I Enter It Naked

Last night, a conversation with very close friends. Some confessions. Hearing the concern from others that somehow, they haven’t done enough with their lives: that things should be different, that they should have achieved more.

I examine my own soul and life. Many influences flow in from around me. There are so many ideas, perspectives, potentials, opinions, arguments from every side. Everyone thinks they know everything. No one seems to know anything. The certainty of ego impales itself on its own stockade; the next moment is always unknown and no matter how much baggage I pack and how many heavy jackets I put on, I enter it naked.

I can only say this. It is one thing, although it will sound like many; and it is an old thing that we fail to understand, over and over.

The only thing that matters is to love God and our fellow man.

The world is full of things, too many things. All of them are good enough as they are and take care of themselves. We keep trying to meet them and then find God, instead of finding God so that we can then meet them. God is not just that great Love which created us all; in this case, God becomes what we worship.

This is not good enough; what we worship is of ourselves, and we as ourselves are nothing. The world is a great thing that dwarfs us; how can we believe we know it? We don’t. Yet we make ourselves the gods.

I need to move past the things of life and love God only. If I come into relationship with this Love, all else will take care of itself. Christ explained this in considerable detail in the sermon on the Mount; in it is everything one needs to know about putting love first. All of the confusion and the many different ideas, opinions, attitudes and approaches that fill me, pull me in one direction or another and attempt to define me with the gravity of their own being, are not helpful to me in this effort to know God first. He said this. I need to come to this with all of my body through my sensation, all of my intelligence through its relationship, all of my feeling through its love.

Instead, I keep getting distracted by the way that life pulls me towards it so that it can devour me.

The love of God is a whole thing that comes first. Mankind denies it; and in doing so, all of the love that man could have is lost before it arrives. That real Love which forms the basis of our Being is already here in us; but we love ourselves more than that true Love, and blindness afflicts us in every moment of our action.

If I love God first, everything takes care of itself. Goodness begins there; and because it is goodness from the beginning, it is eternal goodness, not the goodness I try to manufacture. If I dwell within the goodness of God’s Love, all that I do will emerge from the goodness of God’s Love; and yet I see that I am unable.

From day to day in my life, I don’t see that I cannot be what I make myself. I believe that I can be what I make myself, in every way, in every detail. I believe this so firmly that it has become a stone I swallow. That stone sits in the center of my Being and can never feed me, can never be digested. It is a weight and a wall at the heart of my Being that stands between me and the Lord.

I love the stone more than I love the Lord; I love myself more than I love others. It is a weight I carry that grows heavier with every day. My imagination is just another part of that weight; it does not imagine God first, but instead, invests in anything else it can imagine, just so as to avoid the issue. All of this agitation, this activity, this frantic attempt to be something I cannot be and to do things I cannot do instead of being what I am and accepting what God has made me for.

I am already made. Don’t I see this? I already am what I am. This is what I was made for and how I am made. I am this way. Not some other way. It is hopeless to wish I were some other way and I am helpless to be some other way. I am as I am. This, as well, was created through Love as a gift for me, but instead, I spurn it and look for other gifts which I think could be better. At the same time I do this, this great gift called life which flows into me surrounds me, and it is flowing into me, but I look away. I look away from heaven, which flows into me and is within me, and towards myself.

I always look towards myself. This is the problem.

Well, this morning I just speak honestly of these things as they are. I’m not trying to make anything up here. This is just what is true. You can take it or leave it as you wish. Generally speaking, we are faced with truth in every moment of our life, and it’s not good enough for us. We move on to someplace else, anywhere but where the truth is, because we don’t care for truth.

We just care for ourselves.

Be well today, and consider your ways.

Best wishes, Lee

Investment in Now

April 16.

I’m waking up this morning and I have had my coffee. This is one of those rare nights that I slept the entire night through.

I rediscover myself from within. 

I am alive here, right now, within this exact moment. I am never alive in any other moment except this exact one. There is an exquisite precision to it, an intimacy that rises within my sensation of Being. 

I relax and allow the whole of my existence to express itself here in this experience, in this moment.

Because of the investment in now, the mind is rather still and empty. It doesn't have anywhere else to be or anything else to go towards or run away from. It’s just here. When the mind is just here, it is also relaxed. In this relaxation, it acquires a kind of openness into which life can enter. Life is different than my associations or memories, my expectations or anticipations. It is just here as a gentle force that opens onto the moment with gratitude and love.

