Without Interference

April 25

I got up late at 5:40 AM this morning. There’s a dense fog in the Sparkill hollow this morning. 

As I sit here, my imagination creates a range of situations that don't actually exist. I examine them one by one, as if each one was real. A lot of that goes on during the day and I don't pay much attention to it, so it's interesting to catch it early in the morning and see how it doesn't actually relate to any reality I currently inhabit. It mostly consists of lists of attitudes – or potential attitudes that I may end up infected with later during the day – random ideas, and things that will probably happen, although there’s no guarantee.

What has actually happened so far this morning – no plan, mind you, just the arising of the natural state—is that I read a bit of news. I try to avoid reading too much—I find most news toxic, and so I try to limit my dose to a single tablespoon of crap in the morning. Call it a form of self-punishment for choosing to be reincarnated in this mess we’re all in. After the daily dose, I  reviewed some PDFs recently added to my library, and went over a page of master jazz chord forms for guitar which my BFF Steve sent me. (Thanks, Steve.) I'm discovering that playing guitar is good exercise for the arthritis in my hands. Finally, guitar playing has a practical purpose. I always knew it would someday.

I've also been going through my physical library of books over the past few days, on the way marveling (and this is far from the first time) at the vast amount of material we humans produce to explain everything. It’s as though God, when He was creating the universe, at one point scratched His beard and said to Himself, “Holy Crap! What does all this mean? I should figure that out… no, forget that. It’s waaaay too complicated and would literally take forever… I know. I’ll delegate it. Just create a creature that will do it for me…” and with the least gesture of His little finger, there we were and here we are. 

Churning out an endless series of explanations for everything. 

Anyone who sets out to explain anything comes to find that explanation is a self replicating disease, exactly like a virus –the first explanation inserts its RNA into the DNA of the natural state, takes over, replicates, and spreads a million copies of itself in every direction, each one of which consists of yet another explanation. They go on to infect more objects, events, circumstances, and conditions, in a wild free-for-all. During the process, the explanations mutate; they create new forms that are either more or less infectious. There are no vaccines. Eventually, with we humans, sanity ends up on a ventilator without an attendant.

What is on my mind, however, is not all the explanations, but a particular one of them. 

We inhabit a natural state that arises naturally. Everything within us and outside of us arises quite naturally, without interference. It doesn't need our explanations; even though those are also a postpartum aspect of the natural state. 

If we step back from our identification with the natural state (identification being the condition in which we think we are the natural state, or, equally incorrect, that it belongs to us in one way or another) it's possible to inhabit it without all this interference.

This is a tricky thing, because interference is in our nature. The example I gave of my imagination this morning is all about interference. 

There’s a stillness, what I call the silence at the heart of being, that arises at the root of our organic sensation. The natural state is effortlessly embedded in that stillness. My whole being is an instantaneous and simultaneous expression of that natural state and that stillness. It's entirely available; but the instant I interfere, confusion arises.

There’s nothing confusing in stillness and silence. There’s nothing confusing in being quiet and waiting for life to be here with me. I don't have to invent it in my imagination; it's already here with me. It can speak in its own language and provide its own impetus if I let it. There just needs to be an emptiness that makes room for it.

This point was well made by both Meister Eckhart in his final words, and by Brother Lawrence in The Practice of the Presence of God. (I can’t overemphasize the unique value of these two resources for acquiring a simple conceptual understanding of Being.) It points to the question of presence—the subject of the latest issue of Parabola, which you can review at Parabola.org—and its role in living.

In his masterpiece The Shobogenzo (another great resource, but a bit more difficult), Zen Master Dogen said, 

It is difficult to put oars into the hands of a mountaineer, nevertheless, I must bestow the teaching.

—Bendowa, Chapter one

Folks offer many explanations of presence; but it's not that complicated. 

It’s what’s there when I don't interfere. 

It doesn’t help climb mountains; it helps one find one’s seat in the rowboat.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.