Silence, Sensation, Care

 October 14

There's a place where nothing whatsoever needs to be done at which life flows into Being. 

This place is a point of experience within awareness.Of course the body is the vehicle for this location, but the location itself isn’t physical, even though the expression of it is experienced that way. The location is spiritual; it is the point at which the soul touches life and God touches the soul. 

In this way we understand the soul as the mediator between God and life. On the one hand, beyond us, in a realm that is forever hidden, God brings forth the emanations that create. On the other hand, life presents itself with all of creation as it exists. Our awareness rests in the middle between these two places. It is fed from both places, by the inflow of God and the inflow of life. These two forces are not contradictory. But our attitude towards them is. We think we must have one or the other; and above all, we believe that in order to have God, everything must be pure, be perfect, that somehow life is corrupted and in contradiction to that relationship.

Yet God begins pure and purifies Himself. Am I capable of such an action? I don’t think so. Perhaps my belief in purification under my own agency is mistaken. Perhaps the issue is not in the purifying of action or deed, but merely the purifying of intention and agency themselves. Perhaps this is the only part of me that can be pure; the aim, the intention. It needs to take both the perfection of God and the imperfection of life into account and reconcile them in the attitude of my awareness.

This is a confusing place to be. On the one hand, God’s intelligence within is objective; and on the other, life is not. In the distraction of its presence, the impressions of life deliver the greater weight during the average day. Only by balancing them with the inner impression of the inflow of God’s Being can a counterweight arise. And this isn’t so easy, because presence is wallpapered over with action.

Something inside therefore needs to become much quieter and devoted only to the impression of Being. This action lies outside the purview of ordinary intellect, which we also call associative intellect. This intellect has an impetus that can’t be denied; so perhaps I am in a dilemma here. I can’t get rid of the associations.

Yet I can be separated from them. They are not who I am and what I am. They’re part of a complex machinery within me that generates imaginary potential. Successful association is intelligent and intuitively brings the things that are in relationship into contact with one another. Yet this is an association that functions in the context of relaxation, not tension, and it is very unfamiliar to most. One might say that the more intellectually intuitive an individual is, the more properly their association functions. But for the most part, association is at best automatic and at worst becomes a thing to be manipulated for evil purposes.

The best thing to do with my associations is to leave them alone. 

I sit here this morning, for example, with a nearly blank slate in terms of association. This quietness allows for intelligent impressions to arise of what association there is; and it's deeply grounded not in the act of thinking, but first — before any thought – in the active sensation of Being. 

It’s a practice to spend some time in relationship with this active sensation every morning, to clear the mind and just be within the sensation. One doesn’t need to engage in special or ritual activities to do that; on the contrary, one should just try to be as ordinary as possible and to do ordinary things. The rituals have their own intelligence and their own place, and there’s no point in trying to use them to force sensation, to demand it to appear. The sensation should be allowed to appear anywhere it chooses, especially in the absence of ritual and special conditions. It should be encouraged to have the freedom it needs to anchor manifestation in every situation. If I train myself to believe that it is only attainable under special conditions or when I pray or meditate and so on, I'm already putting the leash on what needs to run free. Organic sensation of Being must be given the freedom of movement within Being in order to achieve its potential.

That potential is great. As I mentioned the other day in my notes, the reason I don’t have enough interest in sensation is because I fail to understand its potential. Everything can begin here in sensation at the foundation of Being. The harmonic tone that arises from this particular point is dominant and gathers other tones unto it, aligning them so that there is not just harmony, but, potentially, melody. There will be no harmonic consonance if sensation doesn't sound the first note.

I have heard people argue that this isn’t true, and that one can begin from some other place. This argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of exactly what organic sensation of Being is. That is, it emerges from a place that is already misaligned relative to the harmonic consonance of Being; and anything that emerges from such a place already fails to bring relationship between the tones that create the music. It is like adding another dissonant note to what is already dissonant in the belief that that will create harmony. It is more noise, to be sure; but the noise just compounds the problem.

In the sense that there is anything to be purified, my intention towards my sensation is what must remain pure. I make this my aim in the morning. The intelligence of the mind rests principally in its silence; the intelligence of the body rests in its sensation. The intelligence of the feeling rests in its care. Silence, sensation, and care can all be unified at the root of Being, in the place where the soul rests. When these three elements come together, nothing needs to be done. Where they rest together, agency is born without manipulation. This is the point at which I can inhabit my Being. 

I need to care about that. The issue is that I don’t care enough, I lack respect. If care and respect are present in this action of silence and sensation, everything is renewed.

There’s the parable in Matthew 22 about the wedding guest that showed up without a robe. He's thrown out into the darkness — the only one that is truly "chosen" in this parable. He is chosen to be excluded from the wedding, the union. Both the good and the bad get to stay, just not him. So the Kingdom of Heaven is actually very inclusive. 

It just can't include him.

He is wordless, and he has showed up physically, but he lacks care. Of course the parable is much more complex than this simple observation; yet this element of respect is at its heart, because the one who is ejected is ejected because of the lack of respect for the process. He has showed up with the wrong fabric, the wrong material, to participate in the union.

Isn’t this how life is? The kingdom of heaven is the union between soul and God and life. Everything in me is invited to this; and yet part of me shows up unprepared, unwitting, uninformed. Wordless. Inappropriately clothed. That part assumes that it has a right to be where it is; and yet the opposite is true. The most important thing to bring to the wedding is respect; and yet I lack it. Somehow, the king who has organized the wedding senses this; and he must exclude me, because I do not belong. There is a metaphor in here I need to study more carefully.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.