What is Not There

April 18.

Sitting in my office, 6 AM. It’s barely light outside; but the birds are already deeply engaged in an impressive amount of conversation.

It's quieter inside me; and as usual I can use this time to gather myself a bit and examine how I am before the day starts.

There’s a wholeness to life and being that can’t be measured by anything but the experience of existence itself. That experience isn't an experience of the mind thinking about things. It’s an experience that begins in silence and sensation, and a kind of emptiness that begins as nothing more than a point of experience—alone, arising without definition.

This experience defines itself by what is not there; and that’s a new and different kind of event. It is a very different mind – a spiritual mind. This mind has a natural and much more concise intelligence than the one that thinks my way through the day.

That ordinary mind forms all of what it does from what is there; it doesn't know any other way. If, however, I engage with this state where I become aware of how I am, just how I am and nothing else, in contrast to this exquisite and unexpectedly supportive quality of “not there,” perhaps I’ll begin to sense how there is only one thing here.

I’ve become powerfully distracted from the wholeness of life and being in the general way that I live. In the face of this dilemma, by now, after many years of practice and experience, a fraction of truth penetrates my ordinary state at most times. Yet the ordinary state continues to have great power. It has worn ruts into the pathway of my life, and the wheels of my cart slide back into them effortlessly at a moment’s notice.

Nonetheless, it's definitely possible to both inhabit the ordinary and keep a taste of this emptiness in me. 

It's surprisingly nourishing. I can return to it throughout the day and take a drink of the clear, unadulterated water it provides. This is the water of life; like the air I breathe, it’s invisible, but my whole spiritual body is made of it in the same way that my physical body is made of ordinary water. I need to drink it throughout the day in order for my spiritual body to retain its integrity and be hydrated by this experience of being.

It's surprising that it turns out 100% of life ends up being defined by what isn't there. In my thinking parts, I truly think it's the other way around. Really I do. I’m utterly convinced of it. Almost nothing can convince me otherwise.

Yet even the slightest echo of this fine vibration that feels Being presents an absolute argument that I have it backwards; and that what is there is exactly what isn't life. What’s there is a group of objects, events, circumstances, and conditions. These features appear in a landscape called life, but they aren’t life. I can’t afford to be confused about it: life is made of a fine spiritual material. If I want to live, I need to be in relationship with that first. 

Not the stuff.

I can only encounter life from within myself; I can encounter it in my relationship with other human beings, and with creatures that live. 

Life is a force, not made of things. I'd like to remember that today.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.