Dwelling places

I sit quietly and gather myself. There is a vibration, an undertone, that unifies being. 

I come into relationship with it. In it, life is a single whole thing, not a fractured series of different parts and experiences.

Life begins here for anything that happens. This never changes. It’s always the case. Yet this particular state, this gathering of attention, seems oddly foreign to most people. 

If the center of gravity, the magnetic force of attraction between the particles of my awareness, isn’t developed, doesn’t focus itself, I can’t sense how I am as a whole creature. 

Without gravity, there is no planet. 

Without a planet, there is no dwelling place. 

Without a dwelling place, I cannot be.

Everyone wants a formula that will tell them how to be. Yet there is no formula outside this gathering of attention and this investment in the gravity of sensation. This can’t be undertaken as an exercise. It isn’t an exercise. Exercises are explorations, experiments. 

This is life. 

I need to take it much  seriously than an exercise. I need to see how it’s deeply rooted in me; how absolutely everything in Being revolves around it. Why don’t I see this more clearly, and see it always? My attention isn’t good enough. Most of me doesn’t take life seriously enough. I think there will be time to live later on, after I figure things out. Yet I need to figure life out now, not later when I have time. I need to stop being distracted by everything that takes place around me and see how I am and how I wish to be much more clearly than I can with my thoughts. My thoughts are disorganized and confused and wander around without a center of gravity. 

Something more definite needs to be formed in me. I sit down in the morning and decide to do an exercise to see what happens. But why don’t I sit down to live?  To see life within me and be with it, not as an exercise, but as a fact? 

A definite thing. Not a hypothesis I am exploring, in the hopes of producing some effect.

That definite thing is already at hand as I speak, as I write this. 

Thank God, I think to myself. 

A higher influence, finer particles of being, flow into me. A sense of relaxation is available. I don’t have to reach for this or do anything; it’s wish for expression is already present in its nature. All I need to do is soften myself enough to receive it. It isn’t just the tension of my muscles that resists this inflow of divine energy; it’s my psyche, my constant worrying, my belief in the thinking part as the center of gravity. It is incredibly insistent about this. It will give long speeches about it, defending itself. Yet when it comes to sensation, it quickly becomes apparent that it is clueless. If I take refuge in the Dharma — the truth — of this sensation I see how powerless my thinking part actually is when it comes to living. It is media; it is commentary. But it isn’t breathing in and out.

I often think that all the anxiety I have, the worrying I do, denotes a kind of caring. Caring is very important, after all; it is one of the fundamental forces that creates being and helps it exercise its agency. But caring is not of the mind. Caring begins in the body and in the feeling, not in thinking about itself with rational constructions. Caring is a harmonic vibration that lies very close to the heart of the magnetic center, of my center of gravity. It doesn’t even begin with the word; it begins with an inner attitude that gathers itself. This gathering of the inner attitude into a core’s care in itself, in its essence. It is a direct reflection of God’s care for the universe and for being; that care doesn’t go away or exist somewhere else, it is directly expressed in the fact that I exist. It isn’t expressed after I think about it, or later, when I notice it. It is already expressed here and now as I sit here within my experience. My value already arises here in this; not in the constructions that are layered onto everything I do and everything I am later on during the day.

It’s true, I’m going to take satisfaction in a business task successfully executed, or delight in a piece of music I’m working on; but those come after. 

Being always comes first.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.