Views from the Ground Floor: Where to begin?

March 20.

I'm sitting here Friday morning before 6 AM, as usual examining the condition of my inward energy and its relationship to the outside world and all the events that are taking place.

I am.

The energy in my Being affirms this.

So I begin here, before anything else happens, living in my body and hearing the sound of my voice and sensing the vibration of all the molecules that make up my Being, who collectively support what I am and help me begin where I am, sitting here.

I don't know anything about what this day will be like. There are a lot of general indications I can see in the immediate future, based on the plans I have made and the pattern of other days; but the fact is that this day is new and even though I’ll engage in a range of repetitive and predictable behaviors, I can't say for sure what will happen. One day in October 2011 I woke up with a similar set of impressions, expecting the day to follow the form I’d laid out for it in my mind and the future to look more or less like expected it to. That was the day my sister suddenly died at the age of 51.

 The entire world and everything in it changed forever in that moment. 

And this was a day, I now see, where I thought things were predictable.

"The virus," as we have begun to refer to it, is doing the same thing to the world: it has destroyed every assumption we had about futures. One would think this would fill people with a sobering  respect; but in the midst of this, I see powerful and supposedly intelligent people making absurd decisions, contradicting every supposedly close-held value they claim is at the core of their view of the world and the way they approach things. I'm not just talking about world leaders here; I'm talking about people I know personally. 

It raises the question: if we can't stay close to our own being and discover a real—as opposed to imaginary—consistency in our beliefs, our behavior, in the midst of a crisis this serious, who are we? My own motives and beliefs need to be brought much more sharply into question in the face of this.

I think one of the facts about an inner search, if it’s real, is that I discover I’m never the person I think I am. There's no doubt I’m a person; but much in me is unreliable, especially the parts that think they're reliable. So my observations about other people are, in a sense, meaningless — nothing more than a distraction from my observations about myself, which I ought to be paying much more attention to.

If I don't stay close to my sensation, my breathing, and integrate those as functions of my intelligence—not my automatism –I'm definitely going to engage in nonsense today. Without a grounding in the organic sensation of Being, the ship leaves port by drifting away from the dock without a crew on it.

I am beginning here within my body and within sensation this morning, and I hope to take in life as a whole thing and see it more clearly today, by receiving it without prejudice and simply allowing it to be what it is.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.