The thinking comes after

From a series of notes to myself written during May 2018. 

 The path to being does not lie on some yellow brick road, or beyond pearly gates. It’s clearly mapped out in my inhabitation of this body, this organism. Having a respect for that in an organic manner, a manner that forms a feeling relationship with the cellular material, allows me to inhabit the body in such a way that life is received more specifically.

My sensation is very precise and intelligent. It’s my thinking that is vague and unable; yet often, my perception has these two situations the wrong way around. If I relied more on the intelligence of sensation to guide my immediate grounding in life, already there is a precision to the observation that begins before I think about anything. It is in the precision of this observation, the manifestation of sensation, that life and being first arrives. The thinking comes after.

 This may sound strange to me, because in me, the thinking always comes first; and then it imposes stupidities. It is selfish; it is violent, whatever it is, it has many aspects of on health, because it lacks discipline and runs in every direction, sometimes just to see what’s there. The problem with this is that of thought runs in a direction and becomes attached to it, everything else follows it, even if it’s a bad place. Emotions can do the same thing; so for both of them, making sure that sensation is the gravity that ties Being down, that anchors it within a truth that doesn’t get so easily distracted, is very important, even essential.

 As always, it’s important to point out that this is not any ordinary sensation. It is the sensation that lives of the body itself and comes to support; the one that is born from the inner energy of the inflow. This finer energy has to serve as a basis for my existence.

 I will always want to spend time trying to figure out what things mean. It is the way I am. I think it is a common and normal condition for human beings. Yet before I try to do this, it’s very important to try and see how things are — and this is very different.

Hosanna.

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.