Day One Hundred and Sixty One

I am restless tonight and it takes a long time for my mind to settle down. I notice that I am also tired. It is dry and cold outside and I am by myself tonight. I am a little lonely. All of these things combine; if it was warm and wet outside, I would feel differently. I was connected to warm and friendly this morning and that has changed. Tomorrow, or in an hour I will feel differently. Time and space extend outward forever.

I will select some warm thoughts and go and rest with them. The stone is so deeply neutral, so approvingly quiet.

Day One Hundred Sixty

I touch the stone for a moment of presence that is free of long strings of thought stories. Through the day I sense more than just stories as well, but I do not fight with them. They are like leaves on a much greater tree, even in winter.

I pick up a stone outdoors and carry it, but it is too cold to hold for long, even through my glove. Stones are cold when it is cold outside, but they can break through ice. Thoughts carry the warmth and coldness of our relationship to things, but they are also a tool to make changes with when we encounter them within the present.

All things, our vision of how they are, and the feeling they engender, are available to be present with. By and by they may speak to us of their emptiness, let us pick them up more gently, use them.

Day One Hundred and Fifty Nine

Contact brings feeling and a response from the mind; also a feeling before it is craving but so hard to see. Sometimes I see this response, this mind feeling, these thoughts as from touching and sometimes they are just other thoughts, other hindrances to seeing, other cravings. I feel the stone as one thing at times, and thoughts shear away with return to it. But it is only there from flesh, stone and the resultant touch. There is no one thing, yet we make as a vantage point for investigation.

Day One Hundred and Fifty Eight

I sometimes have to work through some things to settle. It is not concentration, but it can be mindful. One of my counseling patients has oozing legs from complications related to diabetes and he will not go to the ER as recommended. And so I feel stuck with his legs and his attitude. I consider how silly that is given that they are not my legs.

And yet they are. It may be the sense of separateness from him that gives me the irritation, the sense of pushing back from the pain. It is my own pain I push away from. Deeper, I know I am connected and it is wrestling with that, arguing with my own infectious ill will toward that which interrupts my craving, threatens me with something I cannot control.

Only going closer can prove to me that I do not need to control it.

I age, I pass away, in songs of blood and stone.

Day One Hundred and Fifty Seven

All things, all that is sensed, all that is worked through the forces of nature is of the nature of ease. But easy is tricky is simple is subtle is surprising is stripping is achingly plain. Or these are the seeds dropped from my own memories I grow in the water of my present actions, with hands that touch with a will toward holding tight.

Subtle as cell division it is, this process of grasping. It too is easy.

How often I expect that I am pure inside and all of these outside things are causing me problems. I try to empty them without emptying myself and I run around dumping an empty bucket like a madman. It's like looking for my keys under a streetlamp for the sole reason that it's light there, except Nasrudin knew what he was doing.

Day One Hundred and Fifty Six

I sit for a while in a vague fog. I am tired and restless both. There are unfinished things, most of them little. The week is still a crevasse until Thursday night, when the busiest work is over. Each of my thoughts seems bound up in the body. Concern with a little pride furrows my brow, blunt worry twists my stomach, flights of fancy carry away the top of my head and my forearms, the weight of the past is now digested, the future is in my temples, resolutions grit my teeth, and my thighs wait for dances with success.

The stone confuses the German in my fingers. It should be placed in a machine somewhere, a counterweight in a metronome, perhaps. But it is here to bring my mind and body together, to let go of purpose.

Day One Hundred and Fifty Five

Though lost to the wine of wolves,
I am pressed to find looking sacred.
I run through cedar under the moon,
past the white homes of the dead;
Through the slippery fog at sunrise,
for the stone that mills my bread.

Day One Hundred and Fifty Four

Resistance is hard to underestimate as a primary factor in fostering blindness to what is really happening, but it is also hard to see. I can feel it in tiredness of the body, in comparison of myself to others or to some ideal, and even in a general spiritual way. I resist letting go, and therefore I resist freedom. Not just 'freedom from', either, but actual living freedom. Liberation, not surprisingly, is mostly process and not a location of being free from something. That would be nice, but being at rest from or liberated in contrast to something brings another struggle; the struggle to get away from being bound. It is so subtle, this resistance to things.... there may be liberation from attachment, but the process is one of awareness without any struggle at all. There is movemnent, change, motivation of the will, and so on, but the process is mostly a kind observation. Kind observation moves me in the right direction.

