takes place (papañca) and kamma is performed, as we perceive the object to be permanent (nicca), happiness (sukha), and self (atta). (The Vipassanā mind-door cognitive process sees the object as impermanent (anicca), suffering (dukkha), and non-self (anatta)).
6. With this same object arise countless cognitive-processes (mental formations (saïkhārā)), re-inforcing the cognition.

Day One Hundred and Twenty Seven

I press for concentration and let mindfulness be. I repeat 'touching, touching, touching'. The stone is cold and then warm. I turn from the presence of thoughts about touching, back to just touching. I center the feeling from contact in one place. I do not worry about it being roughly in one place or pinpointed on my finger or the stone. It is touching here, now, stone and skin. I will try to study some points about concentration from the texts and include them in more detail.

Day One Hundred and Twenty Six

I do not concentrate for long and wish to increase the amount of time with concentration. Much of the time is spent during meditation in using mindfulness to notice what is going on in mind and body; noting those things as distractions or definitions that are apart from reality. There are many layers and the truth of things is difficult to describe.

That is not to say that I know what it is, just that in trying to uncover it, there is often a sense of it that comes about but often it is hard to describe. There is a wish to describe it so that I can hold on to it. But there is nothing you can hold for very long. I learn to live with these gifts that are given to me.

There is so much metta available for me to be part of, I can let myself be part of it so that I can get closer to things without fear, without holding on. It has been a happy year, a loving year.

Day One Hundred and Twenty Five

The astronomy book I got for Christmas says the universe may be finite, or not. Either way, I get a sense in touching the stone, that it is all interconnected, it includes the stone in my hand exactly as much as anything else. In that way, I am not unique. Yet I have a loving family that interconnects with me and gives me special and deep memories and emotions in my heart.

What is this part of me that looks? I am astounded by the fact that it looks and yet it gets perfectly close to all of these emotions, all of these things. Looking peels back many layers of presumed definitions of me in time and space. Even the presumed looker sheds pretense after a while.

Day One Hundred and Twenty Four

I have been influenced by every reaction of mine since I was born. I notice that my current state of mind is like a comet with a long tail that has come from my past. I cannot entirely stop it, or be something different, but I can choose to pick a place to concentrate here, in this moment. I forget that I have this base always available to me. Practice. In fact, I do not even move to concentration without some awareness that my mind is being carried along. This is an implied base.

Day One Hundred and Twenty-three

I feel centered and at peace. It is a snowy day outside. I am grateful to be warm and with loved ones. I wish to find peace within a troubled world; to know the comfort of release from ignorance; to be part of the natural balance of things, which is my openness. So often I look for balance out in the world; but it is more about my relation to things, and to the opportunity to do so provided by grace.

Day One Hundred and Twenty-two

Tiredness and being busy conflict again. I take time out to touch the stone. They separate again, and I can see them more clearly. I don't mind being a little tired. The stone is warm to the touch from my finger and from the air in the room. Without them it would be much colder in this winter weather.

It does not need life, but I notice mine because when I touch the stone, I feel the warmth and softness of myself and of the habitat we as human beings have helped to build. I have gratitude for that. For a moment, I have existential angst from the perspective of the stone; feeling my life and warmth and having none inherently. But that is a misperception born of a deeper fear of my own. Nothing has a base, nothing has inherent warmth. Likewise, there is no inherent coldness, no inherent lack of a base. Everything exists relative to its opposite, or its position on some filing system.

Day One Hundred and Twenty-one

Dealing with tiredness during a vacation trip. Touching the stone brings me back to myself in the middle of busy-ness, being tired. I can let that be for a time. I let the stone be my anchor for a series of looking at my body feeling, where there is tiredness and restlessness, and coming back to concentration.

Day One Hundred and Twenty

Becoming carried away is rarely announced, and awareness needs none.

Day One Hundred and Nineteen

My teeth lengthen, my skin grows dry. I become more and more forgetful. None of this happens quickly, but when I am sick, I notice my age. I will die at the end of this process. I have choices with this knowledge; to deny, to accept, or to accept and utilize it. It cannot be denied. It can be accepted, but what is acceptance?

Certainly, nothing can be accepted which is not seen, and so acceptance followed by sleep is but denial. Acceptance of a single event, such as an interpersonal issue, can have a time bound by its ongoing effect. In other words, if I am frustrated, I can accept that, and can benefit from this choice over and over again as long as long as the frustration remains.

With death, there is always an effect. It is like moving from fall to winter, although it often has elements of winter to spring. We could say there is as much growing as dying and so there is balance, but I grasp at life. Neither grasping at life or death is balance. I shall not touch this stone for long. I touch it fully, with this impossible body.

Day One Hundred and Eighteen

As often happens in sitting down to meditate, I've forgotten why I do it. I suppose if I could articulate it well enough, I would be enlightened, notwithstanding attachment to mind. I sit, I know that much to do. I concentrate on the stone. I use it as an anchor for calming. I observe the tiredness/restlessness I have. I see how I struggle with tiredness in meditation and at other times. I threatens to take away the sense of me. Then then the struggle to maintain me becomes restlessness.

I go back to the stone and calming with less tiredness ensues. I am not as caught up in my state of mind and body. And I remember why I do it; to watch and to let observation of what is open up, to let what is not, what I fabricate, fall away.

Day One Hundred and Seventeen

Getting over a cold. Working with a transient sleepiness. I feel easy and comfortable with it. The stone feels comfortable too. Letting my body dry back up and cool down. Time goes by and my cold changes for the better, and then clogged and a scratchy throat, but I still think I'm getting better. I let go of those thoughts too.

How much of awareness of the body is just comfort with it when it is not sick?

Day One Hundred and Sixteen

At the end of today, I am forgetful and out of it again, although less agitated. I touch the stone gently and expect to be grounded quickly. I expect there to be a time limit. I expect it to happen here, now. How things are is not like that. When I crave for time and space to be different than what they are, I live in a dream.

I reach out for something different than what is too often; I return empty handed. And here I don't mean reaching out for what is real, what is loved, but that craving and grasping at events and things. Reaching out for love is necessary, for it is what is, should we wish to let it in.

Day One Hundred and Fifteen

Out of sorts today with a cold. I can't seem to concentrate on anything. I touch the stone and find out why quickly.... I have the following problems: A loud ringing in my ears, pressure in my sinuses, aching bones, a throbbing headache and an upset stomache. I did not know that I had those things. Also, they combine to form another sort of heaviness, and another general overfullness.

I keep touching the stone and I notice how much I wrap tightly around each area. When I bring that to consciousness I see that I am not all that. I obtain a sense of peace with all of it, a sense not so much that it will pass but that it is a passing thing, and made of sufficient stuff to point the way to awareness. I rest with the unrest and find that true rest is not tied to any body state.

Day One Hundred and Fourteen

Tonight my brain is addled because I have a cold. I find myself forgetful with difficulty concentrating. I find myself struggling with this body state when I need sleep. Although perhaps I treat sleep as 'getting away' from the cold.

I touch the stone and feel that the aches and runny nose are not all of me. It is curious that I gain some distance from them and yet I feel closer to them. I use concentration to help with that. Closer in the sense of investigation. I am curious about this state. After a few moments, it changes from a kind of attack to a sense of relief. Much of the bother, if not all, of this cold has been me tightening up around it. Running away is tightening up also. Acceptance seems available right with anything at any time.

I go to rest.

Day One Hundred and Thirteen

I am grateful for the opportunity for contact and concentration. I seek to unbind contact, and yet it is a place to start. Feeling along the stone is never static, although it seems so at first. Feeling is more of many many little feelings, and each of those is more a matter of stone and skin combining; never a single 'true' feeling.

Even when the thumb is just at rest, I don't think I would feel anything if it were static. Everything is in motion. How could I feel anything if I cannot identify what the feeling is made of. And if it is made of something I must be able to say "I feel this now"... feel what? The stone. How? By touching.

So touching is only a moving process, an ever changing process, a true arising without individual or solid or permanent existence.

Day One Hundred and Twelve

I am by myself tonight. I have been with friends and family and my sweetheart this weekend. At first I let the memories grow with some sense of sadness or regret, but then I treat them evenly; they were good times, and they have a tendency to come back, and of course go again and again.

