Day Two Hundred and Fifty one

My approach to frustration in meditation identifies me through my history. I have often approached adversity as a combination of victim and then passive agressor. It lets me know who I am. The real problem is losing myself, either at the hands of someone or something, or simply to the fear that the universe is a cold place. I become more assertive and tip the balance back aright. I lose my history by touching it, letting go, and touching life anew.

Day Two Hundred and Fifty

Feeling contact with the stone, knowing that it is created, having no separate existence. Breathing a moment before craving, gross like wanting continued comfort and subtle like pushing away an unwanted thought. The stone is here. Craving is here, too, but the stone itself does not bind. It is here when it is touched, on the continuum of reality. I am not slow enough to feel it, to let it be what it is on the continuum, but I feel it more closely by noticing how it arises.

These things, craving and touch and feeling, that are made by habit and activity, are themselves another wheel. Even craving, made by a supposed and unexamined habit, it not the real tyranny. Ignorance is closer to it. I do not see tyranny and arrogance in the activity of the arising self. In fact, it is the movement of touch to feeling that gives us beauty, and the acknowledgement and acceptance of craving that makes us human. Somewhere, ignorance and acceptance sit down to tea.

Day Two Hundred and Forty nine

Patience calls out to me in meditation. It whispers in my ear to wait, when I am not in an easy place, when the gears of my body and awareness do not meet, when my thoughts are battered by doubt. Patience is like the weight of the stone, like the smooth surface, meeting the elements of earth, wind, and water exactly where they are.

The repose that patience brings is not outward, based on longed for conditions, nor is it inward, a state of mind apart from unfinished business. It is an attitude like craving, arising when I meet conditions. Patience, however, is invited gently in, while craving lies nervously grumbling at her cage door.

Day Two Hundred and Forty eight

I feel confident from achievement and have clarity of mind with little of doubt's obscuring fog. Which is interesting given that I have made this situation up from activity relative only to me. I notice the desire to stay in this state and how hard it is to let go. Staying in a happy state when it is strong hardly seems necessary but I notice that I do it subtly by quickly jumping away from the fear of the state fading and up and onto a trampoline of imagined goodness, all of which is one off from any state I am really in, excepting that it moves me through another unreal state. In that sense, my states of attachment necessarily are agents of change, since they are self made and I am changing all the time.

And so this dependent happiness is insubstantial, but herefore doubt also is insubstantial, something piled on top of reality.

And reality, it feels like the observation of me from the stone, rather than observation by me of the stone.

Day Two Hundred and Forty seven

Forever will I cherish doubt, and the tree across the path.

Under heavy skies, the cedars wait for rain.

I will learn from the stones that hold the swift river;

in my breath, bound here, and song of wren the same.

Day Two Hundred and Forty six

Today my son had a migraine so powerful he said he wished he were dead. It was hard to be there with all of that, wishing so hard to take the pain away. He feels better now, but I am left to wonder how distance is found in life's sharpest pains.

I think of the stone, and how I rush to find quiet with it, heedless of my attitude. I consider the attitude of the stone, a base free of judgement, yet touching me, the world, all pain. I bring my awareness to it, in spite of my doubt, and concentration deepens. I let go, and I do not stand in the way of love.

Day Two Hundred and Forty five

I notice my craving to be elsewhere, have more, not have certain things. I notice the call of sleep distract me from meditation. It is not sleepiness but my relationship to it that causes me to be somewhere else. It is not having less or not having the things I want that is the problem; or should I say it is never the things, never even my current state of disease, it is only the craving that, like a crevasse, allows me to consider this state unsatisfactory and then jump to the conclusion that some fantasy will be better.

Perhaps we know deep down that all things are not marked with favor, but we hold to the presumed history that we have become, and instead of letting this flaw be the epilogue of our narrative, we write and write more of ourselves.

Day Two Hundred and Forty four

I touch the stone and let go of who I am. Yet I hesitate to explore my place in the universe. I feel many karmas interacting, on some edge of touching. Must I have some center to move outward into this world with awareness? Perhaps karma-making fades by expanding outward, with less and less interference and more and more harmony. As the poet said, There are ripples in still water, where there is no pebble tossed.

When nothing is held, nothing is thrown, there the secret opens.

Day Two Hundred and Forty three

Watching how quickly I turn to follow thought. I follow the sound of a car outside, and from a whisper I already cannot remember, I create a story about it before it has passed my house. I create and listen and create and listen and create. I abandon the fruit of listening more deeply for the insubstantial reward of story.