Resistance is unkind blindness, wrapped around a stocking of coal. The stone of concentration is a steadfast anchor that all of my difficulties show up around. It is a gift.

Day One Hundred and Fifty Three

I cut my finger and needed stitches. I ran low on energy later in the day. I think on how mortal, delicate, impermanent I am. Tiredness is like that, energy running out. When I struggle with low energy, I become tight and lose my awareness of sense bases, I run into things because I cannot see them any longer and then I fight with them.

I let go of my body, my worries, those things that cannot be held. I touch the stone gently and energy returns gently.

Day One Hundred and Fifty Two

The mind perceives things. Objects and thoughts meet the mind in the same way that finger meets stone. When my finger meets the stone, thought follows quickly, even if only 'this is touching'. The mind and thought seem to arise at the same time, that is the mind makes the object's characteristics seem solid with thought and those thoughts make the mind or observer seem solid. I understand more about feeling being an important point of release in the chain of causation. It is where the sense of self is not yet created.

Deeper, the sense of self is seen to arise. By what? I am not sure, but my will becomes motivated to move outside, in some direction that does not further define me. I breathe out all of my possesions and breathe in release.

Day One Hundred and Fifty One

Pleasant experience has a seed of liberation in it, because it is liberation. It is becoming free from a particularly less biologically well state to a more well one. For instance, warmth is comfortable only in its movement from cool. Too much warmth is unhealthy and unpleasant, and then cool is pleasant. We can work with pleasant states by watching our enjoyment of them while letting go of the desire to hold on to them. They deepen toward ecstasy, until at last they change.

Our attitude toward unpleasant states can be a sharp letting go, which can move us toward ecstasy also.

Unfortunately, many states that are temporarily pleasant are not in the long run biologically good for us, such as the use of certain drugs, or adrenaline-producing activities which are harmful. But those mimic healthy states.

Then there is the problem of stasis. States need to change in order to be healthy. The eagle's eyes are sharp because it is hungry. We lose our healthy response to natural rhythms of hunger and eating, dark and light, moisture and dry, cold and warm because of our craving for things to stay as they are or to be different than they are (which is just about the same craving).

Concentration is the one place to stay that does not latch, does not need to move. It is outside of biology, it bounds it temporaly and spatialy.

Day One Hundred and Fifty

Touching with some concentration brings up a variety of issues that carry over in relating to anything. Sustained attention can't be too forced, because I get caught up in the resistance to it. Then again, too easy and I'm drifting into other states of mind, of body. Staying with something, paying attention, is many things, including, it seems to me:

1. Letting go of entangling mind and body states that come up
   
2. Examining the reason why concentration is worthwhile, when doubts come up
3. Observing, naming, identifying what it is I am doing, at least to get back to concentration if I am in a fog.
   
4. Letting go of concepts in order to get closer to the sense door and the object, to contact, to feeling.
   
5. Observing and allowing the very pleasant state of concentration to develop, not needing to second guess it.
   
6. As the relationship to concentration gets easier, increasing effort due to a tendency toward distraction; it all seems to be a state that is never at rest... and yet perhaps it is my mind that is never at rest and therefore, applied activities are necessary until absolute calm is allowed to be.

Concentration seems more about bringing myself in line than in reaching the quiet of the stone. Perhaps the stone knows that already.

Day One Hundred Forty Nine

The stone feels softer from lotion, or perhaps it is my fingers. Do I ever feel the stone? How closely does it meet the body? How closely does the startled bird meet the eye, its fluttering the ear? Each sense has a range that objects arise into. Even the body can feel a burning car four lanes away from within a metal shell going sixy miles an hour. The mind can dream accurately of something that happens half a world or many days away.

Concentration may allow what is already close and not really separate to intensify; in this case awareness and absorption.

Day One Hundred and Forty Eight

As I sit, I think many thoughts. I let them by and feel the stone. I notice myself reaching out for many other sensory things, shapes behind my eyelids, sounds, and then looking for 'files' from the past to fit them into. I let those be. I notice that the feeling and I have a neutral relationship a lot of the time. The neutrality feels especially instructive; how can I have a neutral relationship with anything in sense or mind? How is it perceived if it is neutral. I think that often, neutrality is closer to contact, preceeding feeling, just on the edge of coming into feeling and then grasping. It may sometimes be the feeling of neutrality 'going away' also, where the contact is not seen as particularly harmful or helpful and the sense of self does not grow from it, and so I am 'moving on' to other sense contact. Perhaps neutral contact is occuring all over my senses, all the time, in addition to pleasant and unpleasant. Although this leads me to think that I can let go of certain contacts and cultivate others, that is not concentration or mindfulness, or anything that leads to release.