They are sort of neutral, perhaps like all experiences, but I treat them with more of a charge than they have. I try to see my experiences with a little less of a historic charge. An experience now can be defined in terms of history, what I know about the experience or about similar things of which it is a set, without holding tight to an investment in things being one way or another.

If the time with others is funny, happy, and sweet, I can feel it and ask "how can these experiences help me to apply myself to the practice of release?" If experience is negative, I can ask the exact same question. The answer is that by stripping the attachment to any particular experience benefitting or harming me, I feel it without letting it take me away. I am actually much more with the experience.

Day One Hundred and Eleven

Things grow and die imperceptibly sometimes. I try to see how I wrap around thoughts. Actually, it seems that I don't wrap around them at all, I invent myself right with every thought. I make myself up with them, along some continuum of good-bad, safe-unsafe, full-hungry, sort of biological opposites. I notice that and I can let go of the particulars because they are just things I can get done later or let go of. The 'me' part wants to let go, too if I let it. Ecstasy waits just beyond that, but then that too is a chance to put a non-me up on a shelf. Usually I prefer the problem-solving me to the free me because it has a more 'reliable' history. It's a hard one to send on its way, but better now maybe than when it is called to go by the end of my circumstances.

Day One Hundred and Ten

Worries hover over quiet practice and stand in the way. But this is practice, to let them be for a moment. That does not mean going away from them. Sometimes, I can push through them to concentration, and other times I let them fade like restlessness or doubt. Everything fades, but that isn't a trap, that's a doorway I think. Maybe everything fades except awareness.

The Buddha practiced many years. His concentration was very strong. Most of the time, I believe that I prop myself up in practice. I don't worry about that too much, though. It will fade with awareness.

Day One Hundred and Nine

I touch and get lost in asking what that is, the purpose. I see that I am assailed by feelings of the body combined with thought; uncomfortable tiredness, unconsolable restlessness. I let go of the thoughts but they are strong, now worry about aches, worry about letting go, nihilism. I concentrate in the midst of these things, by noticing; noticing that these problems are part of the activity of mind to constantly create itself. I consider all letting go to be insight and I find my way.

Day One Hundred and Eight

My head is filled with holiday energy, busy and chaotic, bright and unpredictable. I touch the stone like a bead on a mala and the chaos lets go. I return to myslef, touching.

Each of my meditations have been like one breath, one touch, one in a string of touchings. This fraction of my life has more continuity than much of the rest of it.

Day One Hundred and Seven

Why would I want to watch how I follow thought? Why would I wait through discomfort, or bear with a feeling of nothingness? Because it is better to do so. Because thought, although many thoughts are helpful, thought itself leads me nowhere real. If I shrink back in meditation from discomfort, I have taught myself that I cannot meditate. If I do not bear up with the feeling of nothingness, I will see it as real, and I will trade my shivering self for a destroyed one.

I breathe, I meditate, I concentrate. I see the poor mechanisms of habit. I learn to watch them. I touch and am not torn away by thought because I recognize it.

Day One Hundred and Six

Feeling the stone and feeling whatever is going on in the body. I feel the body more fully as 'just' the body... pressing is pressing, tired is tired. I see a stream of thought come with each feeling; tired is not good, tired is dangerous, tired is irritating because it will keep me from something, or Sangha is irritating because it keeps me from fulfilling tired and so on. But also I see thought in much the same was as body; my thoughts are waves of feeling that I attach to and push away. Either way I jump on board and follow them but I don't have to. I can let them come and go with kindness and curiosity. They are fast but they fade out in a fine way, much like the tension does when waiting for discussion to end so I can return home and blog. When it has ended I ask "why was I so jumpy?"

Day One Hundred and Five

I am tired tonight. I know little of the processes of sleep, biological or otherwise, but at first I have resistance, thinking how much I benefit from meditation vs being distracted. Later, I feel that it is more of a transition from one state to another state. I wonder if it is in any way less or more real than so many states of mind in which I am not looking, distracted. I wonder if I can look on my way to sleep.

I stop restling with it and I wake up again; I can concentrate more fully. I touch with much comfort. I think of the well wishing that is being done for me by even strangers. I wish others well; that they be free of worry. I rest with my own wellness, worry, and quiet.

Day One Hundred and Four

Trying to touch the stone as it is. I notice myself conceptualizing of the stone, of touching. I feel out of time, out of reality, dreaming. I let go of that and go back to feeling. I notice myself with doubt and boredom and worry. I notice the tendency to either jump to something else or conceptualize. I try to touch without speaking about touching, yet being with the feeling, as the feeling in the body; looking at the arising of craving; the desire to be elsewhere; letting it go with concentration back upon the stone. So simple, but so rare for me to do; to be with something without being elsewhere.

Day One Hundred and Three

I am a counselor and I teach my clients about working with emotions. I ask them where they are and they say they are right in it and they want to get out of it if it is negative or stay in it if it is positive. When they want out they want to get way out, separate. I suggest that 'working' with an emotion is to see it, be aware of it, but not to be just in it. That is the place where we can stop fighting, feel what it truly is (anger and discomfort are often overlaying sadness for example) and make decisions. It is awareness of the feeling and being in the feeling.

I touch the stone. I am aware of the feeling that comes from contact. I am using my awareness to feel deeply whatever it is pointed to. This is concentration; awareness and feeling. Am I apart? Am I directly there? Concentration is difficult because I feel that I am becoming unraveled. Definition of who I am as that which flits from here to there is in some danger.

Day One Hundred and Two

Touching the stone. Sometimes, clearing out the cobwebs and focusing is easy, like tonight. Then I am touching but asking questions about the practice in my mind. Not sure how much of it is helpful. I put the touching into pleasant, unpleasant and neutral, being reminded that craving comes in quickly; in most cases, an intellectual craving to define and categorize, which I'm not sure is all bad. The feelings in the stone are subtle or vague and not always sharp and clear. Often it is quite neutral, but when I pay closer attention it is pleasant or unpleasant. That being said, neutrality may just have a vague cast because I am not used to staying with it. I contemplate the characteristics such as smooth or rough, warm or cool, hard and soft, etc and I notice that they are built up by history and don't give me a sense of the stone as it really is. I relax and see if the stone and I can come to terms about its attraction or not. I venture off into thinking about my purpose; to stay with contact and feeling and notice craving. The stone is more neutral.

A moonbeam comes into the window and moves down my shirt toward my hand. I fantasize that it will strike the stone and the stone will then float etc etc. But the moonbeam goes just to the left onto my hand and down. I move my hand over and the moonbeam strikes the stone beautifully. Is it any different than some positive forces I ascribe to being beyond my power?

What if I imagined winning the lottery. I imagine crazy people must feel quite fine because sometimes they imagine such things, or they imagine horrible things and feel intensely bad. Perhaps all I am doing is imagining things. I imagine imagining that I have won the lottery. It is hard to do but it is a great feeling. Not less real than some other feelings, but not that real either.... mostly because it passes. There is a long view to reality.

Day One Hundred and One

It takes a while to still, and the usual things call me away from being still; obligation, sound, thought patterns of not having, past and future concerns. But I become still by degrees, gently leading myself back to concentration, and feeling then a peace right with all of the things that call me away.

I feel the stone in an unpleasant way but actually it is just a restlessness. That subsides and then I actually feel the stone in an unpleasant way; it is 'too hard'. Then I also feel it in a neutral way and in a pleasant way. It seems to me that 'unpleasant' is just defined by wanting something to end. 'Pleasant' is simply the feeling of wanting something to keep going. Neutral seems to be just 'not knowing' a thing or being distracted while 'sort of knowing' a thing. In other words, it's not something that isn't there because that isn't anything (unless is in a subtle realm of some sense not looked at but felt). So if it is there (or at least 'there' in the meeting of sense organ and object), it is either pleasant or unpleasant unless not quite touched, investigated.

Of course, each of these definitions are the most tangible way I call myself me. Which came first, the feeling or the sense of me? I notice a huge stream of historic files that are various definitions of me, such as 'oh yes, beautiful blue butterfly wings...... I like them because I used to collect them and they made me feel dreamy when I first saw them etc.'

This inner dialogue is the made-up me, the clinging and craving that follows sense contact.

