Narrative, Part III- Pre-Narrative Being

 

June 1 2021

To this day, the immigration forms that one fills out on the way into China still have one touching feature that they’ve had ever since I first started going there over 35 years ago. 

The reasons for travel into China are listed with boxes to check: among them are business, transit, tourism, and a fourth box that says, quite simply, “settle down.”

These two words have always fascinated me, because they carry within them the implication that one might go somewhere just to settle down. Not to do this or that, to take some outward action, but to just quietly be there, with a sense of oneself. 

Do we ever enter ourselves from within—immigrate into Being,—just in order to settle down? 

Usually, when we approach our inner lives, we’re either tourists — we’re there to see the sights and yet don’t care much about them — or we’re business people, that is, we want to engage in transactions or fix things. There is, of course, that third feature where we’re just “in transit,” that is, we become interested in our inner life for five minutes and then we’re done with that and we move on to all those important things that need to be done outwardly. 

The idea of settling down, however, implies a wish for residency from within — a residency in that selfsame body consciousness, an active experience of physical location, that otherwise remains so elusive. We’ve forgotten it. We’re marching our army to Moscow; there’s no time for such stuff.

One of the terrifically damaging functions of unbridled narrative is the stress it produces. Because narrative is built of contradictions, situations where the words give rise to conflicting direction and opinion, it’s a stress machine. Contradiction and conflict breed paranoia; and, in a most unfortunate way, these three features drive narrative forward in exciting ways. They tends to breed more contradiction, conflict, and paranoia; and the next thing you know, people are destroying the world around them and killing each other. The Napoleonic vision, in other words, sets us all on the warpath. We never see this when we take the first step; and every step after that first step appears, per the dysfunctional nature of the narrative, to be a logical one. Yet not a single one of these steps was ever logical; and that’s because none of them were informed by body consciousness.

Body consciousness is fundamentally separated from Napoleonic vision. Because it doesn’t rely on narrative to receive life, everything that begins there is free of all things outside the immediate impression of life. It can, at first, be a shock to find oneself in this place, because it essentially invalidates all of the narratives that preempted it in the first place. Suddenly, one is here, in this moment; and there is no narrative. One is just here. This place encompasses a vast silence that has nothing to do with all the words, the stories, the heroic tales of justice and injustice. It’s a quiet place. 

We don’t see the way that narrative drives stress. We talk about it; yet we never really penetrate the organic ground floor of our being, where it’s less an object for yet another narrative and more of an experience that can be observed and evaluated. 

The evaluation of narrative and its consequent stress needs to take place silence and stillness, not from within a place of agitation and further narrative. This is the value of meditation; it may help us to step back, to withdraw from the narrative in such a way that we see its futility. It’s not, mind you, that narratives are entirely futile; it’s the way we identify with them that is futile. We never disbelieve them enough. We confuse ourselves with our narratives. The act of meditation and sensation, the act of mindfulness, pulls us away from the narrative into a moment where we remember that we’re simply creatures that breathe in and out and have a life. One might call this an experience of pre-narrative Being.

When we use the often amusing and usually dismissive phrase, “you should get a life,” what it’s meant to indicate is that the person engaged in the activity being examined is wasting their time on something completely meaningless. 

Yet the life that we need to get is the life of mindfulness, the life of the body and its own rightful consciousness. This is the life that begins before the narratives seize us. In approaching it we need to beware that we don’t just construct more narratives about it. We need to invest ourselves in the un-narrated origins of being within our sensation.

This is a new place worthy of our search.

Be well today.

Warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.