Day One Hundred and Forty Seven

I watch physical and mental noise quiet down. Concentration is interrupted by thoughts and body feelings. I sense that every thought has a concurrent feeling in the body; a slight lean toward or away. It makes sense biologically. Even "I liked my walk today", or "I hope the weather is nice tomorrow", feel like they are designed to keep me well, or safe. Positive or negative, they keep me apart from concentration and other realities if I do not notice them. Sometimes, I let myself think a stream of thoughts I am having, I notice them and I notice that I am separate from them. I pack them up into a body feeling and let them go their way. They usually seem to be in groups of pleasant or unpleasant. Sometimes they start pleasant and end up at an unpleasant dead end. I let some groups of thought or inquiry go unsolved. I feel a sense of emptiness or despair after that sometimes, but I let that go and return to concentration with invigorated focus.

Day One Hundred and Forty Six

Touching takes me out of time, sometimes to where there is all time, all things. I notice touching before craving, concentration and I am no longer falling away from or toward anything. The past and future may be there but not in relation to the object and the body. I create no story, except for a little one about fear of letting go. In that one, I see myself letting go and worrying about what I might leave behind or not get. Telling myself this helps me to place myself in relation to concentration instead of this or that, instead of wanting or pushing away, instead of craving. I let go and the story ends. Here opens up from some center, an unmade fountain.

Day One Hundred and Forty Five

I touch this stone for touching's sake
in the salt of paths that lead to blindness,
for the grace of liberty I take
and the unbidden hand of kindness.

Day One Hundred and Forty Four

Exploring contact brings it up out of the relative sphere of something that we are getting or not getting, into a more objective one, of looking at the process. And yet it is not theoretical because I am really touching; well, more or less really. I touch more fully when I work with kindly but firmly with hindrances. Desire and aversion, tiredness, restlessness and doubt all define me. When really touching the stone, I do not want it, I do not want it to go away, it is calming and invigorating, and it speaks of what is true.

Day One Hundred and Forty Three

I consider ignorance. It seems to be some factor of individuality, or self-posessive individuality. The Buddha says it is lack of restraint of the senses and lack of attention that provide the fuel for it, that we cannot know of its origin. And so insight and ignorance are both waiting for their food. They are brought about by a combination of factors.

I touch a hundred thousand things with my senses to wrap around or away from, to fashion ignorance from. I touch the stone and have restraint. Yet it is gentle and never forced; it fights with nothing. Awareness has such availability.

Day One Hundred and Forty Two

It makes sense that concentration takes effort. If we were in it as a permanent state; we would be like stones. It isn't a permanent state. In fact, it seems that the act of bringing attention to the object of meditation is as important as anything else. It is like how we experience any feeling, in this case we are doing it consciously. It is a dependent thing like anything else, made up of the compound factors of object and sense door.

What is this attention that we bring. In fact, I think that attention arises through the mindful act of bringing it. Then when there is concentration, it grows more or less on its own. Attention seems to be the absence of craving. Perhaps it is simply the removal of craving, or craving is simply lack of attention.

Day One Hundred and Forty One

Ecstatic release from concentration may be due to it being the only time we are not on guard. It is interesting that we need to be focused to no longer be on guard, to no longer have a body process moving out mind to protection or food or other functions or to have some distraction like TV or reading move us through stories (which may be biologically relaxing).

I have to repeat to myself 'let go, let go' over and over to maintain concentration. I also have to say 'look here, come back here' to improve focus. A variety of pleasant sensory things happen in concentration. I think they are closer to the way things really are, but not if I get stuck there or contrast them too much with daily life.

Day One Hundred and Forty

I am tired today from activity and from caffeine and chocolate. Each of these seems bound to give me a feeling of tiredness. It is a little harder to name what is going on. I name tiredness and it helps. A state of tiredness often brings a little confusion, not by itself, but I think it comes from struggle with it. I let it be and move to whatever I am feeling, and then to concentration. I can stay there for a while. Everything around the stone clarifies, like ripples outward that fade, leaving a clear pool.

Day One Hundred and Thirty Nine

Considering what is left to observe the self, to look for it's dissolution, or to find and hold an awareness of it's dependent nature. It may not be that there is on perspective; that may be another trick of the mind; much in the same way that the notion of a pleasant unity to things is a trick of the mind. There are so many delusions to believe in, spiritual and material. Only love lasts, and love, for all its warmth, depends on no one.