Day One Hundred

I hold the stone lightly and run through many thoughts without wanting to. I look at them briefly and go back to touching. I feel the tension in the thoughts where I want to solve, find, follow, and battle. I ask myself if liberation is different from where I am, if it is in another place and another time. I understand that thought to just be my desire to split things into myself and something to follow. I mistrust my ability to be with myself. I feel loving attention in each thought for a while, right in the middle of a doubt and fear. Here is where liberation begins. At times I do not follow, I let the thoughts run away. Other times I sink into their empty core.

Day Ninety-nine

Doubt, aversion and even thoughts run like foxes away into the woods. All I can see is their tails and they bid me chase them. I sit by the lake quietly and concentration deepens. I am in a place I remember but it is a new place also. There, touching is what I come back to again and again. New thoughts and body states asail me. At some point it all deepens on its own. I am by degrees free of worry about chasing anything. I feel very light. An hour goes by quickly.

Day Ninety-eight

It is a good day to wish others well in addition to meditating on a stone. Wishing others well includes visualizing them and using some concentration on that image, to call them to mind. In doing so, other thoughts about them and myself and things that happened or did not happen and so on, come to mind along with their image. I try to notice that and then bring my concentration back to them. Doubt, never far away, rears up and says that I may not have any effect, or there is too much water under the bridge and therefore who am I to offer kindness, or this or that body state comes up, just as in meditation on something else.

For me, coming back to concentration on a person with specific words, letting go of other dialogue, is not easy, but I do notice a presence of mind much like concentration on breathing or the stone, that opens up my senses, feels lighter, more at ease. The difference for me in concentrating on someone else is the struggle with a sense of inner purity (the how can I be good enough thoughts). When I let that go, I feel loved as well. It's from that space, feeling loved, that I become more sure that what I am doing is helpful to myself and others. And as much as I often wish that someone else could make me feel loved, only I can open the door to my own watchtower.

Day Ninety-seven

Touching the stone. Wondering how much of touching the stone I pull up into thought. Trying to keep with just the sensation of touching. Yet thoughts of being with vs not really being with occur, and thoughts of whether or not thinking is less real than touching. The former, doubts. The latter, a kind of curiosity; too often I second guess myself on insight. I say "I observed that and so what", and yet, if I notice that my thought is not confined to grasping or avoiding, then I have to say that it is at least some reflection of liberation.

It feels that in the realm of thought, doubt is a natural balance to realization. For me, doubt arises when I am quiet. Biologically it is a rare time that I am not ensuring my satisfaction or safety and so doubt can be a good sign. Doubt feels like restlessness in my body, some place I want to go away from. I stay with it and I can touch the stone for what it is. I can touch thought in the same way, as though a fully touched thought is alright, just a pleasant or unpleasant thought, just a thought relative to one of two things: craving or liberation. Also, noticing that thoughts reduce substantially in number when I don't wrap around them, don't follow them, don't run after those thoughts that represent something that is not real.

Touching the stone is mostly an exercise in thoughts, but some of them, at least, are liberating, in touch with the way things are.

Day Ninety-six

I ate almost to bursting today. It is an old habit. Sitting is more difficult when I am this full, but not impossible. Old ways of balancing no longer work so well. I used to eat too much and then exercise too much, but my body is not as pliable. Sitting is an interesting habit; I can do more of it and it never feels excessive. It may for some I suppose, you know a feeling that the world in general is not rewarding and sitting is and so some kind of imbalance arises between the two.

Whatever wraps around the liberation that comes from sitting is very very subtle sometimes. There is such freedom in being with whatever there is and then we contrast it and it is no longer in the moment. It only works in the moment and it is always different.

Sitting works with a full stomach and it works with frustration and it works with interruptions and it works when it is noticing all of these things. Meditation is made of noticing and ignorance is made of non-noticing. I sit with some balance and wait patiently for more balance to settle in. Balance has no definition but for its relation to other things; in other words, I can't really be 'balanced' with myself without working with my attachments and hindrances and so on. Balance is only in the moment as well, but I could get a lot more practiced with it.

I am thankful for the light that brings me Jeanne and my children, my family and friends, kitty, and every change.

Day Ninety-five

Peacefulness again mostly and watching changes in body and energy states. Also, I have left my rock at home and am using an 'emergency rock.' This one is still a natural blue-grey color and not black from body oil. It feels completely different and much more 'separate' from me. In fact, my original rock has a little of me on it, and is much 'warmer' to the touch, smoother, less 'dry' feeling.

I'm wondering if we put a little stamp of ourselves on everything we come into contact with and then, in a sense, feel familiar with ourselves. Even with this stone, it is a tiny bit oily now. Even before, when I looked at a few stones and selected it. I thought "this stone will do", because it had an 'acceptable' look to it in size and shape and then an 'acceptable' feel. When do we ever pick something more difficult to work with to help us grow? We tend to want teachers who will make us feel better, safer. We tend to want temperature, views, smells and thought-makers (books and entertainment) that 'fit' a space we already crave.

How do we set up arrangements for us that are not so set up, in order to help us out of our routine? How do we encounter things as they are, without the instant of prejudice, of comparision, of judgement?

Day Ninety-four

A busier traveling day than I thought. I still feel the need to arrive somewhere physically. The stone is quiet wherever it is. All I can do tonight, all I need to do is let go of struggling with the restless feeling of needing to be somewhere. I can rest with anything, anywhere, like the stone. I am not made of the feeling of being busy, of traveling, of arriving. I take deep, quiet breaths.

Day Ninety-three

Release from a strong sense of self is so pleasant that it is distracting from concentration. Not struggling and watching for a while brings noticing and letting go by degrees of duties and arguments within. What is left is a much deeper concentration and curiosity about who or what is concentrating. Ah but this is concentration's definition, one-pointedness, no attachments or build up on the looking side. But there is effort, often in the middle of great doubt, but then not wrestling with doubt, effort with kindness and balance.

Touching tonight is deep and releasing, a tempting place to park. A place to rest the eye when the true eye needs none.

Day Ninety-two

Most everything I touch in any way, through what I see, smell, taste, touch and think serves to reassure a pre-made sense of self. That self is sometimes scared, sometimes assured, sometimes asleep, but always different and separate. I presume I cannot see but at a distance. But that distance is incorrect, off the mark, designed to see only the inner walls of a house it has built. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, "there is a voice calling to you in feelings and perception....." Usually I am speaking rather than listening.

Day Ninety-one

After all this time I have just begun to stay with the feeling of the stone. In breathing meditation I have sense of allowing it to 'just happen by itself', but touching is less rhythmic, less of an automatic process that is happening all the time. Yet, I do place my attention on a specific place for breathing and likewise with touching. In this case I usually feel my thumb on one spot. Staying with the feeling is easier when I can ask myself it the feeling is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.

Often the feeling is diffuse into the thumb and hand and so I concentrate on one spot where the thumb just touches the stone. I lead myself gently back to it many times. Often, I must work with the blocks to meditation and then they dissipate. Neutrality is a hallmark of working with this stone, and then less often, unpleasantness. It rarely feels pleasant. Pehaps I can begin to define my meditations more specifically by these qualities. Also, I feel the need to ask 'what is touching', more often.

Day Ninety

I am comfortable and happy again and so I ask what meditation is. Too often I contrast it with the restless body states, the doubt and the grasping I often have. But being or appearing peaceful at heart can have a subtle grasping to it as well. Like ecstasy, I feel that it is very close to the way things truly are, but the eye tends to shut in a kind of contrast to everything else.

Why shouldn't it feel the same way in its approach to the supposed me as anything else? I think it does when I see it for what it is; another state of mind and body that defines me as separate. It feels uncomfortable to shift into meditation from a pleasant state, until I stop trying so hard and bring my body and mind with me.

Day Eighty-nine

I am at peace and I am comfortable and satisfied tonight. I am not in a rush. I notice that the stone feels comfortable as well. But I still sit and exercise some concentration. It requires patience and perseverance because I am dealing with holding on to these good things. I push a little because I am pulled down by a pleasant drowsiness. For a while I go there, to the comfort, but I remember..... looking into the comfort it is empty. I see that. It does not terrify me any more to know that these good things will end. They are such healthy good things. They will come again. Letting go with them is the best thing.

Day Eighty-eight

Touching and thought feel re-introduced, re-attached quickly in a series of individual grasps. I name thought after a while and say "Ah, there goes a thought about...." and that interrupts a very quick and complex series of thoughts about whatever the subject is. Tonight it is raining outside. I have a hundred thoughts about the rain, none of them involve actually experiencing or listening to the rain, although some are closer than others. Likewise stone, most thoughts about it are one-off from just feeling.

