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.