The Moment Opens

April 4

This morning I find myself in the middle of experience of life once again. 

I sit down. 

I don't know what I'll write.

The moment opens.

My imagination is designed to extend its branches into the future. It's designed to grow its roots in the past. Yet the trunk of my tree, the solid organ of awareness that keeps all the fluids of spiritual life flowing upwards and downwards, is here in this now. 

The stubbornness of my mind and its insistence on dwelling in the past and future causes me to look away from where I am now; and in fact where I am now is all there is.

I ought to pay much better attention to this. Everything that is truly needed in life can be found here and now. The past and the future are mere accessories to it. My sensation, my intelligence, and my feelings are all designed to be here where I am, not invested in things that have already happened or things that might happen or I wish would happen. The present can include all those things, but it is never of them.

This morning I was reading Meister Eckhart's sermon, On Detachment. In a certain sense, what he says in the sermon applies to my question about Being in the immediate. To Be in the present bereft of concern. To attend to it with attention and kindness and love, without any special regard for its nature other than these essential qualities of Being. All this has something to do with detachment. 

I meet today as it is. I meet the facts as they are. I don't use “alternative” facts – my own alternative facts, or anyone else's. The facts are simple things that emerge from within the receiving of life as it is. Each moment it is so… or it is so. This needs to be appreciated without baggage. Metaphysics travels best when its suitcases are left behind.

I don't even really want to think about being detached. That, as well, is a form of attachment. Much of thought begins by making things more complicated than they actually are. The immediate, if I understand the term properly within my organic sensation, is unmediated in the sense that it hasn’t been interfered with by my thinking part. It's simply what is here. It doesn't concern itself so much with what isn't here... only exactly to the precise extent necessary.

Speaking of the stubbornness of the mind, it must be noted that the mind – the associative intellect and all of its machinations –is largely dispensable. Like a disobedient child, it insists on being here and inflicting my presumptions on every moment that arises; yet the moment itself already has freedom in it insofar as the mind doesn't touch it. 

I can enter that freedom within the immediate moment if I'm willing to move one step —one tiny step, that's all—past where I am in my thought, and into my body and my sensation. This isn't far away, and it's not such a big thing. Not exotic; just practical. If I allow this, then life and the sensation of it becomes the teacher.

Ask a pupil in this action, I can learn something about what is happening here. About life. And I’d like to understand life: in every real moment I see so clearly that I don’t understand much of anything, and that any real understanding has to begin first with Being. 

Think about it. We all thought we understood what life was, what was going on—and then the virus came along and turned pretty much everything on its head. Now it turns out that the only definite thing we can say is, "I am." Most other assumptions are shattered. There's a lot of talk about that; yet the essential point is that this shock brings us a bit, even if a little bit, towards Being, by disrupting the perpetually arrogant flow of our assumptions.

I can’t begin with understanding in order to figure out how to Be.

I know this sounds complex and sounds like some sophisticated form of metaphysics, but it isn't. It’s an inner action that acknowledges the simplicity of life instead of embroidering it until the fabric is concealed under all the needle work.

This simplicity, which I can become much more intimate with, is of very fine texture and equal to the greatest of blessings. 

It’s ours to participate in in so far as we are willing to leave ourselves behind, and instead inhabit this most immediate and most sacred quality of Being—

which is our birthright.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.