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.