There is a relationship I have to everything. Sometimes I do not see it but it is there, building up a story or letting itself be. When it is there, really there, it does not create. It plays the song of nature, speaks essential words of concert, rests in its homeland.

Day Two Hundred and Forty two

Radical instructions work. Don't do. Don't think. Don't judge. "But I have to sit with this stone" I say. Then don't do more than that. "But I have many thoughts". Then don't follow them. "But I know nothing without comparing it" Then don't hold to the comparisons.

So much of this meditation is non-following. Experience is continually refreshed without our meddling, but this craving for something to be different or stay a certain way turns every new moment into a battle with a reluctant ghost.

I picture myself waking up in or near my body. I am surprised by this. I watch thoughts arise, fade. I watch feelings touch my skin. I notice the tendency to hold things. I sink into touch as both participant and observer, not wanting anything to be different. Habits of mind clutter even a simple touch. I had not noticed the high whistle of long-driven wind through the windowframes before.

Day Two Hundred and Forty one

I am wound up with the cares of the day, plans for the future, some allergies, tiredness. It actually feels wound, energy that cannot flow. I feel far from Dharma, apart, out of tune, blocked and less than capable. As usual, when I am most frustrated with being tired I am also restless and vice versa. Either state on its own seems like it would flow better.

The stone feels more like a small bomb than an object of concentration. I fear it will go off if I do not get myself right.

I stay here. There is no magic elsewhere at this moment, though there is no magic here. Ah, but wait... ecstasy rolls like a spool when I hold myself enough to let restlessness go on its way. I connect to concentration with the the string of me, which lays like a sweet spring fuse.

Day Two Hundred and forty

Offering Metta tonight, insofar as I have wisdom and heart to do so. I am repeating phrases of 'may I be well, happy and peaceful' and so on up to and including the universe. I am faced with including myself in Metta and not knowing who or what accepts me for what I am.

I notice some of my qualities of non-acceptance: judgement, irritation, and designed ignorance. I have made them over time to be quite deep, subtle, hard to pull up by the roots. Sometimes Metta acts like a balm to them, other times I suspect it too must have a root in me, or be with the core of me.

I feel Metta closely with my fears and grand ideas. It does not take them away, it gives them something new to drink, something from another world, something essential, arterial. It can bring the dust of stones to life. It will some day scatter mine for new life.

Day Two Hundred and Thirty nine

The stone feels comfortable tonight, but I realize how much of whatever the stone feels like is due to my past. It feels comfortable because I have come to be in a pleasant mood; it has a weight and smoothness relative to my history of being with it and weighing it against all else I have known that is like and unlike it. What is it's feeling without all that history.

As I look, it becomes less and less of something of mine, and yet I hold it in my hand, and so it is very close; perhaps the only thing I touch that I am moving toward not owning. As such it takes on strange characteristics, it is a beacon of information, some kind of relay to a world beyond this ragged fiefdom of my own making.

I realize, to be a suitable object of concentration requires a struggle with and letting go of, my idea of relationship. And yet, even all that is just the stone's characteristics. Beyond that, it is a single touchpoint, much like any other. This is what I have, single touchpoints, never more than one at a time, each a doorway to greater understanding, to realization, if only in their declaration of presence.

Day Two Hundred and Thirty eight

I try too hard to be free of holding on, to be that which is free, not holding, touching without grasping. But I am holding on.

I am also aging. I used to approach older age by ignoring it or contrasting myself with it. Now I worry about it as my memory and wakefulness go through obvious cycles of clarity and fog. Acceptance would be a monumental thing, and this attachment to life is a fine place to start building a monument. For a moment, I stop worrying about accepting or not accepting, stop knowing or not and just notice. I place the stone right where it belongs.

Day Two Hundred and Thirty seven

Thousands of impressions, reactions and subsequent impressions happen in moments, it seems. I cannot count them all. Luckily, I recognize some of them as insubstantial. I stop for a moment, no longer waiting to be entertained, to be proven wrong.

I am more often tired than when I was younger, but I have as much chance to be here. There is no more need for quantity of experience, not even quality, just a more open relationship..

I have long seen life as a set of circumstances that happened to me, although certain choices put me in a better or worse position. Now I see life more as the sum of me and the world around me. And yet, the strangeness of being one entity, buoyed here by something unknown, never fades.

Day Two Hundred and Thirty five

Who knows for what measure we are here, with breath to follow, by what grace? Sometimes the high conference of voices, assembled toward some contract with the spirit, declares less than a tree full of morning birds.. Worse, we license with pens what the tongue has no business attesting to., much less owning.

