Day Three Hundred and forty three

Home again

This is the place where nothing moves

This is where words fall from lips

A spring whence rivers themselves rise

and from which thirst itself does sip,

Where merge both canticle and dew

Where wind and stone awaken

If light years tear my arms from you

our love be lives of love unshaken.

Day Three Hundred and forty two

Day seven of vacation

Touching stone and breath. The definition of me is only against or as possessing. I am lost without these locations. Yet, I let go and concentration deepens. The fantasy of the objects of breathing not being me vanish. The fantasy of them being mine vanishes.

The story of me runs out. I find a pool that is not made by anyone to drink from. I have long been thirsty.

Day Three Hundred and forty one

Day six of vacation

I notice the arising, the being, the passing of thoughts and feelings. Each is a frame bound and supported by other frames, in a larger set of how things are. The larger frame will fall away, and so many little things will change.

I aim my attention at the stone and mindfulness arises. For once it is out of the frame, out of time, singular, touched at last.

Day Three Hundred and forty

Day five of vacation

I practice allowing my breathing to be, allowing touch to be. I practice like water, allowing whatever there is to come to me, instead of reaching out to fill up or change or possess things. I am filled with light.

The stone returns home with me, along with the essence of things that touch me. Troubles go to their respective places, spirits to their spirit places.

Day Three Hundred and thirty nine

Day four of vacation

Meditation in a sleepy cabin during the day. I drift into vivid dreaming, of a museum where I find fossils. I wake to find myself somewhere in time, more of my own making that I expected.

That night, there is news of loss from home. I connect with many threads of meaning, sorrow, seriousness, the brief place that life is held in, and the definition of family.

Dreams run in many directions, forward into expectation, into the honey and salt of the past, and expanding here in pools of warm consideration; to cool or evaporate later.

Day Three Hundred and thirty eight

Day three of vacation

Working with breath to allow it to be whatever it is. When I do, I notice that I am alright as whatever I am as well. I touch the stone, and all is well with things, they are all always home.

Day Three Hundred and thirty seven

Day two of vacation

Now the stone is near home, where Jeanne found it years ago for me, before we met. But the stone is always home, unlike my wandering mind, which drifts and dreams like a lost sailor.

The stone rests, and I watch my moods change like the tide.

Day Three Hundred and thirty six

Day one of vacation to Canada; posted a week late.

Settling after a tough drive. Noticing many contrasts, how the hotel is better than driving, and holding on to the contrast. Noticing how hard it is to let go of pleasure; here there is more space, more quiet, less tension on the eyes and mind. Yet all of these things shift, from comfort to discomfort and back again. As I let go of the pleasure and peace of sitting here, I experience something greater.

It is hard to believe, as I sit, that the truth of, the experience of, the reality of impermanence is available as a release to mortals.

Day Three Hundred and thirty five

Touching the stone or the breath and trying to let it be whatever it is. Then letting go of trying, and they are as they are. Considering that breath or stone are in their way, the only things in the world, the only thing I need to experience contact with for a time.

Noticing that I vanish somewhere. Noticing that meditation is never a success the same way, there is never the same rest, because it is me who must let go, let my attention graduate, and to do so, I must recognize that I have changed.

Day Three Hundred and thirty four

I notice that I wrap around somewhere other than this moment because this moment here, now, represents true contact with stress.

I touch the breath without words.

Day Three Hundred and thirty three

I sit with stone in simmering heat. I consider the cares that present themselves. Sometimes I can easily give myself a break from them and allow myself to concentrate on breathing. Other times they seem to need more attention.

I reflect on them for a little while. I know there is not much I can do about them right now. I consider my attitude; that I am missing out on enlightenment. That makes such little sense. I let go and reorient to why I am meditating in the first place. I rest with the notion that it is a simple practice for the release from wanting, toward the end of fabricating, to being with everything in its place and time. The image of myself steps aside to let wisdom take a step forward, into the light, breathing the breath of humanity.

