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.