Day Fourteen

I felt cold today from the breeze coming in the window. With concentration as a base, I could more easily look at the feeling of being cold. It was made of the air and my skin, impulses to nerves, and a reaction. I felt the cold and craved for non-cold. I quickly imagined myself in a sweatshirt, or with a wrap, or a closed window. Since that was not reality, I suffered. In between cold breezes was a more definite sense of non-cold, of relief. But that was torn away with a cold breeze, the suffering of loss of warmth.

I pushed gently toward the cold breeze, to intervene somewhere in the process of clinging. I noticed the multiple images of my thoughts, which I believe were arising in a biological way to move me into a warmer spot. And so I might as well agree that warming up was the thing to do, but I am so often like a pinball in life, only bouncing away from each unpleasant sense contact and toward each pleasant magnet; I no longer find that rewarding.

For moments I see the stream of thoughts, the impulse to get away from cold, built by thoughts, and they all disappear. There is just cold, and a kind of sweet release. Then, quickly a desire to maintain release, with each cold breeze, a craving for a more enlightened mind state. But it is the end of mind-states that bring release, the end of craving for anything more than what is. I must keep returning to this end, the end of all that is created above and beyond a simple touch of stone, or wind.