These two things are extraordinarily powerful forces that lie at the heart of what takes place in Being. It's a good thing that I don't feel them fully most of the time, because when they really enter me, when the full force of their truth flows into me, I’m overwhelmed. Tears come to my eyes. This happened yesterday at lunchtime, when for an instant I was filled with all of the remorse, all of the sorrow, all of the love that this life can concentrate within itself when Grace arrives. I’m both incapable and unworthy; yet the benefits, the graces, of this life and the love it’s created by and filled with continue to flow in, whether I appreciate them or not.

Well, my iniquity and my insufficiency are old stories here. It's certainly helpful to be reminded of them; yet I can't spend all day in these deep moments of receptivity which remind me of this and bring me to a real humility. My immediate task is to just be here in life; raptures, however important they may seem at the moment, should have nothing to do with my aim to be responsible right now. It's the tiny graces that live within the moment that make up the larger ones that gradually become concentrated and capable of receiving the force of the Lord within Being. 

I'm incredibly fortunate to be alive in the first place. It reminds me of the instruction of Zen master Dogen: “We have obtained these bodies difficult to obtain, and encountered this dharma difficult to encounter. Therefore let us practice as if our hair were on fire.” 

For me, of course, this instruction brings its own problems: I'm mostly bald. 

Perhaps I should practice as though some other part of me were on fire: my soul, for example. It can burn with a quiet flame that seeks the Lord; and even if the light that it casts on the darkness in me is no more than a faint one throughout the day, it can still serve.

This reminds me of another quote, part of the poem “God Knows” by Minnie Louise Haskins:

“…I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:

“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” 

And he replied: 

“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.

That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.” 

When the mind, along with the body, is quiet and still, it acquires a freedom of response that is somehow always appropriate to the moment. When it’s not distracted by itself, it also knows how to Be. This is surprising and new, because its Being is quite different than what I generally think the mind is. It is an attention; it is what patiently waits for life and sees it as it arrives.

And here we are.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

It is Your Duty

If you wish to Be, your sensation must become as natural as breathing. 

It's a food as essential to the development of your soul as the breath is to sustaining the life of the body.

It is your duty to help your sensation come permanent.

If you do this, then you'll see how it functions, and why you need it.

Consistency

Shadbush

April 14

Yesterday a huge storm blow through. In the evening, as the clouds cleared, the bedraggled corpses of a few bees lay around the entrances of the hives. Yet on the whole the bees were prepared for this event; and as soon as the rain stopped, they were outside the hives foraging. They knew quite early that the storm was over; I think they can sense barometric pressure and respond to it.

We human beings live through highs and lows of a different kind; most of them are produced by desire and our emotion. The word "desire" was originally derived from the Latin desiderare, which in all probability was formed from -de, “down,” and sider or sidus, meaning star. The general idea is that our desires flow down into us from a higher level: from the stars. And indeed a great deal of astrology centers around the interpretation of our desire relative to our life.  Love and attitude; forces so great they descend from the heavens and, in the end, hardly belong to us. In most cases, it seems, we helplessly belong to them.

…Or do we? 

Our desires produce inner, not outer, storms; and after they’re over, too often the tiny corpses of our expectations and assumptions litter the front porch of our Being. One sees that we’re also a beehive in the sense of our thoughts, our attitudes, our assumptions and presumptions, and our emotions. Gurdjieff said we have many “I’s”, many different people, in us.

In the midst of these impulses and emotions that pull us this way and that, we too often lose our moorings. We profess one noble thing or another, but then do the exact opposite because of an emotional impulse. 

There is no consistency; and this leads me to the theme I was pondering last night.

I often, in my circles, hear folks express concern about the fact that they forget themselves, forget who they are, forget what they are doing, and seem to function almost mindlessly. All of a sudden they come around to a more focused level of awareness and find themselves in situations they didn't plan on, doing things they didn't want to do, and having feelings they didn't want to have. 

This is an experience of a kind of polarized desire, that is, the moment when I wake up and find out that my desires weren't the right kind of desires. 

OMG.

How can I create a greater consistency of Being? What does that mean?

The word consistency is derived from Latin roots -con, meaning “together” and sistere, “stillness.” to stand still.