Finally there is stone and rain for a little while, unattached, needing no introduction.

Day Eighty-seven

The stone is cold, and so am I tonight, and I am restless and tired both. Encountering the stone I notice my resistance to touching it, to being here. I have a very general tightness of body and mind. I look for what is placid to hold on to and underneath, I struggle.

I struggle because I am at some level aware of my connection to all things, and somehow I resist, feel it is too much, feel a history of being burned when getting too close. Never mind history, all of advertisement and much of our day to day interaction is about not getting close. 'Here is this or that rich and velvety, long-lasting and pleasure giving thing, ' say the ads. Tht implies that we are poor, rough, short-lasting and 'running out' of pleasure. With that going on, it is no wonder that I will not reach out. Perhaps I can buy it and not share it and that will help. Sometimes faith too is about buying and selling rather than sharing.

I am part of all things. I can be with what already is.

Day Eighty-six

The stone was formed long ago. Me, not so long ago. Does the stone have wisdom born of time, I wonder? Do I? I wonder what sentience is and try to experience that. I notice that I have a mind that holds thoughts, but that mind may be mostly defined by the thoughts, a sort of mirror made of a mirror. In another sense, thought is only the impressions of feelings and history upon the mind, and so without a compound set of things, not only would they not be there, but they are not there now in any independent sense.

I do not know if the rock has sentience, I suppose not, yet there are many things I do not understand. I feel the rock in my world, but it defines my world and as such, is as real as I am. The art of awareness is as much the art of letting go as of defining anything. I am rock, sky, water, air in this very moment, in this very body, in this very life; more, I am neither me or not me, I am defined by what I hold on to and liberated by what I let go of; I can be in touch without holding on, right here, now, there is no time, no space.

Kitty climbs on me while I am meditating and I pick her up. She has good wishes for me, she wants to be close, I feel all that, so closely.

Day Eighty-five

I often conceptualize meditation as a place to go that is different from where I am, someplace harmonious, where I am like a great gentle eye that looks over animals and rivers, or like a river, flowing around whatever comes my way. But that is an instant of separation, 'this' vs. 'that' other more intimate place. How strange to conceptualize an intimate place, but that is what I often do.

It is delightful in a way to realize that working with troublesome mind states is good meditation, it is harmonious. It was me all along that was the subject here, me all along who was the obstacle, me all along that is choosing to build a wall apart from nature, apart from me.

Day Eighty-four

Doubt often feels like not being in touch with anything. It feels like having no grounding. But when I touch the stone I remember that I am always in touch. It may not be in touch as I like, but there is wisdom in just knowing that I am always making a choice about my reaction to feeling; in other words, doubt for me is often a kind of confirmation of feeling like I can't do it, can't meditate, not able to deal with anxiety, not able to control restlessness in the body, not being able to be in touch.

So I am looking to confirm the unable, offbalance feeling that I do in fact have. You'd think I would want the opposite, which I do, but therein lies the problem also; I split everything into sureness and unsureness; the known and the unknown. Once that happens, I must try with all my might to hold onto the known. Of course I feel my fingers slipping off, and that is left is me screaming "I'm not going into that doubt" which of course is exactly what doubt is made of.

Day Eighty-three

Looking at what is there. The stone is there. Also, tiredness, sadness, and great joy. I watch and tiredness has aspects of restlessness and doubt. I embrace them and they fade. Tiredness, too then fades. Sadness is there, and it is of the past and present, my memories and my worries are there. I hold the stone. It is not in the past although I have other memories of it. I too am no longer in the past. I sit with my worries and sadness of the past and let go of what I cannot change. Stones may not get sad, but they change; they crack and they become other things. I am what I am because of the past.

I wonder if I can choose my emotions, as if they were something I am far enough away from to not get led around by. I tend to think there is only distance and suffering from my emotions, but that is not true. Real closeness to them lets me have the only choices I truly have, to be me with them.

The stone was a gift of love and kindness, joy and a little sadness. It is well balanced; I leave my touch of it tonight to stay with the love in my world, with more of me, more closeness, less wanting.

Day Eighty-two

The stone is quiet at all times, in all places. Whevever I am touching it, only I have the noise, or only I am somewhere else. That must be the case with everything that touches any sense. The sound of a bell, the dart of a swallow, the waves of thought and the smell of coffee are all of the intensity that they truly are, none of them have any excess noise. And they are neither existent outside of experience nor are they only made of contact; they are something brand new.

When awareness is added, these things are notes in the quiet song of freedom.

Day Eighty-one

How often I treat meditation as a way out of pain, I say to myself "this will bring release from my attachments", with the attitude of non-acceptance of things as they are.

There is no time, there is nothing better, there is nowhere else to be. Yet the stone is a center, like a little writing desk I have made to supplicate inspiration. Every article of faith sinks into the ground with the rain. I let go my grip on waiting, my long count.

Day Eighty

I often think I cannot let go of problems and troublesome thoughts or physical pains until they are gone. But that's not really practice, that's just hallucinating again, holding on to wishes that things be different. Letting be might be a healthier way to phrase the beginning of working with problems.

All things appear at first to be in concert with my mood, with my own sense of trouble or calm. Later, all things appear sort of pointless, but that is my mood of doubt, when things start to run down and run out when they are looked at; combined with a low energy state and or an underlying problem I've pushed down instead of truly letting be.

I notice golden beads coming toward me on light rays from the candle. They are not really there. But all of my experience comes to me that way, none of it is very substantial. Reality is never made of what it looks like, but at least I get paid for my hallucinations at work, and they drive me to the supermarket.

Day Seventy-nine

A number of new distractions seem to come up when concentrating; like a sense of physical pleasure and also distinct and unexpected feelings in specific senses. Today I feel very light and comfortable and my senses feel clear. I do not feel very tired. When I touch the stone, after a while, it feels very comfortable.

I am drawn to my eyes and my jaw, which relax. Inbreath is especially pleasant and my nasal passages are very clear, larger. Perhaps I have become an anteater. A quick check reveals that I am not. I see clear grey and purple intertwining shapes on my eyelids.

So much to be distracted by; a kind of easy comfort that then demands to be filled up with visual and tactile things. I recognize this as a default position to easy comfort, although it is not often enought that I have a sense of easy comfort. I am mindful and go back to direct touching.

Hard to stay there when uncomfortable or distracted, hard to stay there when clear and calm.

Day Seventy-eight

Trust in love is necessarily scary or risky, at least to our constructed self. Otherwise we would be whole all the time, and therefore probably stone. It seems to me that much is made of nonduality and oneness, but from where and to where are we brought? Here is another construction, all that is beyond frustration, doubt, and anger. Just be here, they say, and rest in non-duality. I am not done kissing the stones I cast.

Day Seventy-seven

Craving seems to be simply wanting to be elsewhere. When I am going to meditate, I notice many cravings. Most of them are in the realm of thought, but these thoughts are often influenced by feelings and the body.

I am running through many scenarios in my life about gaining this or losing that. There are more diffuse wants that drift into a fog. I want to argue with situations in my life. I lose sight of the fact that I can look upon these hindrances for what they are and not push them away too forcefully. By noting what is going on I can refocus. I can see the craving, at least generally.

I am holding this stone. I am this body. I am posessed of many fears and arguments. I am this mind. This is a helpful step for me, although none of it is true. I need to go through it because the truth, that even my concentration, body and thoughts are not 'mine' is a place I must take steps to. For me, to let go I must know what I am letting go of.

Craving falls under the categories of hindrances; of doubt, restlessness, tiredness, desire and aversion, but doesn't seem to be any of these things. In other words, I can have doubt and not crave for it to be different, focus on its arising and watch its passing. I can see tiredness and not crave for it to end or crave to sink into it and so on. As for desire, that is much closer to craving, but I can watch that, too and turn back gently to the object of focus or let it pass.

This thirst for what is different feels so very intimately tied to all things.

Day Seventy-six

I notice many judgmental thoughts. It is difficult to be myself, even for a second. I do not know who I am, but then I watch myself and I come closer. I can let myself touch things deeply. I am carried along by the whole world and I am grateful.