Day Three Hundred and thirty two

Noticing the importance of energy and attentiveness in meditation vs sloth. I watch how my motivation to practice enhances my energy, my desire to look at my mind, and vice versa. When I remember that sitting through hindrances has always yielded clarity and fruit, I am motivated to practice. When I remember the times I have found release in being mindful of pleasant and unpleasant contact, the release that is inherent in all of our contact, I am motivated to practice.

I notice some of the links between the hindrances. Sloth (not mere tiredness but the lack of motivation to practice) may be ego-boredom resulting from the fading of desire and aversion. It masquerades as tiredness to effect the continuation of self, the closing of the eye.

Can I see this? Am I willing to set my purpose in life against the shadow of time?

Day Three Hundred and thirty one

Again I am heavy and aching. I touch the stone and notice the many feelings of body that interrupt my meditation. I also notice the many things in the visual field, which seem especially sharp and tilted, sound which seems compressed, and a slight chemical taste. I know that each impression is made of much smaller impressions that I cannot see, each one point, one frame that adds up to the movie I make of my experience. Smaller dots make up a flow, each flow interweaves to make frame and then chapter and then title. Each movie runs along a course of history in a much larger movie. There are so many stories being made that I cannot see or feel at least on the surface.

I consider the feelings and stories as more craving, craving to get away much as I crave for pleasant things to stay around. I consider how my attachment to craving makes me really there, but really there with craving, with illusion, with what is not there. I put the distractions of my unsettled mind down in the gathering dark with my generally fragmented perception and I gain some distance to watch what is moving, and breathe silently.

Day Three Hundred and thirty

Tired and sore today. Noticing how physical pain and tiredness tangle the mind up with arguments and tirades.

While sitting, I notice some difference between body and mind. I notice how the mind names and describes the pain. On the one hand, there is a global sense of the need for wellness, a large and reaching description of what makes me feel well. It includes a sense of freedom of the mind to take up ideas and pleasant sense contact as its own. I remember feeling better for a short while earlier in the day and how much I enjoyed it.

On another level, there is an almost neurological sense of well or ill being, which I suspect has names or mental activity tied to it. There is a tangle of response from many locations of trained body consciousness, or mind/body places of consciousness. I notice it and for a time I am quite free of any pain; I am clear-minded, without holding on to a 'well' state.

There is so much that comes from sitting, so much information about the state beyond well or ill. I don't experience it as a unified state so much as I do an informative one, a state that also flows and changes as do my mood and feelings, but one that speaks in the language of liberation.

Day Three Hundred and twenty nine

Feeling ill from Lyme bite and antibiotic tonight. Noticing how tightly I hold on to wellness, such that I refuse to notice illness; not that I feel well, but that I tell myself I cannot be sick. Slightly feverish, I notice my mind getting tied up with the body, affected by the body, struggling with the body. It is an odd struggle to be trying not to notice it, not to allow for it, not to rest. Noticing it, I accept the heat and aches and allow myself to be in a different place than I usually am. My thoughts skitter like water in a frying pan.

But the water comes from a great pool that trickles over cool rocks, somewhere in the nature of that which holds me.

Day Three Hundred and twenty eight

I touch the stone and consider its material form, and my mental image of it. The stone is going through its many forms, and is not the least bit solid; though it could break the skull of a crow.

I have the feeling of its qualities, smooth and somewhat heavy. I perceive it in the realm of many stones and what is not stone. Consciousness of it comes up, craving comes up. All of the mental processes come up and I see them as different from the stone. I consider the magic of mental processes; the life they bring through the ground of self, built over a hundred thousand points of touching, all compared and led forward by craving into a jungle of new formations. I suppose comparison has brought me here, always a stone's throw from death, a ripple from Nirvana.

Day Three Hundred and twenty seven

I sit in the palace that holds nothing fast.

I bear the scepter I cannot grasp.

I wait while death declares the high position,

but at last let the ear take no place to hear,

whisper magic and miracles

their admonition.

Day Three Hundred and twenty six

I hold the stone and it is hard to concentrate. I blame the stone.