Day One Hundred and Thirty Eight

I feel free in concentration. I consider its perspective. There is a subtle sense of being free from something. I sense greed, the desire to have; to hold on to the 'free' perspective. I sense hatred, the disdain for my old self; for history, for my mistakes, for many things. I sense a subtle ignorance; the general sense of craving for self that wraps like twilight around my dreams; even it darkens the very release from them.

It seems to me that these are the things that matter most; the application of freedom, of concentration and mindfulness to these subtle matters of self. Freedom is a living thing, and it cannot be anywhere but here and now. I feel the stability of bringing the dark into the light with me.

Day One Hundred and Thirty Seven

Some spirit in concentration and love is the same. But inviting the spirit into the body, mind and interactions liberates those things, where concentration on its own does not seem to. Perhaps everything has liberation from craving when contact is made with concentration.

Day One Hundred and Thirty Six

A couple of successive drifts into tiredness and I pop into an easy awake. It feels comfortable to concentrate. I notice my trouble in the past weeks with mindfulness and concentration; I feel I cannot do one without the other. I do try to just be with the feeling but find myself questioning it. I don't think it is unhealthy. I let go of trying to unbind the entire twelve links however. I still feel it is a worthy endeavor to look at the sense door without the mind. If feeling can truly be bare, and I have felt it, then so can contact. The critical 'eye' feels different here than the judging eye of the mind. All phenomena seem inherently watched by an unjudging eye.

Day One Hundred and Thirty Five

The struggle to name and to categorize and to see with the mind continues. The body is not of the mind, there is a feeling there of touching that is separate from the mind. I must give up some of this strong desire to see things in words.

I understand the idea of looking at bare feeling. But that is the recognition that it is caused by contact; which is caused by sense base and object. I see that touching can be before craving for any state to change. The stone is pleasant or neutral before the mind wraps around that. The body has its own craving separate from mind. Thus it has become a body.

Day One Hundred and Thirty Four

I concentrate my whole body on touching; I let the rest of my body be only more of what touches. Although touching is a single point, it is also never a single point; or we could say never even touched, for the space between atoms and so on. Dharma talk tonight was about seeing the immeteriality of those with whom we are angry. In that way, we see them as less threatening; also we see them like ourselves. The door of touch, of the body seems that way, not substantial, only there when called upon, made up of other things.

I am quickly at becoming, but more so with my distractions than with the stone. I notice that I go there to fill the space of my vanishing self.

Day One Hundred and Thirty Three

Touching the stone is easy but I am all alone tonight, and many thoughts assail me. I struggle to balance happy ones and lonely ones. I am not made just of those things. Within loneliness is freedom, release, unbinding, I'm sure, and yet I am not there. I look for companionship with the stone, and instead see a hundred kinds of touch that might make a warm library flutter away in the cold wind. I drift. I must go with the wind on waves with what I am made of.

Practice is a lighthouse that is sometimes not seen. I can feel it when I touch without writing a story about where I am going.

Day One Hundred and Thirty Two

Looking for the sense door of touch is an odd vocation. I'm not sure it comes into being without contact, or at least does not have any experience of function without that which it presses against. Likewise, I wonder, does contact not have any existence without feeling.... in other words, what is felt is what defines or speaks to what it is made from; contact.

As such, perhaps I'd best be looking for becoming; the strong sense of 'I' that pervades everything and cannot look back through the chain of causes because of its homemade veil.

It seems there truly is no time and space, for it flows both ways. This present moment is resting on past moments, and not just that it 'rested' in the past tense; it truly is resting on it.... deeper still, it is not here in any material sense, at any time. This feeling of touch is resting on contact, which is resting on the sense door. Any awareness of this chain seems ready to break it, but ignorance and 'I' are strong. I look without looking for a moment.

Day One Hundred and Thirty One

Sitting quietly for a long while tonight. I feel touching, and I concentrate. I notice how everything else falls away... not gone, but not tied to me anymore. I look for what the base of sense is, and notice many thoughts springing from the base of the mind;. it seems like the same kind of base, body or mind.... also it seems that they are not really there.... the sense of having a 'door' or a place for the stone to touch is not there without the stone, it must arise in combination with its object. And so I think that often I am not looking in the right place... I am looking for this door to be pre-existent, much as I look for peace of mind to be a thing or something to find. The door of sense very possibly cannot be seen from any place other than where it is.