What is Expression?

There is much more to life than we usually think about or see; and one can go much deeper into oneself than one usually goes.

There is a secret, sacred place of being in all of us. This place lies buried under many layers of psychology and personality, far away from all the functions we use to express ourselves. 

The word express means to press out, and this is what we do. We press ourselves, our Being, out into the world. The world exerts a reciprocal force on our Being because of its emptiness; it draws us out into it.

Yet there's an opportunity to come into contact with a quietness that emerges in our sensation. This isn’t the ordinary sensation of the body, or even any sensation that arises from the ordinary. It's a much subtler and more refined vibration that belongs not to me, but to itself. It has a different taste than anything I know of. Without that taste in me, I will constantly confuse everything I hear about sensation with something else, a lower rate of vibration that's coarse enough to touch the world and my mind, but not to exist within its own energy. 

And it's this sensation that exists within its own energy that I find interesting.

This is a part of myself that is truly me, and yet foreign to me at the same time. It comes as a bride in the darkness to join me; and it weds itself to the breath. In doing so, we become a Trinity, my awareness, the breath, and sensation. 

This draws a silence  towards itself. It's a silence that did not know it existed before; all of its territory was taken up by thinking about this and that, probably thinking about sensation and Being and how I don’t have them and ought to. 

The silence sees that all of that arose from tension.

A different kind of awareness brings with it a different kind of relaxation. Organic sensation contains a relationship within itself that relaxes. It has nothing to do with the will to relax, the thought of relaxing. It’s the embodiment of relaxation, its essence, as though it were an essential oil, a balm applied to Being. As it arrives, the rest of Being — which still maintains some of its tension, although more intelligently — recognizes its authority. This authority is not of the outer world. Expression relaxes; there is no need to press outward. Instead, a force concentrates itself within. There is a magnetism that draws the world towards and refines it. This once again comes from the sensation of a finer energy that manifests within Being.

This finer energy does not need the faculty of thought to direct it. It has the opposite effect; it aligns thought so that it acquires an organic direction similar to the manifestation of sensation. In this, the faculties of both the mind and the body distill themselves into much simpler essences that do not bother themselves with what is unnecessary.

In this quieter place, where the force of Being is more concentrated and can gather itself together in a new attitude, one awaits the arrival of feeling. Feeling does not come when I call it; and it can't be touched. Rather, it comes according to the moment when it realizes that the place has been prepared for it, and instead of me touching it, it will touch me.

This life is incredibly precious. There's no substitute for it. When awareness is born here within it, and it is inhabited, when I dwell within it as close to the earth of my Being as possible, I sense instinctively how grace creates everything. Even the least thing is so filled with grace that it cannot be measured. 

The Perfection is not so far away.

This is what I am interested in today. I’ll be interested in it all day long, not just once in a while when I am gobsmacked and realize that I constantly forget that I exist. 

This interest arises from the relationship, from staying with the molecular vibration that Being arises in. It's a durable interest. Not temporary. 

It is the one force in life that can be trusted above all others.

Go and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.