No Contact: Freedom Right At My Fingertips Painting

Pressing my hand against the tiled wall in the bathroom: this seems like a very definite unambiguous experience. I’m in a room I know, the wall feels hard, solid. It presses right up to and against my fingers which cannot penetrate or pass through, but seem just to make contact. But if I look at the experience more closely, say, I close y eyes and concentrate just on the sensation of touch, at first, I might still think, yes, that’s the hard wall against my fingers, maybe a sensation in my mind. But when I make an honest attempt to be rid of all the preconceived notions and just focus directly on the sensation, I find these labels, “hard,” “my fingers,” even “impression in my mind,” are not with the sensation, but are conceptually applied on top of it. The sensation itself, though appearing, is wordless and silent. If I look at the visual, like the one presented in my painting, with the same objectivity (for some reason the conceptions applied to visual sensations are harder for me to break through) I can’t really determine what the whiteness of the white tiles consists of, nor the hand-ness of the hand. All these things, these ideas, that we bandy about so effortlessly with certainty, fade and disappear when examined closely. I actually have the whole everyday world backwards. I go around constantly believing that the hard wall and my fingers exist there externally as if “beneath” or “behind” my sensations of them. But when examined, I see that the hard wall and my fingers and the whole world in fact which I am constantly caught up in and ruminating about only exists as thoughts and conceptualizations deduced and inferred from sensations and then applied as labels on top of these sensations. It’s gotten so that I don’t hardly ever actually feel any sensations any more, just live amongst the ideas and conceptions they instantly and seamlessly call up. I’m so lost in these conceptions I’m convinced they are the real world and don’t even notice they are just a bunch of thoughts constantly circling round in my mind. What I’ve said here up till now can be recognized by ay one who would just take some time to experience and actually look at his or her sensations. But the following is more the reason why I keep looking at mine and is more a belief that I haven’t been yet able to fully realize. Most of the time I am still caught up in the attractions of my own conceptions even though the result of these conceptions are always one or more of these: anger, unhealthy attachment, dislike, desire, jealousy, greed, a need to dominate or control, or just a feeling of trying to lose myself mindlessly for awhile. I believe if I spend even just a small fraction of the time and energy that I spend on this instead focusing on what the actual nature of my awareness of sensation consists of, that is, if I looked “inward” at the processes just a little bit instead of always “outward” trying to fix the world or squeeze something out of it, soon I would develop an awareness and consciousness which would become so colossal as to make the outer world recede and disappear. Compared to real awareness, true consciousness, I believe the entire “external” universe would be just like a few strands of hazy clouds passing around a sphere of incredibly brilliant fiery light. But unfortunately, so far I continue to remain bliss-less-ly ignorant of the freedom right at the tips of my finger.