Day Seventy-five

I am holding the stone but trying to let go. Instead I hold on loosely. I bring my attention loosely, gently. I try to be what I am, like the stone does.

I look to uncover the secret mechanism that is craving. It is there following feeling, and before, with contact, and within the senses. It seems all pervasive; at the very root of thinking. And so watching for craving; feeling for craving, is difficult, but it is the only other activity besides craving. Can I watch feeling without craving? Ah, that is watching; watching craving; craving is defined as not watching; not watching builds the self; the self is built of sleep.

In the glory of touching, of feeling, of contact, of forms that rest alone, I return to what I am.

Day Seventy-four

My perception of the world around me and of the stone is flawed by my presumption of its independence. I desire it to be a certain way, I dislike it, or pay little attention to it. Sometimes, the harder I try to 'just feel' it, the more entangled I get in many thoughts and feelings.

In any of these cases, I 'pick up' not just the stone but a delusion of myself as separate from it. It feels like I cannot see without this artificial barrier, but that is just doubt. The form is there and my skin contacts it. Immediately I have a story, not so much about the stone, but about myself. They are interwoven.

I haved a perception of the mind in the same way as thinking about those things and 'trying' to get peaceful, more aware. These are just perceptions and feelings that lead to a delusion of the way things are. With what is the way things are peceived? Simply with the mind of unwrapping, of letting go. I could say that to be spiritually healthy in this exercise, I need the stone to be calm, but there is no stone there, no exercise, no spirit.

Day Seventy-three

There have been difficult sessions with the clients I counsel; one in particular with a heavy past. I cannot go to the place he is, it feels to risky, too unsettling.... he is in my head as I sit today. I thought about how all beings have been my mother; those close to me, those in the past, those who only are seen for a short while. There is a call to be close to all of them.

If they have all been my mother, cared for me, that makes the possibility of some exchange of energy more possible; I can be closer because there is grace. As someone said, 'how little grace is earned and how much given....".... that is the situation with our mothers.

And not even so much that we have not earned the grace through our own efforts, but that we do not need to, we need not protect ourselves so much, there is the experience of such grace here available; there is only a series of mistaken angles in ourselves and others, only a tangled flame of craving above the lake of acceptance; this lake has been our refuge many times.

I shift from trouble to joy in release from this trouble I have made.

Day Seventy-two

The stone may be as much me as any other part of me. When it is touching my fingers, I cannot find the touching point. When I look for that point, I find at first, only my skin impressed upon the stone. But after a while, I feel the pressing of bone under the skin, and feel the surface of the stone. The surface impresses not just upon my skin, but upon my bone, upon my arm, upon my body. But it is not the stone that impresses upon the bone, not the skin upon my arm, not my bone upon my body, but impulses that bear the seed of perception; combinations of combinations, the stone and the air, the gravity of the earth less the moon, the temperature born of the sun and the cool dark of the house; everything is here, and none of it can be captured or assigned a cost. At the same time, none of it can be denied; and the true relationship of all things is there in the stone and my fingers, my stone and the fingers, the flesh upon bone of my parents and my children, my love and my lost.

Day Seventy-one

Barriers to meditation are created by me. They are mostly made of history; echoes of sense impressions and thoughts woven into new ones. I look at the difference between perception of touching and judgement about it. There is the stone (or the limitation of it in name), the feeling made of contact with it, and the perception of the feeling or the repeated stating over and over in my mind "this is the feeling". It seems to me that the 'picking up' of the feeling is the judgement; it usually moves quickly to a description in my mind of the stone and its feeling, based on older descriptions.

On the other hand, meditation doesn't work well in a thick fog; which is the other way to go, like not wanting to identify and pick up and instead sort of pretending not to know what feeling is. I feel that the feelings and perceptions are not a problem at all, neither are the volitions toward or away from them, nor the thoughts, but a subtle craving in them that relates to the description of myself. I find myself challenging the stone to a solidity battle.

Day Seventy

Life is hard for me to look at sometimes. Working with this stone, like life, seems unavoidable. I have it here, and life is all around. I could stay in bed all day, or make up stories about how things are. I could stop this blog and my meditation, but I'm committed to it. Besides, I do plenty of other things and few of them bring as much satisfaction. I bring my body and mind to meditation. They often seem in some disagreeable state to being quiet. . . .

Ah... that's it; it is not discomfort with the stone at all; it is not the avoidance of the stone, but of facing that which I am. In other words, my only real issue is accepting ME, whereby I can concentrate. I have tried many ways to go around me, but none of them work well. I am not in a disagreeable state at all, I'm only in my state. I have no reason to disagree with what is really here.

Day Sixty-nine

A quiet afternoon falling asleep over and over during meditation. I can watch that and wait for sleepiness to pass. Often when this happens I feel as if I am getting needed rest, and let myself have it. A kind of easing up on the 'get it done' mentality.

Sixty-eight

Staying with or even going to the stone with attention is often a battle with something else my attention is pulled to. Often it is a sense of comfort I am running after. Some of those comforts are strange; thought patterns and fantasies where I am soothed or in control of something, or wild adventure.

Other times, like right now, there’s just a general restlessness. It manifests as a tight jaw, nervous fingers, fluttery chest. In my mind I feel like either fading into sleep or moving somewhere. Then some doubt. Now touching but trouble staying with it. I have a very general sense of imbalance or incompleteness. It is my mind wrapping around doubt. A little distance and I can see that. What I thought was blocking me is not that at all, it is not a foreign force of any kind. It is me and what I am holding on to.

Day Sixty-seven

When I am agitated, things look agitating. The rock does not fit properly, it smells bad (really, I smelled it, its a bit like gun oil, but more on that later), the meditation bell is dirty and less than imperfect, the silver lamp is sharp and cheap, the large rock has poorly drawn circles on it, the crushed rose tells me I do not have what it represents in my hand, all things pulse like an aura before a migraine.

But these things are surely much more neutral. I sit with the stone and this unpleasantness. I shift first, to a more open awareness; my body softens, my mind holds the thought of neutrality, of being present, of exploration and the objects soften. As they soften I can see more about them, and I notice the words that I have written on them, 'dirty', 'cheap', 'poorly', 'I do not have', 'bad'..... These are strong judgments. I notice that they are there before I speak them, unconscious links to the past.

The objects soften more and become neutral, then friendly, arranged like little mushrooms with something to say, a village, the lamp is cute, the bell has character, the beauty of nature's circles. These words are from history also.

I may choose the present only from among that which I have chosen to see.

Day Sixty-six

Concentration is a strange proposition because most everything that the mind encounters is 'picked up' and perceived as 'mine'. Yet, the objective is to go back over and over again to the stone. How do I work with it without picking it up? What is this form without holding it, redefining it? It is most certainly a changing form, and it does not need to be anything I add to. As it is, it is a place to go back to and each time, to let go of what is happening but keep looking at what is happening. How rarely I do those two things together; usually I am forced to let go; even then I simply make another movie about how things are.

How are things really? They are unbinding in every sense, warm, willowy, a chorus.

Day Sixty-five

In the Sanna Sutta http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an07/an07.046.than.html, a short Sutta I was reading on perception, the Buddha talks about the wholesome perceptions of death, impermanence, distaste for that which is inconstant and so on. In considering the stone, I struggle with many perceptions, most of them less wholesome, such as it is cool now, or it is smooth, or neutral now and so on. None of those bring much enlightenment. I can feel myself being pulled in to perception, 'picking up' a sense of self vs stone, simply how I identify it. I can sense how refined, or should I say how natural, a more healthy perception of the stone could be. It is neither permanent or impermanent. It is not a subject of careless rumination, but it could be. I have a choice; either to push through the doubt and craving, or allow them to pull me into mental ping-pong.

In pushing through I see more about how craving is applied to perception and how that is linked to form and feeling. I can't add additional commentary to form without breaking the link to feeling and believing feeling to be independent. Although bare attention appears to see feeling without craving, I get more of a sense that it usually is bound up by ownership and lack of vision, thus supposing that it has bare feeling. But truly bare feeling may need to include the contact with form upon which it rests.

It may not be so much the 'better' activity of the mind which realizes wholesome perceptions, but its perspective.

