Astray

June 3

I sit quietly, trying to evaluate the state of my being in the midst of the many different thoughts that arrive.

Some of them have insight; they see inwardly and touch on something larger than my ordinary state. Other thoughts are clearly of the ordinary.

I try to distinguish between them.

I have a lot of opinions and seek other people with the same ones. Opinion sets me apart from other people; and I see how I seek to remedy that by finding people with those like mine. The difficulty with this is that that will always set me apart with yet other people that don’t share those opinions. All of this is driven by a subjectivity that is inherent in me.

There is another part within Being that comes from a much larger place that isn’t attached to opinion. It often appears as nothing more than a shadow; and I am rarely aware of its animate nature. This is the spiritual part, which exists, metaphorically speaking, underneath the thick layers of my ordinary awareness. It has been buried so deeply that it’s easy to pretend it isn’t there or dismiss it with psychological labels such as the unconscious or subconscious. It’s an entity with far more scope and power, far more vision and intelligence, than all of my ordinary thoughts and parts, which are relatively fragmented and rarely organize themselves into anything approaching legitimate coherency.

Years of contemplation and self observation have created a state within which this vast and mysterious force of inner Being is closer to me than it was when I was younger. It nudges me up against the ordinary parts of myself and I see them in much more detail. The experience is decidedly uncomfortable; I'm far less interested in who I am that in what I want.

This is where my willfulness has gone astray; and it has gone astray not just in the body with its fairly straightforward and relatively stupid desires, but in the intelligence and the emotion, which are equally dedicated to having their own way with things. If I’m really seeing myself, I see this as it happens, not as a Monday morning quarterback. It’s even more difficult to do this without interfering, to really inhabit the contradiction of my life. I need to see that contradiction if I want to become more real, less subjective, less opinionated. It is a consistently painful process. Yet I need to develop a desire in relationship to that, rather than the simpler desires that just scratch various itches.The desire to Be is a greater aim and needs to have a greater respect assigned to it.

It rained this morning. As I open the window in my office, the wood thrush is the first bird that I hear. It occurs to me how I’m surrounded by these many smaller creatures, birds, squirrels, chipmunks and the like. Each one of them has a beauty and goodness in them that is taken for granted. There isn’t a single creature around me that doesn’t express a truly extraordinary mystery whose roots run deep into the existence of the planet itself. The things that have taken place to create and sustain life on earth represent the miraculous; yet I go about my day as though it were normal.

From time to time, if my spiritual part is more open and receives impressions more deeply, I realize there's nothing normal about anything; that even the texture of a rock or the curl of a leaf is miraculous.

I’d like to remember that a bit more today. I’d like to relax and let this larger faculty of spiritual perception enter me and inform my action. I’d like to sense myself. I would like all of that to happen consistently, with a loving attention to the details.

In order to do that, I’m going to have to suffer who I am more directly, because it comes with the territory. I will need to listen to others in a way I often don’t want to; I will need to see how I resist things and argue about how I am right.

Can I do that? If I inhabit the spiritual part of my being, it will help. It has a developed capacity for this kind of receptivity.

But I need to have a wish for relationship with it in order to gain that support.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.