Patrick Kearney – Touch & Story

Often when we come to practise meditation we find ourselves overwhelmed by the river of stories that flows through our minds. This is the realm of narrative, the virtual world within which we live most of the time. In the Buddha’s language, this is the world of the sixth sense, that of mind (mano). Our basic task is to keep our awareness in the physical world, the world of the five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. We practise intimacy, where we stay with the touch of sense object on its corresponding sensitivity – the touch of sights on eye sensitivity, the touch of sounds on ear sensitivity, and so on. Finally, we approach the sixth sensitivity, that of mind, by learning to stay with the touch of thought, feeling and perception. We learn to stay with touch rather than story; even the touch of story itself.