Day Sixty-four

Accountability to even just being with the stone seems too great. Can I not have my own refuges of doubt, clouds, and anxious espionage? The stone says little, but in silence a lot. I have not been in such a position to have to ask myself these questions, knowing that I must deliver an answer. In the end I have nothing, and were the earth raked by some meteor to a depth of a thousand feet, exposing the granite of stones to be melted, cracked and washed for a million more years, I would have no less.

Old age darkens my once clear vision as it hurtles to crack my knees. Now, I am of blood, skin, bone, touch, and words. I was once made of this stone and I will be again. Whatever I am drifts out the window tonight, leaving a stone I could not trade for a grain of rice, black from the oil of one season of my days.

Day Sixty-three

I sometimes meditate out of the other side of distraction or concern or busy-ness. I await the quality of meditation to deepen. Often, I feel a rush to make it happen, to be quieter, to be somewhere other than where I am but that just adds another step. All of these things can quiet on their own; turning attention, by turn and turn, from holding tigers to touching stone.

Day Sixty-two

Touching and quieting today. I feel restless at first and then sit with that; noticing the tightness of breathing and letting it be. Then tired, letting that be as well, the fog can be watched too, then dreams or partial dreams wake me back to one place upon the stone, staying gently with that.

Leaves fall outside in the wind. Each and every one is brand new, falls perfectly without any need for planning, cuts a space around the tree with the prow of its stem like a little boat. The leaves are in perfect time as well; no one has planned them. The stone sits in its time with me. It is just right, I am just right in being with it, being with my love, being with the round of sleep and waking that gently seeks interruption, a waking that wants to shed its inhibitions, brightly colored as they all fall down.

Day Sixty-one

Touchingtensioncryingsoundcoolstonedesiremovingstayingloudringingringingmovinggentlepushingtouchingaskinglookingwantingrighteoushumblegraspingmemorieswaverestingfallingonespotdoubtbodybubblesupbreathingtastingtouchbeingallowedneithernorpleasantopeningrestingfallllinglikealeafinfall

Day Sixty

A place to just touch. Touching is an exercise in alternately looking at what is blocking touching and looking at touching by letting go of the blocks. New blocks, things to get pulled by in sense and thought, arise constantly. But the stone becomes interesting and a place to examine feeling.

Feeling the stone is pleasant, unpleasant and neutral, but that seems to be only a layer above the self, above the concept of me and mine. Without me and mine, I'm sure there is no particular difference in feeling, or I should say no binding difference. In other words, I experience these feelings but in a more raw form, they are not experienced as held and therefore have no hold. No hold feels scary at first, but then it is more like a way for the mind to open up, to break the chains of dream, to be still here. My what goes by!!

Day Fifty-nine

What is beyond thought? I have more of a sense of what thought is made of; that most of the time it is applied to objects, to other thoughts, to what history is brought in and combined with present experience, categorizing, defining reactions to pleasant and unpleasant (such as "I don't like this", which is a step beyond feeling); more rarely to neutral, although with some investigation it seems that subtle thoughts are going on all the time to categorize that set which is neither pleasant or unpleasant; that set which is neither helpful or hurtful and therefore that set which does not require a following action toward or away.

Going back to touch over and over again pulls me out of thought. First it limits and contains my thought, which brings resistance for a while, but that fades. Then there is often a 'popping out' of the usual stream of thought and the stone is a base from which I have a much larger observation deck. I can see the pull again nonetheless to say "ah here is your base and all these things are yours, pick one and play with it" and so on. But once again going back and back and back to touching there is a communication between the base and looking more deeply at feeling, form and thought.

I'm beginning to think I could assemble a real robot if I can figure all this out. You know, there hasn't been a real robot mind that thought on its own, but if we can make the right components they might take up life. My mind and body, upon investigation, are but component parts. So we could make the component parts, certainly feeling could be made by a sensor and its interaction with things, perception by some register of built up categories, picking up intention, and so on. If we built it right, we'd only have to wait for craving to take place. But it is that sense of self, that fundamental ignorance that leads to craving that must help animate things. And that is so intangible, so hard to analyze, distill, so subtly resistant to study.

Day Fifty-eight

I can feel my body system working very fast. Either this makes it difficult to meditate or not seeing it makes it difficult. It is interesting to me that in many ways, meditation is defined by the removal of that which makes it difficult, that which hinders it. In that sense, meditation is a natural state.

My body is anticipating many things. Even after a period of quiet, it is rapidly salivating, digesting, pumping blood at a considerable rate. I have been especially on the go and I am not sure why. Perhaps I also have a tension like a rush to quiet. This is good to know. I so often contrast meditation with the processes that pull me along. But this is the same body and the same mind either at rest or busy with itself. Then there is recognition of no focus. I know I am not looking, I define looking as loosening around that which I had been tight, the lack of focus and turning toward the object of meditation with intention, consciousness, perception and toward the form. A moment of quiet before turning toward concentration, and a more positive feedback loop begins.

It seems that this troublesome form, this stone, this odd object, becomes neutral, pleasant and unpleasant..... but it has none of those qualities; they are only the result of contact. Ultimately, it is but a little round doorway.

Day Fifty-seven

Sinking into the night in meditation is so different than when waking into the day. There is more of a sense of going from noise toward quiet as opposed to lingering quiet that carries through into the noise. There is the fear of nightmares and all that is uncontrolled by vigilance.

But then, there is discipline of the mind and buoyant release to let the body roll across the sea of sleep with some sort of navigation and cooperation.

I hold the stone and fall into sleep. It does not feel like a place to go, not like another place to strive and file concepts, nor a place to get away from striving and filing.

Day Fifty-six

I am stone. I sit by the parade of your life, and you notice me when you let go all other intention.

No one has ever picked me up without picking me up.

Day Fifty-five

Ah, just going back to touching the stone as an object of concentration. It is so simple and yet fraught with many distractions. I see doubt and aversion and also attraction. I am so restless inside. I benefit from some delight in concentration; a sense of unbinding that makes me want to look around and smile. I see old moods, old habits, old conflicts. They serve to muzzle the store of experiential information that comes from being still.

I was thinking that 'nutriment' to these hindrances was craving, but it is the thing that is tied into craving, really, the coal in the craving firebox; there are four (reading about it again at http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nyanaponika/wheel105.html ) ... four kinds of nutriment: edible food, sense-impressions, volitions, and consciousness. It is hunger that stands behind the entire process of nutrition, wielding its whip relentlessly. The body, from birth to death, craves ceaselessly for material food; and mind hungers as eagerly for its own kind of nourishment, for ever new sense-impressions and for an ever expanding universe of ideas.

Analogies to eaten sons and skinned cows round out the common technique of the Buddha to disgust us and thus raise our awarenss of our own ignorance. And so sense impression is the nutriment or nutrition for feeling which is then inclined to lead toward craving. But sense impression here has craving in it; indeed it seems that all of the skandhas can or may not have craving in them. Therefore I must be watchful not to identify with the sense impressions coming from the stone. So rarely am I with anything I do not identify with.

Day Fifty-four

Touching the stone; I reflect that the stone does not have consciousness, but then I wonder if I do. It is something I take for granted. I know it is built out of conditions and so it is just another thing I have. What would I be without it? Well, not necessarily without it but without feeding it? Feeding or providing nutrition to my self concept is in fact my self concept. Not feeding it is a kind of doorway.

I had told myself I would just practice concentration and not look up stuff but I am compelled to do so. I am looking at the five Skandhas at http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/study/khandha.html. I see that they are form, feeling, perception, formation or volition, and consciousness. I also note that 'nutriment' or feeding any of these can happen. I am fascinated by the notion that I can feed form itself. Also, that consciousness is dependent on, or made of formation, moving toward, picking up, holding. I wonder more about what 'nutriment' is.

I hold the stone. I feel it neutrally. I perceive the feeling as stone-feeling. I pick up that perception instantly. That perception leans against something to make consciousness. They are all fed by ignorance. I am not sure if they fade when not fed, it is more likely that they are still there, simply not fed and therefore do not lead to clinging. All that does not lead to clinging and becoming must lead to understanding and liberation. The stone takes on new meaning. Form takes on an aspect of liberation. Form and sense base become feeling. Magically when left alone. Perception arises from past impressions.

But I am not sure of much of this. I touch the stone again. It is preparing to speak.