I do so enjoy having a stone as an object of the attention and love of another. I find freedom in that place. I kiss the daughter of the moon, once bright in full, yet lovely with a touch of darkness on her face.

Day Two Hundred and Thirty four

I would think that all of the necessary things are in place to let awareness happen, but they are not. I notice myself thinking more, not that I am thinking more, I just notice it more. I notice how many judgements and opinions stand in the way. I notice that most everthing that strikes at the door of body and mind is picked up and judged. I rest at feeling with the stone. I notice a myriad of other touchings. They are not knocking, I just have an old habit of knowing when ghosts are there to be let in.

Day Two Hundred and Thirty three

Body consciousness of the stone depends on stone and body to be touching. At the same time, mind begins its process of analysis.

But body consciousness is not waiting there. It is created, made, manufactured by the stone and body touching. There is no stone to concentrate upon without body consciousness. This is a mind of touching. I'm not sure there is another mind with which to observe them. Of course, there is the idea of a mind, but it is only made up of those pieces of craving (or wholesome activity) that appear to the mind door to create this or that type of consciousness. And so there is no ultimate mind, much as I would like there to be.

There is stone, there is touch, and there is consciousness which leads to contact and then feeling. Craving muddies the waters by pulling an already insubstantial consciousness into an insubstantial story about ownership.

Day Two Hundred and Thirty two

I bring myself back and back again with some determination to concentrate. I say "this is touching" and "this is touching" with light and hard touches. I see that noticing and looking for hindrances are two different things.

There is a continuum that goes from an attachment to hindrance, like a kind of fear or fascination, you know, being wrapped up at one end, to noticing, which seems necessary if they are strong, to moving right through them. Sometimes, concentration is sudden and precipitous, like falling over a waterfall.

The danger there is the stark contrast to the world of solid illusion. All of my history becomes elastic, fingers of three poisons reach, feel stuck to their dimension. How can I resist? I am not given my breath by anyone, not by myself, not by anything but grace.

I am still after nature's swift foreclosure of my clinging.

Day Two Hundred Thirty one

I am tired today, after working in the garden and bike riding. I worry less about meditating while tired. Usually it is wave of thoughts about falling away from concentration into dream, and being physically tired.

If I do not struggle, I become less sleepy after a time. However, I sense that consciousness is more accessible and full of promise than unconsciousness, and so I resist. I don't want to lose my awake state. This adds the restlessness of struggling against a very natural state, and trying to hold on to another state. Two hindrances in one.

All in all I am not awake in either state. I let go of my worry, knowing that my state of awake is being cultivated by gently returning myself to concentration.

The stone is cool to the touch, hard and heavy, but not in any way a burden.

Day Two Hundred and Thirty

Tired this evening. Watching for what is happening with me that is a hindrance to concentration. It is always my relationship to my body, thoughts, and feelings that cause me to get tangled up. I could challenge myself, Zen-style, and ask "Whose relationship?," but I'm not that quick; I need to know what this thing is, this complex presumption upon which all of my history and plannning rests.

But perhaps it is not that complex. Perhaps it is not there. Perhaps my mind insists on making something quite simple complex in one last-ditch effort to prevent it's presumed demotion from creator to participant, from knower to knowing.

There is craving that follows feeling. I know it when I touch the stone and I am carried away. The stone has fewer and fewer places for my mind to go to crave. Therefore, manifold mulitplexes of mental movies have moved in, along with strong cravings for body states to be different than they are.

I dedicate myself to the birds of the air, to the quick heat of participation, to the water that rinses judgement clean, and to stone, that I might be where I am.

I ask that the elements bring me good counsel, and the song of my true place.

Day Two Hundred and Twenty Nine

I notice myself thinking. There doesn't seem to be much to it but a lot of prejudged commentary about how and what and when and why things are. Thoughts for me are kind of a cheap mystery novel.

When I let go, I still see a kind of thought, but it is less involved with a longwinded definition of who I am. It's more like receiving than labeling, more like learning about the way things are than cataloging. And there are so many levels to the information available; levels that reveal how quiet feels, the song of letting go's consonance with nature, and the falling away of time and space.

Day Two Hundred and Twenty Eight

I have a couple of perspectives on encountering hindrances, thoughts in particular. I often look at them as things which are confronting me with some power of their own, some kind of independent life. When I sit with them for a while, and if I have some success being quiet, they appear less substantial.

That which creates the view I have of the world does not like being left without these thoughts, these ideas of how things are. The mind resists exploration about what it is holding tightly. The mind says that it must return to balance by creating something else. But the real balance is between the mind and awareness, something the mind will not agree to let happen, at least not with a tight grip on it's vision.

