Value Now

 

Oct 1, 2020

If one doesn’t know one's life through the organic sensation of presence, all the talking is useless.

Perhaps this is the only thing that should be talked about. Everything else is theoretical. You can't have your own life in your own Being without the organic sensation of being.

I listen to an enormous amount of useless talk about this and that in situations and in groups where this is the only thing people ought to be concerned with. The attention wanders and it seems as though people are willing to do just about anything except concentrate on this question.

When are folks going to listen to the body and be within it in a way that demonstrates an actual attention?

There needs to be a different kind of concentration in us to help this take place. The concentration cannot take place in the mind. To even consider beginning there is actually a mistake. This concentration is molecular and intimate, and not produced by thoughts.

There is an enormous amount of goodness in what is present and real and takes place now. The problem is that in my work I never want to be where I am. I always want to be somewhere else where it will be better and I can work more effectively and so on. 

I want to think about things. Not be.

 I need to be invested in the value of what I already have, not what I want to get. If I can’t see the value of what I already have here, right now, how am I ever going to value something else?

It’s stupid, really. I’m constantly squandering the value of the present against a future that does not exist except in my imagination. I never value what is here now. Yet I was put here on this planet precisely to value what is here, right now. The way things are as they are, not the aspirations that arise in my imagination.

In reality an incredibly rich and immeasurably valuable moment is already here at hand. 

Why am I not celebrating it? 

Instead I’m focusing on how incapable I am, how I’m not present, how I’m not working. 

When am I going to see that this work is not all about me and how I am?

  Ponder that for a while.

May you be well within today.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.