If I am not concentrating on the stone, where am I. I look, and see that I am in a vacuum that I have created by a presumed notion of me connected to many things. My anxiety rises as I look for things and do not find them. Then I look to leave the things I have created to be with, the ground or stage that I have made for things to set or act on. But it is all too compelling, even intermission.

Day Three Hundred and twenty five

I am tired in the heat and humidity, although I've had the luxury of a day inside in air conditioning.

I connect with breath and wonder, how in the secret name of heaven could this body and mind be anything more than a moan before death, a falling leaf, or rainwater collecting into rivulets that slip into drains? Then I notice the many impacts of form onto my senses, and the consciousness that arises there. Even the voices of many beings to whom I might send Metta must strike me somewhere, however lightly or in whatever way too quiet for my busy mind to sense.

My observation dislocates and I reach painfully for a new balm.

Day Three Hundred and twenty four

Following the breath comes easily tonight. I feel the breath going in and know that it is not part of a continuous touching; I feel it going out as another touching. Yet each in and out breath are broken up as well into little fits and starts. There is noticing of the breathing, and there is just breathing. I sense that just breathing is also conscious, already contains consciousness or it would not come about. It is not like the wind, simply a matter of interacting elements. It also has a regulation of the mind, long before awareness happens. Yet awareness begins to span the gap from rarified and distant conceptualization down to the elements of body and mind themselves.

The stone sits on the altar, an element in the potentiality of waking.

Day Three Hundred and twenty two

I connect with my breathing and I am grateful. I hear crickets outside. They are as they are. My breathing is the same way. Calmness comes to the surface.

After a time, I reflect on the retreat. I know that happiness and love can be brought about in any and all of us. In the same way that mindfulness brought to an object brings about the conditions for concentration, so can mindfulness, when brought to the feelings of separateness and doubt, allow for deep touching and strong faith.

Day Three Hundred and twenty two

Feeling the sensations of the body. I am made of these things but that does not need to make me into something else. Yet, there arise the personalities of me and the friends I am with tonight.

We are all older. They are each wise. I can feel their comments on impermanence in my heart more directly than I can hear them.

Day Three Hundred and twenty one

Departure day

Entertaining myself creates the ground of illusion, the stage of me. What good will it do me to speculate on the ending of this play, if I do not feel each prop, each actor, and come to know the director?

Day Three Hundred and twenty

Day Seven

From Maha Boowa's book Things as They Are:

"When the skandhas reveal themselves bit by bit, what are the adversaries to Nibbana? The sense that "my heart is empty and at ease, clean and clear." Even though we may see the heart as empty, it is pained with un-emptiness.

I loved this statement. The teacher in interview suggested that I consider that my difficulties are a purification, and the extent to which I was holding on to progress being this way or that way. Maha Boowa confirms the close and kind relationship that is needed and I celebrate my fortune at not yet having found peace.

Day Three Hundred and nineteen

Day Six

I apologize to my stone. After almost a year of practice, I must give it a break. I have had much difficulty developing sustained concentration in this quiet environment and so I am moving to the breath alone. I will return to you, dear stone, when I have developed my concentration further.

I wonder if ignorance and wisdom are not in perfect balance. How would the Buddha have become enlightened otherwise?

I have trouble concentrating and I am trying to look for what is there. It is hard to see. Is it another thought, or feeling, or just some belief in self? I do feel deeper tightness below the surface, deeper feeling. It is like there is some fear, something protected that acts as a bridge between thoughts.

I look out the window and watch a spider climb up a daisy. It moves out of view and I want to see it return to view. My wondering has already built craving and clinging. I notice that clinging gets stronger with little webs of contact and feeling and craving built around it. Views, it seems, are these strongly reinforced patterns. Do we have real memory? Sure but it seems to be more like views that reinforce a belief in self than it does one continuous consciousness.

Noticing how things are brings joy, contentment and bliss. Perhaps it is the concentration inherent in the timeless awareness of things. It seems there is no time or space, just things that go by, like webs in the dew.