Day Fifty-three

There is the feeling of hardness or coolness or roundness of the stone but there is much more before these categories arise. While in concentration there is a feeling of touching the stone that is very pleasant and refined, like very special super duper fine stone touching; but that is just a concept that followed the feeling so I let go of that and it is more simple. It is a feeling that directly brings an insight into the nature of feeling; it is ok all by itself, it is singular and yet it is not separate, it is a peeling away of that which is not part of concentration; concentration allows just what is to take place. Consciousness comes back to rest in forms, I think.

Day Fifty-two

I just can't get to the stone without getting to what's in between. Yet sometimes, whatever is hard is also something not so hard to be with. Today, there is an approaching storm and the pressure is low, moist, low energy. It fits with a kind of foggy confusion, dullness physically and mentally. Actually, I see the fog as some combination of several unfinished projects that are due and the slowness of spirit.

The need for energy combined with no energy is devastating. It's ok when if flows downward and diffuse, when less is needed to be 'done' and things roll with whatever energy they already have, expending it. A rolling stone gathers moss when we are trying to have it be somewhere else, do something else. The stone is a good companion; it is certainly affected by things, it is moist, warm and heavy today, yet it is one thing, one place. And so it is one that is not separate.

This view I learn from; it is my projects and my energy. I can do little just now. My energy flows down and around a bend, where there it will become something else with other things.

Day Fifty-one

Sometimes, everything about the stone and me is vague. Touching is here, there, and around it. The point(s) of touch is not in my hand or at the stone, it is here and there, it moves. But that is as much my discursive mind picking away at the object of concentration. There is one point of stone and me, there is one touch. I watch my mind look for entertainment; there is none with the stone; there is truly no here and there, no touching, no nontouching.


Entertainment is never quite there, every agreeable occupation of the mind is either a fading fantasy or one promised to arrive. Mostly I just play games in my mind; "this is me touching or not" or "I can't do it right now but I can soon" or "I am here and need to go there". All of this feels planned, timed.

And there is no release even, or at least, release never seems to take the stage on schedule.

Day Fifty

I know that I am defined by my attachment to things, my contraction around them. I mostly just want to be somewhere else. I will not be a bad person, I cannot stand them, I cannot stand it in myself, I must therefore stay good at all times. I have bound up some sorrow in this.

I stand still and lose myself. It feels dangerous and then sad; it wrings me like a dishtowel. I am infused with being ok just as I am. I am accepted when I lose my definition, my contraction. It is the practice of acceptance, in real time. The touch of the stone is neutral and then very pleasant. Pulses of touching give way to multiple and various feelings; those of fingers alone, of finger and stone, of bone, temperature and pressure. My mind struggles to make contrasts, to define itself; it pulls away from the stone; it tells me the stone is not specific enough to concentrate on. I watch that tendency. The stone is specific; it is touching; the touching does have component parts. The component parts may also have many parts, but the primary components are the stone and my hand, still. The consciousness about the stone is a little 'I'.

Day Forty-nine

With an allergic sneezing fit and an ankle that is hard to put down in sitting position, I am distracted today. I consider sneezing in the sense of larger time. Letting myself be pulled in instead of looking, I am in a 'small' sense of time, that which is bound be either having the sneezind continue or finding relief.

There is much to be said for a larger time, in other words, sneezing never lasts, even if it goes on for a whole day or a whole week. Of course I can take care of it and that will help, but there is no guarantee that it will end. The only guarantee is that it will change. So many problems seem available to pull me into an I vs it or this time vs next time or in vs out or fixed vs broken.

I define problems that way, or I define everything that comes into consciousness that way, as a comparison to something. Touching the stone brings some relief; watching is specific, watching is release; it is the opposite of holding this or that; although..... there you go, right, watching can swiftly become freedom 'from' and then it is just a thought. When it is JUST freedom, it is real, it is in the context of direct experience; feeling.

Day Forty-eight

Touching the stone connects me to the solid parts of myself. I feel the bones in my arms and in the rest of my body. I consider their separateness from myself. They are only a part of me, then they are only bones that act together with many other things to bring life.

I have had the opportunity to 'pop out' a number of times in the past few days, from this or that state of mind. It's very much like being suddenly outside some circle of doing or being. It is unusual to rest there because, well, just because I don't usually rest there. It is full of possibility there and the fear of giving up. The possiblity is at first just an ongoing exploration of other moods that pull me back in. But then there is more space than that.

I return to concentration. Feeling, touching. In any bare contact, without me and mine, there is release. There is a life of release here.

Day Forty-seven

Noticing pull-outs to meditation; I go toward them, sound of birds, view of cat, tiredness of body. They are all there at my senses, but I go toward them. I go back to concentration and their pull lessens. I experience them in a more bare way and concentration deepens; I can let them be, even the thoughts, when not grasped, go their way. Today I am left with restlessness which too fades when I watch myself wanting to pick it up and solve it, interact with it, talk more about it.

Day Forty-six

It is hard to work past aches, pains and projects today. I talk to my clients easily about letting go, but I cannot do it, I work with them to let go, if only briefly, by not holding on quite so tightly, but can't get there myself.

Ah, I see it now, it is always a kind of letting go that is particular to the thing or things that bind; and not just a place of meditation with the stone. Often, I must come out of concentration to identify the blocks.

Then, I need not struggle to remove them, just get close to the feeling and be with it for a while. Then a sharp turn to the stone and both hard and foggy feelings lift or become more pleasant.

Day Forty-five

It is hard to quiet tonight. The wind is blowing and the weather is changing. We've had as much to do as there are leaves around, it seems. The stone waits patiently. I don't need energy, I need to rest. But at first, the only rest seems to fight with things; unfinished things, unbalanced things. How to rest with all that and not finish it, balance it all?

While sitting, letting go and being OK with things does seem a kind of energy, an inner balance, a return to gentle movement inside, a recollection that what is difficult outside will move in time and space beyond anything I can conjure.

Day Forty-four

The stone has no eyes to see, but it sees things without judgement. What is the judgement in me? It is not in the feeling, because my senses have no independent life of their own, feeling happens before any response to feeling. It isn't my mind, because that is just the space to hold perception or thought.

It is the sense of 'vs', of 'me' and 'mine'. It is given some space to rest in concentration. Hindrances of tiredness, anxiety, desire and dislike and doubt do not bring judgement, and yet they are defined by it. What is tiredness to stone? I suppose it would be a hundred years of meditation that had worn it to the size of a pea. Anxiety, just about to be cast into the path of a steamroller. And so on; but in truth, the stone is being worn without fear, and exists most temporarily with no visible signs of cracking.

Tonight, I am a paper doll cast on the river of sorrow, floating by a stone.

Day Forty-three

Observing wanting to be elsewhere. There are myriad forms of it; I'm pulled to all different parts of the body, to the affairs of the day, to a kind of restlessness, boredom; why would I want to be with boredom? It is like a platform, a place to rest.

Antagonistic towards the various kinds of touching of the stone; is it on too many fingers, should I tap it, let it rest on my hand, and so on, even though I have found peace with it many times, I forget what that feels like. Each meditation has to start anew, and some are so much more tangled. Is this just another object of comfort I am pulled to?

Thankfully not, the stone is often neutral but rarely something I have to run back to. And yet, from the perspective of a refuge, insofar as it represents the practice of the Buddha (as much as I know it), an aspect of Dharma (each and every lesson that proceeds from real experience with it), and of Sangha, at least in the recollection that I still myself in the way of other fellow practitioners and so that I might cultivate stronger compassion, stronger concentration, an end to comfort.

Day Forty-two

I sprained my ankle slightly so I can feel much of my energy going toward that spot. The pain pulls in my attention, probably so that I can do something about it. It's an old injury and this one isn't bad but I can feel it. When I really look, it's mostly a throbbing, spreading kind of stiffness and not so bad. There's some fear of getting old, or this not going away, and what to do about tomorrow and all that. It's harder to concentrate on the stone, or is it? Really, in terms of quantity of problems, the ankle is less of an issue than some other things. Sure, it pulls me in (or should I say I reach out and pick it up), but with concentration, I can give it its due. The application of meditation to problems, it seems to me, is really just the serenity prayer, to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.

But that's not meditation, that's just one way to experience a particular release. It's meditative in the sense that acceptance and wisdom can come from a still place, a non-entangled place. But meditation is about looking at the process of feeling and craving. The 'looking' is unique because it seems to be more 'felt' than 'looked at', although experiencing anything without resistance leads to the availabity of that looking.