Day Two Hundred and Twenty Seven

If there were a magic phrase that worked for concentration, I'm sure I would use it, but of course there does not seem to be. I notice that each and every hindrance is unique, and it is back through them I must go to be free enough to concentrate. On another level, I've spent years getting lost and why would I suppose that finding my way would be to continue through these deep woods? It is back on the clear path.

Not that that does not appear instantly many times, but I'm happy to apply glimpses of freedom and acceptance to greed, hatred and delusion, which remain like stout trees in the middle of my path out of darkness.

Perhaps acceptance should not be so slippery, but that is how my mind works. It does not see a way out, does not know that getting close means letting go, does not notice that craving is created by itself.

Day Two Hundred and Twenty Six

The idea of original space is unpleasant to the mind, which requires everything to belong to it. Yet everything comes from a time before time, a space beyond space, unmeasured. How else would we grow without any substantial platform?

We come from emptiness and we return to it. We know this, and that is why all compound things are suffering, and why we choose a kind of amnesia.

Sparks fly from the great engine, setting fields afire. Bring forth eons of bitter legions, prove kind stillness never tire.

Day Two Hundred and Twenty Five

I am tired from walking around Manhattan today with my younger son. We saw many, many different and interesting people doing interesting things. On the one hand it was beautiful for the space to be there for them to express themselves. On the other, people do seem to have to fit into a mold of fashion, expression, and mood.

We saw an old, tired dog with an old, tired owner. It seemed like the dog's station in life to have such an expression. Yet, the spirit never tires. Where is the castle of disconnection that lies within so many beings?

Day Two Hundred and Twenty Four

When the stone is not a perfect place to concentrate, it is a very good place to study. It is like an entire university, full of every hindrance known. I can see more clearly from this place of concentration my hindrances and my relationship to them. I get so much out of attachment, aversion, tiredness and restlessness. Even doubt provides me with a clear way out of practice. I doubt what is happening, I doubt my capabilities, and believing in that pushes me right into old distractions of the mind.... "if this isn't working, then it must not be true", I say to myself.

Yet the diseases deepen because I know that my hindrances, upon inspection, give me nothing that lasts, nothing that satisfies.

Day Two Hundred and Twenty three

If I were walking down a hillside path, somewhere out in early spring at dusk, and I heard the sound of voices coming from a house at the riverside, I would say to myself "I hear some voices coming from the house, but I do not know what they are saying." I would not say "They are greeting me" because I would not be close enough to hear. Neither would I say "I do not know what is happening" for I would know that I was on a path, nearing a house.

In meditation, I so often assure myself that I am incapable of identifying what is going on, or at the other extreme, presume to know something I do not know. Watching a hindrance like attachment to pleasant feelings or pleasant thoughts is more subtle than difficult. I forget where I am, or should I say I presume where I am, which is usually too far away or entangled.

I am probably always in a fine spot to be meditating. That is not to say that I am always in a fine spot for realizing Dharma... that would be like already being at the house, at the foot of the Buddha. But I am able to look out for my presumption, my manipulation of facts, my feints against what is unsatisfactory, my trust in passing things.

Day Two Hundred and Twenty two

I am tired and drift into dream. Touching the stone is always a matter of contrast with dreaming.... of what was, what will be, what seems to be now but is not. Even when I have no tiredness and few distractions, I am most often supposing that the stone is this way or that way, or spending time wondering about some meditation principle I've read.

When I pay attention to what is really happening, I peel away layers of dreams and find new worlds of connection and spirit that are unexpected and never, ever conjured. Time and space are not what they seem to be.

Perhaps, as the Aborigines say, this waking life is most often the dream side, and dreams, when they are known to be a landscape that accepts every footstep of ours, every breath, are real.

Day Two Hundred and Twenty one

Noticing a strong negative feeling from earlier today; frustration and anger, defensiveness. Noticing how I wrap around these feelings, protect them. I let myself stay with them, get closer, open up to them. I am surprised to discover that kind attention and anger are not opposites.

Often, I consider anger a state I must not lose, must not reveal. It is a surface feeling for fear and potential loss of me; I usually get angry when I feel threatened. I bring attention to it, notice that the feeling is compounded by having mentally run into a roadblock about practical ways to deal with the situation.

I let that be and focus on the body to begin with. My whole body is tight. I grow close, notice that deep feelings like this really define me, an outline carved by a swift sword. They have some relief right where they are, the only place they can have relief, a release of me, of tightness.

I learn from my strong feelings, they are wrapped around my heart.