Day Three Hundred and eighteen

Day Five

What creates a new state of mind? I notice that this present one, this thought pattern, begins to decay because it runs out of energy. Sometimes this is concurrent with weak messages of another formation. This contributes further to the decay. Sometimes my mind notices that something has changed in the body, or the body knocks on the mind first.

At this retreat, we can use the library. I read Bodhi, Bhikkhu, trans., The Great Discourse on Causation: The Maha Nidana Sutta and its Commentaries (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1984), with fervor. I notice many points that can be observed. Bodhi points out that clinging includes an attachment to views, which explains a lot. I experience my mind tapping in to memories, and some of them are strongly held views.

In this discourse, the Buddha adds a piece about how craving becomes clinging in addition to the typical course of feeling>craving>clinging, etc.

"Now, craving is dependent on feeling, seeking is dependent on craving, acquisition is dependent on seeking, ascertainment is dependent on acquisition, desire and passion is dependent on ascertainment, attachment is dependent on desire and passion, possessiveness is dependent on attachment, stinginess is dependent on possessiveness, defensiveness is dependent on stinginess, and because of defensiveness, dependent on defensiveness, various evil, unskillful phenomena come into play: the taking up of sticks and knives; conflicts, quarrels, and disputes; accusations, divisive speech, and lies."

I observe a robin land in the grass, looking for a place to find bugs. He chases away an interloper. But there was plenty of room for both.

My fellow potwasher is slow to arrive. I consider him a slow person. I notice the above set of links in my process. What a leap I have taken!

Day Three Hundred and seventeen

Day Four

Lunch pear. Even as I begin to focus on eating, I fly away to critical analysis of the pear, to being done with the pear, to losing the juiciness of this pear moment. I try just paying attention, but I struggle. I consider myself bad for not paying attention. I struggle with that, the feeling of whether or not I should consider myself bad. Then I struggle with that struggle. I let it all go, noticing the subtle attachment to what I wish were happening in every other way but now. For the first time, I eat a pear at pear eating speed.

As I try hard to concentrate on the stone or on breathing, I have little luck. I notice a subtle tendency to hold on to something, to hold back, to protect. I want concentration to be this way or that way, to bring bliss, peace, clarity, freedom. However, concentration is a castle without walls.

Later, I lay down in my room in the heat. My bones are like the stones, hard, smooth, heavy. My blood and organs are like water, my breath is a supporting air, and digestion is fire. I am amazed to be only that, so little to really struggle with.

Day Three Hundred and sixteen

Day Three

I sense that the hindrances of attachment, aversion, sloth, restlessness and doubt are all different feelings of craving that impact my mind but are unobserved with mindfulness.

I have so many arguments in my mind, so much anger! I am so disgruntled and so attached to things. I notice my underlying desire to master doing things or thinking (which is the doing of the mind) to prove that I am good. I feel not so much that I am defensive about being good, but that I protect an inner weakness from being found out. Again, a wise heart that feels at once foreign and always known heals me.

Day Three Hundred and fifteen

Day Two:

Many thoughts and streams of thoughts arise in my mind. I play a little skit about me being entertaining and dancing away from something serious. I am found and I know that I need love. Something that cares very much for me helps me.

I feel dissolution of body into its many parts. I feel dissolution of mind from its many objects.

What is really coming into the contact of any of my senses are objects, each with information about liberation. Concentration lifts me up, as if I were high above the Nazca lines, to see what they mean.

Day Three Hundred and fourteen

The next eight days are posted late, due to being at a retreat.

Day One: Arrival

At the Forest Refuge in Barre, Ma, the Buddha in the meditation hall sits atop a ten ton boulder, reaching down to touch it.

Concentration creates a point of awareness; a place for it to rest to be different than all other things, to observe, and to be free. I notice that many things appear to be going on in the world, but my interrelationship (or presumed one) with the point of concentration is also going on and piques my interest.

Day Three Hundred and thirteen

Retreat week begins tomorrow. I am filled with many feelings. I relish the opportunity for the quiet time, but I know that means a full review of layers of me uncomfortable to my sense of control, attachment, and possession.

In the end, nothing can hide from the mother light.