Day Forty Two B

Three highly neglected practices are:

• Word Meditation
• Thinking Meditation
• Seeing Meditation

Speaking, deliberate thinking, and seeing easily comprise 90% of our conscious activities, and we cannot ignore them if we want to bring perpetual mindfuless into our daily life. Many teachers have advocated walking Practice as the transition between Sitting Practice and daily living; I propose seeing, thinking and speaking Practices as well. And remember - the object is not the form - it's the knowing. Knowing that you're seeing. And being able to see their vibrations, hear vibrations in sound - it's all there is. We collecting these experiences and practicing the re-cognizing (albeit purely intellectual) so that when the time comes for these things to come together and take us forward, we will be ready. Sometimes, the going forward will be out here, right in our daily life, on some Thursday night or Saturday morning at 5B.

Touch, smell and taste are some of my favorite senses, because the pappan~ca is relatively easier to see and stop. Form - Feeling - Perception - Mental Formation - Consciousness. Chilly nipples, hot dog cart on wintry day, nice salty/sour tomato fish soup. We can see the perception, and the mental formation on a day when we're bright. But seeing, and hearing, and thinking. Grrrr. Especially words. Would that we could see words as selfless and impersynal as a clattering spoon, leaves rustling across the forest, deer jumping, ambulances wailing, even music and drunken carousing. A wrong word can rub me worse and longer than ten minutes of intoxicated revelers rejoicing in the street below my window. What I learn over, and over, and over again -- when you can't keep your mind on the form - keep it in your body. That is, if you can't focus on the sound, and the vibrations hitting your ear, like the second hand of a clock, then keep it on the annoyance or anger or desire you feel. Sometimes your mind was too fast and you now have no choice. You're already annoyed before you know it - so put your focus on your esophagus.

Things are so dynamic in our eyes - how can we help but stay engage when we look at them Even now as I type, I am looking at the wall in front of the table, and see small moving little things in everything. I nthis plain yellow wall, millions of little bits of vibration.

Day Forty Two

I had the same few problems as Ma' today. Boredom, and out-of-gas. When you think boredom is a static state of no energy, no direction...look closer and find -- it's annoyance; anger. Displeasure at the present moment. Greed for something better. Look closer, and it's a desperation for something more stimuli-ful. It jumps onto food, water, bathroom, rest...If you're lucky enough to really not need any of those things, you get an opportunity to push the envelope on this. Boredom manifests behind my sternum; where I think my esophogus is located. Perhaps top of my diaphragm, but sometimes too high...In any event - interestingly -- that where all my high-energy feelings go -- anxiety, anger, anticipation, desire. Disappointment, tension, impatience, love, tenderness. Boredom is incredibly subtle; it also engages some tension in your arms and legs.

Boredom is an opportunity. It arises when we have no other strong or inviting stimuli - our attachments - like heartbeat, the anterior torso buzzing, buzzing in our face & palate, even our breath. It arises when things are slower, quieter, and more subtle. It's an opportunity for us to get closer, deeper, finer. A new challenge then arises - to not get attached to the quiet, and be annoyed when we are pulled out from fine to gross by a more gross object. Annoyance has lots of little quiet symptoms: hunger, thirst, urgency and tiredness are just some of them. Coiledness is another, and gerthenhert is another. Annoyance can sometimes be combatted by Kegels.

*Out-of-gas is the flip of hte same coin. Get closer. Keep assessing. If the channel of looking is low energy, see if we're ready for wide open-range awareness.

*Sometimes, it really does take an effort to think. When it does, keep the effort on awareness in the body.

*Today, we'd have spontaneous Mahasi-speak. Remembering, thoughtlets, thoughtlings. Seeing thoughts and the desire to think. Not so fine on our physical observation, though I did stay close much of the time. Phillip Pullman stories pulled so effortless - like a doggy daemon onto a golden monkey's paw.

*
~Thought is a fully formed conception.
~Thoughtling is a thought that's about to happen. You can sense some kind of baby animal lifting its head out of the sand, some kind of burrowing animal pushing up faint outlines into a blanket, starting to rise up. SOmetimes you're fast enough that you see the thoughtling before you see its face; you don't know what the thought was going to be, or you know what it was going to be about before you had it. That's a thoughtling.
~Thoughtlets are little flickered non-ideas - more fully formed than thoughtlings, but not as powerful or engaging as thoughts. If you do not find the strength to resist the temptation to think, even a small and colorless thoughtlet can grab you. They work in conjunction with boredom. Because when you're bored, your mind may be even too spaced or tired to form full thoughts. Instead, it gets hooked onto a passing train of thoughtlings.