Life—receiving itself as itself

May 11

I’m back from China, and I’ve had a week to recover from my jet lag. This morning we took a walk out to the end of the pier in Piermont.

 There is a place within us that is eternally still and eternally silent. By this I mean that its stillness is outside of time and its silence is outside of time. This place is populated by nothing except awareness. It doesn’t have the ego in it; it is simply the receptacle for being.

The harmonic vibrations of being need to resonate sympathetically in order for this stillness to become accessible. It is there even in the midst of the most hectic and disconcerting parts of life. If it forms itself well, it acts as an anchor within my daily manifestations.

As I write this, I’m in relationship with that place. It awaits the arrival of the forces of being which flow into me. If I learn how to pause both within myself and my relation to others, perhaps I can see that life is about receiving what takes place. This is a very different position than the one my ego would build everything out of. I don’t see how my ego drives everything, and how my whole life is a process of thinking only of myself. But if I am in this place of stillness, the ego does not direct my activities.

I don’t believe that it is possible to just be, without this force of the ego driving everything. That my life consists, in its essence, of receiving itself as itself. Instead, I’m perpetually obsessed with attempting to craft everything. Life can craft itself if I allow it to; and, strangely, that reciprocally includes everything that I want to craft. It just becomes a process where the craft creates the artist, rather than the other way around. This is like writing valid poetry; it does not get written, it flows in to the writer, who is nothing more than an intermediary putting the words on the page. The hidden idea behind the initiatory schools of the ancient world embodied this in the figure of the Muse.

 The idea is that life breathes life into us. All of the impressions that we take in are, like the air we breathe, a food that flows into us. Like the muse, it inspires us — there is an exchange of sacred substances that takes place on the finest level, in the molecular structure of my cells, where the impressions are received ever more deeply and produce an increasingly harmonious vibration.

 That vibration intensifies in direct proportion to how attentively I cultivate my relationship with this place that is still and silent. I can even do that in the midst of an argument or an intense business meeting. But in order to do so, I have to attend quite carefully to my sensation so that I can balance my relationship between the outer and the inner parts of myself.

Wishing the best for you on this day,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.