 In order for inward Being to be consistent, it needs to come together and to stand still. I need to discover a quietness that is not based on my emotions; and this quietness, this stillness, is arrived at by a gathering of force from within. 

There’s a concentration; not in the sense of anything forced or coerced, but in the sense of an inward affiliation, a discovery of the attraction of my molecules to one another. A magnetic property that consolidates my physical self. I am, in every concrete physical sense of the word, a magnetic field. Attraction and repulsion rule every force in me from the subatomic level all the way up through atoms, molecules, cells, and the entire body. 

There is nothing theoretical about this physical fact. The human organism, in the sense of its greater consciousness—this metaphysical awareness that we call Self—concentrates itself in this series of very structured attractions and repulsions. There’s a staggering level of activity and vibration; yet, compacted as it is at the atomic and molecular level, it’s as invisible as the psyche, which cannot be weighed and measured in the way that atoms can.

Yet in the midst of all of this microcosmic uproar—

the soul. An essence.

There’s a place where everything comes together and is still. 

The activity, the turning thought, the whirlpools and tornadoes of mentation and desire, find a center of gravity in the sensation of myself. 

I am here. 

I exist. 

Nothing more is absolutely necessary than to appreciate this.

In truth, what moves most of me forward through life is what I call event-based satisfaction. I can’t deny this force; it’s a part of the organism, of my essential Being, and it arises naturally. If I try to force or manipulate this part of myself, I go against nature. Yet it’s inconsistent, not gathered together, and it pulls me in many directions. So perhaps it isn't that helpful in my appreciation of my Being. 

My satisfaction needs to begin here, right now, with the inhabitation of my body. My sensation of myself can help me do this. In this way, there is a togetherness and a stillness—a consistency—that supports me where I begin, not from what I do and how great or terrible it is. Outwardly, there is no doubt that things will continue to be great or terrible. The question is whether I maintain a thread of connection to this inward force, which is indifferent towards the outwardness. 

When I use the word indifferent, I don't mean uncaring—not at all. What I mean is consistent: together, and still. Contemplative. Willing to receive life on its own terms, even those parts of life which consist of myself doing this or that.

In her final moments, it's reported that Jeanne de Salzmann said, 

Be there in relation to a force. Then it doesn't matter so much, what happens.

This morning, as in each morning, I'll try to begin with a respectful and careful attention towards this force which creates my Being. It's ever so interesting, if I'm willing to pay a little attention to it. 

This reminds me in turn of the way that Zen master Dogen often used to end his dharma talks: 

I respectfully ask you to take good care.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Awakening Body Consciousness

Patty's new Book.

Highly recommended.

A Fragment of Good

April 13.

It's quiet this morning. It is raining. For me, this usually creates an atmosphere of nourishment that is in some inexplicable way fundamental to the disposition of the soul.

I'm interested in inhabiting this wholeness of life which is not of me, but flows into me from an unknown source.

Yesterday was filled with the ordinary good of daily living. The virus is still lurking in the background, but although it may have power over life and death, it does not have power over the ordinary good of the day. 

Nor will it ever.

The bees had a mild, sunny day in which to explore their new home, and they exulted in it. My son & I built a planting box for raised-bed gardening. My wife & I baked tarts and bread. There were moments of improvisation. Every moment is, in the end, a moment of improvisation.

One thing I have to improvise with throughout the day is my negativity. I'm reminded of the story of the three Billy goats gruff, who have to contend with the ogre under the bridge. I have this negative part lurking under every situation that I have to navigate. It pops up as relentlessly and stupidly as the gear in a piece of clockwork. The gear has many different teeth, all with a singular aim. Each one seems determined to grind the situation down to some lower level where I’m tempted to complain, see things in an evil way, blame others, take satisfaction in the distress and anguish of other people. This part has no intelligence; but it has ill intent.

I suppose all of us has a machine of this kind in us somewhere; one wonders where it comes from. What point is there to this negativity? I don't know. I could explain it in terms of polarities that produce energy for us to use, and so on. There are a lot of metaphysical perspectives one might bring to bear on the subject. Yet in the end, what it always amounts to is me seeing myself as some distressingly negative commentary on a person, a situation, or the world arises in me. 

