Year of the Tiger

 

Tuesday, February 1 

In Asia this is the beginning of a new year, the year of the Tiger.

I find myself here in this body once again, as takes place every morning. 

The experience always fills me with the impression that this is the only day there is.

What goodness can I try to bring to this day? It’s already filled with goodness; yet I have the responsibility to act mindfully and with intelligence and attention to try to add to it voluntarily, from my own effort. The day is a blank slate which I must make an effort to write goodness for others into. 

I’ll already have quite enough goodness for myself, it’s given in the first place. The question is what I’ll do with it. I have a responsibility to this body, this being, and this day to make an intelligent, sensitive effort towards what the day brings. 

This is quite difficult because so much of my psyche and my spiritual intelligence turns inward. That isn't a bad thing of itself, because turning inward is necessary in order to cultivate the growth of the soul; yet the ego also turns inward, and it easily deflects this action to its own purposes. The next thing you know, the day is about me and mine and what I want, rather than everything and what it is. 

This question of taking everything and what is in with equanimity and the stillness of a receptive compassion is, for me, where life begins. 

This is where attention is born and where it forms the kernel of what could be mindful action within life. That's only going to take place now, not some other time when I'm better prepared. I can't keep waiting to get my game on. I have to make an effort now.

Because I was a bit sleepy this morning, I made my hot chocolate without honey. It's OK; it's still good. As I drink it I feel the contrast of the nourishment that it brings to the stomach, the gut, and I can distinctly sense the difference between this nourishment and the nourishment of the air which I’m breathing. Each one feeds molecular sensation in a different way, and they combine together to form a more complete nourishment. This morning, as always, the third food of emotional impression and the consequent arousal of feeling is a bit less organized. Perhaps it needs to be that way, because I need to use my instinct and my sense of touch to navigate through this complicated territory, balance the many different factors that combine in it, discover that stillness of receptive compassion that allows feeling to become more sensitive, more intelligent, more informative of the whole.

So much of inner prayer is becoming tactile, touching what is real, keeping an attention and using a delicate and gentle contact with the whole of being.  

Who knows what will come next?

I don't know. 

It's inevitable that I will judge much of what I encounter today; and yet do I see that every judgment I have is far, far more a reflection of who I am and what my attitude is than of that which I judge? 

Perhaps I can suspend a bit of the judgment and just receive life as it is. 

Maybe this is the difference between judgment and discrimination: judgment is the speaking of the law, discrimination is the seeing of different things. 

I want to make myself the Law. 

This is where things go wrong.

Do I know the Law?

One of the impression that has been troubling me lately as a white male in his later 60s is encountering the fact that, above all other sexes and races, white males tend to think that they are The Law. It's in fact quite astonishing that looking straight into the sharpened teeth of our own mortality, the majority of we white males keep insisting — delusionally, there is no doubt —that we know better than everyone else. There's something about aged testosterone that turns foul; yet men in their later years seem to crack open the cask in their private reserve on a daily basis and drink it with gusto, congratulating themselves on how well it has aged.

I've never had much patience with that fraction of the male community who believes that everything is a contest, some form of judo where you outwit your opponent and demonstrate your superiority. Yet the subtle (and too often far-from-subtle) thread of that activity runs through most of what takes place in men. I'm not sure if there's anything quite like that in women; perhaps so, but I'm not a woman, and can't exactly say. It has always struck me, however, that women generally have a somewhat better feeling capacity for living than men do. 

Well, I can't fix these things. 

I do, however, have a responsibility to see clearly and with a critical mind and to see my own place within these actions. 

How am I? 

I need to come closer to the organic sense of my being if I want to develop the potential for real compassion, real discrimination. The golden rule needs to become a more intelligent and active force in life for me. For myself, I remind myself daily and often that above all, I should try to do no harm. It’s much easier to do harm in almost any situation than it is to be kind and act with care.

So these are the questions I have this morning as I breathe in and out, and these are the considerations and aims I put to myself for the day.

Hoping that you find yourself in good relationship today,

warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.