Feeling the process of entanglement, I know I have been working with a lot of that. After that? Working with disentanglement. After that, working with unentanglement, and probably all the entanglements that come with it.

Day Forty-one

Letting go of things to be with the stone, to concentrate. I think of my purpose. For one thing, to still, to quiet, because I have experienced suffering as a kind of noise, a chasing, a movement after things. It is hard to know all the reasons for meditation at the beginning, or at the beginning of a session, but it helps to know that obligations can wait, and that there is positive result from looking.

It helps to have good wishes for all beings. Me, I have to wish myself well first, I mean I have to accept myself as I am, or better yet, allow acceptance, then I can move outward to others and wish them well. A base of being quiet helps, but this helps with quiet in turn.

Tonight the stone is too hard, and then it is too neutral, and then it is just right. But then it is just right in relation to nothing. I feel my heartbeat in my fingers. There is glory in consciousness all by itself.

Day Forty

Candle wax drips and the flame almost goes out in the rush of air from the heat. It is colder today. My son sneezes a lot. There are many cares of the day. It seems there is never 'too much' stuff to get in the way of meditation, it just takes time to settle in. After a while, each problem sits in its place and I go back to the stone.

It occurs to me that my relationship, or how I hold on to it at least, to these difficulties, defines me. It makes me solid, less flexible, more fixed and more likely to break when the inevitable changes occur. I can be the guy who is waiting for the candle to straighten out, or I can observe the pull of wanting to be somewhere else, and instead, be present.

Day Thirty-nine

I feel plenty of anxieties as I pick up the stone; bills, upcoming commitments, unfinished business. I let go of them when proceeding with concentration by asking what can be solved in this moment and giving myself permission to let go. I feel that the problems are still there, but my focus shifts to present feeling in my fingers. Sometimes, when I let go like this, tiredness comes quickly.

Letting go of anxiety seems to turn into tiredness. I go back to thinking about biology; there is so much fighting for survival, being aware of what may be of benefit or harm, that when that is lifted, the body wishes to sleep, to recover. I feel that I am resisting a biological signal with curiosity. And at this point, the curiosity has to be about the process taking place, whatever it is, with enough faith gathered thus far in direct experience being more interesting than sleep (at least at times) and in the possibility that biology (or better yet my relationship to it) is not all there is.

I then get into another dichotomy; holding onto the stone tightly vs. the worry that this is all there is. Or that this meditation is special vs nothing else is special. So many opposites, all spread out in a long line that seems to go nowhere, except that when looking, each set dissolves.

Day Thirty-eight

This stone is literally a gift because Jeanne gave it to me. What is my relationship to it? To hold on gently and persistently. Some gifts are eaten, some are used for cooking, some are to look at, some are to listen to. This one is for touching, I've decided.

I'm grateful to have a set of senses that feel. Although they may need guarding, in and of themselves, they present feeling, which seems to decode a trove of information about how things are. But I am very, very lucky, for the senses and mind which are considered an 'I' become unbound in the gift of another.

Day Thirty-seven

I am touching the stone. The solid earth element of the stone seems to touch the solid earth element of me, my skin, pressed onto the stone with the deeper, more solid bone. And yet I touch the stone as much because it is different from water, and in a specific place in the air, and of a certain temperature. So it is because of the other elements that I feel it. Also, perhaps I feel my hand because of it's fluidity, I can press because it is not entirely solid; blood and other fluids are all part of the equation.

I have contact with things and I feel them. My feelings of them are relational; I feel them this way because they are not another way. They are like this because they are part of something else. And yet I discriminate, as if the stone is permanent, separate, and inherently satisfactory.

Day Thirty-six

Feeling the gravity of the stone, watching my mind refer back to its shape as I last saw it, feeling 'around' it for a circular definition, asking about the heaviness in relation to other things. It is interesting but then more neutral and then staying with that, pleasurable. Holding or touching the stone is pleasant today because I lift up and out of holding on. I am still touching, but the entire experience is more free flowing, more instructive of letting go. There is an end of desire to change the relationship, at least for a moment.

Day Thirty-five

I am recalling Ayya Sobhana's teaching in practice today. She was talking about how she had formed an ill will towards a troublesome student. When she had the quiet to identify it and the courage to name it, it soothed.

I am practicing 'wherever the stone presents itself' just as she taught to locate the breath for a point of concentration. I am also feeling more closely discrete pulses of information from the feeling to perception, and the volition to go toward them, do something about them, make thoughts and so on. Ayya was talking a lot about biology yesterday; how most of our actions are reactions to self-preservation and desire for comfort; and yet we get what we don't want and don't get what we want etc.

She 'saw' her volitional formation toward the student and it came unbound. Usually I don't do that, I'm resistant to discovery of how I've come to see things a certain way. There seems to be a built-in resistance to understanding how volition or will toward things works. Fear of being extinguished I suppose. I can feel it in my meditation. I say "why bother with this" and "this stone is getting you away from comfort" or "this stone is getting you toward comfort" and "you are a closed system and do not have the eyes to see yourself," and "so you are an assemblage of heaps; form, feeling, perception, volition and consciousness.... if you see how volition happens you will become apathetic, there is no special knowledge here, " and "you too were hurtful towards others, you had a right to be, and if you bring awareness of that too close, you will lose something...."

It seems that the whole meditation process is non-biological in terms of its function. Concentration seems simply to be a point of focus where we can look upon our being with some insight, and with a set of information that leans toward liberation.

Day Thirty-four

At meditation retreat today with Sister Sobhana of the Bhavana Society, on Using Contemplation on the Elements to Center Your Practice. I was surprised to know that Earth and Water are more physical elements and Air and Fire more energy-related but it makes perfect sense. After having us consider all of the Earth elements of our body by imagining their removal one by one (hair, skin, organs, muscles and skeleton), we practiced with a more general meditation.

I was pulled to her explanation of the Buddha's pointing BACK from Consciousness, Volition, Perception, Feeling to Form for us to realize the way things are, rather than having us strive to achieve some idea. She explained the skahndas as gears that interlock, and observing closely any one gear can lead to their unbinding. So we worked with form in the element of Earth and asked if these 'solid' things are truly us or mine, as the Buddha exhorted his son Rahula to do in the Maha-Rahulovada Sutta (http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.062.than.html).
and also the http://www.vipassana.info/028-mahahatthipadopama-sutta-e1.htm , which is the simile of how many animals' footprints fit into an elephant's footprint; likened to how all other teachings, including those on the elements, fit into the four noble truths.

Day Thirty-three

When is my meditation intellectual vs. actual? I guess that's when I'm closer to being with whatever is. 'Arising' seems like an overused term, but to identify that things are compound, made of this plus that and never static in time or space, then it's ok I guess. To be awake with whatever is, to be of pure mind, is a puzzle, because I've an old tendency to contrast momentary insights with the 'junk' of my mind, and therefore be instantly in some idea of a better mind state.

The stone is a single point, or single enough, that touching it is the exercise of purity. All the while, my mind is pulling back to fiddling around with memories, dreams and reflections, but I return again and again to concentration. In so doing, I am engaging that grasping part of myself in an exercise of letting go. I cannot go to the stone without all of me, and yet, coming closer to bare touching, everything else releases, even thoughts of 'Why am I doing this?'

Closer, the stone and I are just about staying awake and nothing else. It is less and less and less to get lost in by letting go of each thing that comes to awareness, each thing to get lost in, until eventually, I am not lost any longer.

Day Thirty-two

It is dark and cloudy tonight. My ears are ringing still from a concert last night. I am tired and shadows are sharp, lights appear in the corner of my eyes, sound is indistinct and therefore suspect in some way. I cannot tell what is true; my senses are not at much ease. Myself and the cat seem real enough, but am I in touch, especially if my mind cannot catch up with sense impressions? Why touch the stone? Why is anything here? Is anything here? And so staying with the worry for a while; it is just that, the concerns about existence of things are possibly more healthy than the wages I pay so often to empty hallucinations that really don't work for me in the end.

I can touch the stone. Perhaps I hear 'touch the stone with a pure mind and happiness will follow', as the Buddha said about acting with a pure mind. I cannot go completely around any problem to get to the stone with purity. That would just be a rambling stream that connects nothing.

I sense something that cannot be written, about the way things are.