The commentary never seems to be a part of me or what I am as a person or as a soul; it always seems to come as some outside force, a voice that tells me to think something bad. Fortunately, this voice has little power to create the impulse for actual action in me; it never has. The things that it manages to tempt to me to do are usually rather petty. Perhaps this is OK; as long, I think to myself, as I can avoid the serious sins, perhaps I can be forgiven the little ones.

Yet this doesn't seem good enough. A life filled with petty infractions is just as demeaning and reprehensible, in the end, as one spent committing huge sins. It isn't the scale of the activity that concerns me, it's the attitude. What is this worm that gnaws at the root of our Being? I can deny it; yet it persists.

There is one way in which I see it helping. It reminds me constantly of my smallness, of how tiny I am and how little real spiritual power I have. In this way, it’s a servant.

This type of inward action is in contradiction to the contemporary world of perpetual spiritual empowerment, in which (I suppose, maybe I've got this, like so many other things, wrong) I am supposed to be ever more in love with myself, think of how powerful and great I am, affirm everything about me. I'm supposed to be capable, heroic, etc. We live in the age of the spirituality of ME. This idea has an irony that shines forth from its heart in ways that seem to be overlooked as everyone rushes towards it.

The situation reminds me of Paramhansa Yogananda, who said that we should cast ourselves in the role of a hero in our own life. It sounds great, but I now realize that – after spending a lifetime doing something like this, no matter how pathetically – the hero always has some deep flaw that has to be overcome. Perhaps it’s this apparently tiny but objectively indestructible gear of negativity that turns in me –and maybe there is no way to overcome it. This is a stimulating factor that constantly reminds me of how little I have really achieved over the course of 64 years, and how much is left to be done.

It engenders, in other words, humility.

In Christianity, as in Buddhism, abandonment and surrender of life and ego is a central tenet. (See Meister Eckhart’s Sermon 89.) This action has to be engaged in without metaphysical presumptions, because evidently even the metaphysical presumptions must go. All the masters’ metaphysical presumptions seem to agree on this point. (Oops.) The action of surrender needs to be comprehensive—unto, so to speak, death. There needs to be a perpetual inner action, one that is always present, one which one gives everything else up and just inhabits the moment quite simply. The negativity is in there, as well. It’s the truth of the moment that matters.

So in abandoning, I abandon my negativity along with my other qualities. I have permission to leave that behind me instead of allowing it to soil me. It may be an action I have to engage in 10,000 times a day; I don't know. In every moment I move past it even one step, some good has been done. And, I must confess, in the midst of all these ideas about abandonment, detachment, and surrender, desire will still exist. 

I do desire to do some good in this day. One can throw all the noble metaphysical ideas one wants to at the world and its creatures and how we should leave them behind; yet if we throw out the wish to do some good and leave that behind as well, the baby has gone out with the bathwater. It’s my responsibility and my duty to have a wish to do some good. It may be very little good; but even a tiny amount of good is better than none.

That good needs to be, in my experience, an objective good; something that is not for myself but for others. If the only good I can do is to not inflict my relentless inner negativity on others, that is already perhaps a much greater good than I can understand.

For this reason alone, I find it worthy to practice self observation, to see myself, and to pay attention to how I am in the present moment. 

If this is the only thing that comes of it, already, it’s a good thing on its way to greater ones. In and of itself, of course, it’s a very small action, an inflection imparting character — but all greater good is built by tiny fragments of good which get together and acknowledge one another.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

Self Contemplation and its Excess; Traditionalism

My experience with words is that people often say things without thinking through what the words actually mean, or what they have actually said — as opposed to what they think they said.

I’ll give you a couple of recent examples. One person made the following public comment in a response to a post I made on facebook:

“It’s a shame to believe all humans have the luxury of pursuing self contemplation at the expense of understanding the suffering of others.”

I’m not sure whether the author of this comment was implying that I believe such a thing (I don’t.) It does however invite comparison to a comment I made in the selfsame piece, 

"This is what it means and how it feels to be blind in the soul; enraged at the lack of love in others instead of dismayed by the lack of love in myself."

At the same time, after thinking about the comment for a while, in trying to understand exactly what it meant, I asked myself whether self contemplation is actually a luxury. The statement, after all, hinges on this premise; and if there is any weakness there, the statement empties itself into the void.

