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.