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.