[This is a “back-post”; it is a work-in-progress, so it may change partially or completely, with materials added or taken away, over the next several days or weeks. This is “day 9(c)” of my stay at the Vipassana Meditation retreat. For general comments and summary, see “day 11.”]
I am in the bathroom, and I notice an ant. The ant appears to be damaged. Wounded. The back legs don’t seem to be working very well. I worry that maybe I stepped on it accidentally, or hurt it some other way.
The ant is trying to climb up the wall. It will make it up one foot, maybe two feet. And then it will fall down to the floor. It will walk a little way along the base of the wall, and the climb the wall again. And fall down. It did this 5 or 6 times.
Trying.
Trying.
Trying.
And then it walked along the base of the bathtub, around behind the toilet, where it stumbled into a spider web. It struggled, there, for a short time. And then stopped.
Shortly before, I’d returned to my room after 5 o’clock tea. I was restless, and frustrated, and sad. I was looking forward to doing push-ups in my room. This was, perhaps, the first time ever that I’d looked forward to doing push-ups.
Stir-crazy: I did 150 jumping jacks, and 30 push-ups.
As I did my illicit exercise (it seems it’s not technically considered desirable to have aerobic exercise during the intensive meditation course), I thought about “the world pushing back.”
What does this mean, the world pushing back? We can’t stop wanting things. We can’t stop feeling aversion to things. Desire and aversion are things that let us know that we’re alive. That’s the world, pushing back. Just like being down, doing push-ups: the world pushes back, hard. That’s gravity.
I’m not sure what I’m getting at. I guess I just feel that to speak of eliminating desires and aversions is ridiculous. It’s like choosing to be dead. You can only let go of your attachment to the outcomes (results) of actions brought on by desires and aversions. But that’s important. I think about David White’s discussions of the philosophy of non-attachment as outlined in the Bhagavad Gita.
