Day Sixty-nine

A quiet afternoon falling asleep over and over during meditation. I can watch that and wait for sleepiness to pass. Often when this happens I feel as if I am getting needed rest, and let myself have it. A kind of easing up on the 'get it done' mentality.

Sixty-eight

Staying with or even going to the stone with attention is often a battle with something else my attention is pulled to. Often it is a sense of comfort I am running after. Some of those comforts are strange; thought patterns and fantasies where I am soothed or in control of something, or wild adventure.

Other times, like right now, there’s just a general restlessness. It manifests as a tight jaw, nervous fingers, fluttery chest. In my mind I feel like either fading into sleep or moving somewhere. Then some doubt. Now touching but trouble staying with it. I have a very general sense of imbalance or incompleteness. It is my mind wrapping around doubt. A little distance and I can see that. What I thought was blocking me is not that at all, it is not a foreign force of any kind. It is me and what I am holding on to.

Day Sixty-seven

When I am agitated, things look agitating. The rock does not fit properly, it smells bad (really, I smelled it, its a bit like gun oil, but more on that later), the meditation bell is dirty and less than imperfect, the silver lamp is sharp and cheap, the large rock has poorly drawn circles on it, the crushed rose tells me I do not have what it represents in my hand, all things pulse like an aura before a migraine.

But these things are surely much more neutral. I sit with the stone and this unpleasantness. I shift first, to a more open awareness; my body softens, my mind holds the thought of neutrality, of being present, of exploration and the objects soften. As they soften I can see more about them, and I notice the words that I have written on them, 'dirty', 'cheap', 'poorly', 'I do not have', 'bad'..... These are strong judgments. I notice that they are there before I speak them, unconscious links to the past.

The objects soften more and become neutral, then friendly, arranged like little mushrooms with something to say, a village, the lamp is cute, the bell has character, the beauty of nature's circles. These words are from history also.

I may choose the present only from among that which I have chosen to see.

Day Sixty-six

Concentration is a strange proposition because most everything that the mind encounters is 'picked up' and perceived as 'mine'. Yet, the objective is to go back over and over again to the stone. How do I work with it without picking it up? What is this form without holding it, redefining it? It is most certainly a changing form, and it does not need to be anything I add to. As it is, it is a place to go back to and each time, to let go of what is happening but keep looking at what is happening. How rarely I do those two things together; usually I am forced to let go; even then I simply make another movie about how things are.

How are things really? They are unbinding in every sense, warm, willowy, a chorus.

Day Sixty-five

In the Sanna Sutta http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an07/an07.046.than.html, a short Sutta I was reading on perception, the Buddha talks about the wholesome perceptions of death, impermanence, distaste for that which is inconstant and so on. In considering the stone, I struggle with many perceptions, most of them less wholesome, such as it is cool now, or it is smooth, or neutral now and so on. None of those bring much enlightenment. I can feel myself being pulled in to perception, 'picking up' a sense of self vs stone, simply how I identify it. I can sense how refined, or should I say how natural, a more healthy perception of the stone could be. It is neither permanent or impermanent. It is not a subject of careless rumination, but it could be. I have a choice; either to push through the doubt and craving, or allow them to pull me into mental ping-pong.

In pushing through I see more about how craving is applied to perception and how that is linked to form and feeling. I can't add additional commentary to form without breaking the link to feeling and believing feeling to be independent. Although bare attention appears to see feeling without craving, I get more of a sense that it usually is bound up by ownership and lack of vision, thus supposing that it has bare feeling. But truly bare feeling may need to include the contact with form upon which it rests.

It may not be so much the 'better' activity of the mind which realizes wholesome perceptions, but its perspective.

Day Sixty-four

Accountability to even just being with the stone seems too great. Can I not have my own refuges of doubt, clouds, and anxious espionage? The stone says little, but in silence a lot. I have not been in such a position to have to ask myself these questions, knowing that I must deliver an answer. In the end I have nothing, and were the earth raked by some meteor to a depth of a thousand feet, exposing the granite of stones to be melted, cracked and washed for a million more years, I would have no less.

Old age darkens my once clear vision as it hurtles to crack my knees. Now, I am of blood, skin, bone, touch, and words. I was once made of this stone and I will be again. Whatever I am drifts out the window tonight, leaving a stone I could not trade for a grain of rice, black from the oil of one season of my days.

Day Sixty-three

I sometimes meditate out of the other side of distraction or concern or busy-ness. I await the quality of meditation to deepen. Often, I feel a rush to make it happen, to be quieter, to be somewhere other than where I am but that just adds another step. All of these things can quiet on their own; turning attention, by turn and turn, from holding tigers to touching stone.