Notes on Being and Association

There's often discussion about how my associative thoughts “take me away” from self remembering, self awareness. 

Self remembering, the self that is aware, appears to be weak.

I need to find a new position in myself. I need to be in a fixed position and act flexibly from it, not occupy a series of flexible positions and try to fix things from them. 

“Things”: that is, what I call objects, events, circumstances, and conditions, cannot be fixed. These represent truths that I encounter and must correspond to.

Another way of understanding it is as though I sit in a room and the associations come and go in and out of it. Yet I'm always in that room. I have an identity. “I am” resides in a fixed position within Being that doesn't change. 

If I gather my center of gravity and concentrate myself, then associations become interlopers, not agents.

An interloper is someone who doesn't belong in a place. They interfere. They may be positive or negative, but the point is that their interference is accidental. If I am like a dog inside, I follow them as though they were my master. 

Yet I want to be the master. They should be the dogs.

Interlopers are different than visitors. A visitor becomes an honored guest. This is the tradition in Islamic societies. I have an intention towards the visitor that is quite clear; and I play a role. Do you see and understand the correspondence here? If parts of my associative Being are visitors, I already have a very different relationship to them than if they are interlopers, vagabonds that wander in and out of my house as though they owned it and take anything they want. 

This is my house. I ought to be generous in sharing it; but I also want to be attentive to it and value it. I can’t do that if I live in it like some kind of Hurrah’s nest, where everything is thrown about in confusion.

I want to say a few more words about associations and how they become agents if I have no fixed center of Being. When I say that they become agents, I mean that they acquire an independent force of their own which empowers them with the ability to lead me wherever they want to. I believe in them. I follow them, as I said earlier, like a dog.

There's a real place in ourselves where we can stand our ground and be firm, seeing these things come and go.

As always, the sensation of presence, the organic sensation of Being, provides the center of gravity and the attractive anchor of Being from which this becomes possible. Sensation is the mast to which Ulysses is tied in order to avoid the Sirens. 

 May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.