The word luxury means excess; and it seems difficult to argue that self contemplation is by its nature excessive. There is no doubt some forms of it may be excessive; (mine? hmm.) but we have specific words for those forms, such as narcissism—which in its origins exactly mirrors excessive self-contemplation. 

The argument, in other words, casts far too broad a net to be valid in the first place. I shall explain.

To contemplate is taken from the Latin templum, place of observation: con-templation means nothing more than to be in a place of observation. If we don’t see ourselves and how we are, how can we know how we're behaving, and whether we even begin to understand the suffering of others? It seems to me that the classic conundrum in front of us with many world leaders today, including our own President, is that they spend too little time and energy observing themselves and questioning their own behavior. Every doctorate in insensitivity towards others begins, accidentally or otherwise, with a course in refusing to consider the consequences of one’s own actions. The course is called ITOG 101: "It's The Other Guy 101." 

Everyone gets an A in this course.

In this sense, it's impossible to see self contemplation as a luxury; it is instead an absolutely essential service to others that begins in oneself. 

I will take the point one step further. One cannot understand how others suffer unless one develops compassion. In my own experience, one of the chief aims of self observation is to develop a much deeper and more organic compassion. 

Another example was a comment recently made to me about the difference between tradition and traditionalism. It’s safe to say I didn’t understand that comment either; it was brought to my attention later that I had missed the gist of the comment in its larger sense. Not surprising; and without a doubt my bad. My attention is less than perfect, like everyone else’s, and the one thing that stood out about the remark to me was that the person who made it said that traditionalism was not alive and vital, but dead. 

Now, these were some super-smart people having this discussion, probably out of my league, but I stopped listening at that point because it sounded wrong. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but when I was busted for repeating it in an incorrect context, I began to think about it at a bit more depth to understand why I stopped paying attention and what my negative reaction was all about in the first place. 

Traditionalism, in the Oxford English dictionary, is defined first as a Roman Catholic doctrine from the mid-1800s which maintains that everything that can be understood by man proceeds only from God and is the exclusive result of divine revelation. Traditionalism believes that human reason is ultimately incapable of attaining moral and religious truth. At least this is what the dictionaries all say about it. 

The second, less specific meaning is "the upholding or maintenance of tradition, especially so as to resist change." That force is also, so far as I can see, not only alive and well, but growing and kicking ass. The whole world is engaged on a perpetual mission to defend the future from the present by preserving the past.

The use of the word traditionalism hence seems inaccurate. Something may indeed be dead when it comes to tradition; but this particular thing doesn’t look like it’s the dead one. Religious fundamentalism is all about exactly this idea; and fundamentalism, whether Islamic, Christian, or otherwise, is a major force in today’s societies. Far from dead, it drives a tremendous amount of anger and destructive behavior towards secularism. 

I say things that are inaccurate myself; but generally speaking, when I write, I try to think through what I am saying as carefully as possible and express the ideas I’m up against in the best and most accurate way I can, given my limitations. Among which is the fact that I am, in my own eyes, basically an idiot. 

Both of these examples serve as cautionary tales against the proclamations (shouting-outs, clamor) we are all so prone to making. I make proclamations myself; and everyone around me does it as well. They’re all suspicious; few of them are carefully examined, and they all come out of the starting gate running lean and mean on the four strong legs of assumption, with a jockey who is certain he has already won.

The whole point of questioning everything, which is the idea not just behind the Gurdjieff work but behind the necessity of self-contemplation itself, is to bring a healthy and intelligent suspicion to the act of proclaiming. Thus I hereby proclaim that all proclamations are suspect; and what is suspect should be carefully examined — probably through contemplation. However, don't be sure, for I have proclaimed it. Gavel down.

There is, to be sure, some truth to the idea that many folks are struggling so mightily in their daily lives that it appears they don’t have much time to contemplate themselves. This comes down to what Gurdjieff called “pondering the sense and the aim of existence.” The myth is that those in the midst of poverty and oppression don't have time to think about their lives. 

This however, is simply one more unintentional yet glaring degradation of those who are so challenged: that they aren't able, because of circumstances, to think about their lives with care, the way other people do. They are incapable of philosophy, of self reflection.

I reject this. It is impossible. Give them credit: struggle and suffering generally tends to produce more reflection about life, rather than less. Here again, it is no luxury; there is no excess.

Every person does this in one form or another; human beings have a surprisingly consistent habit of examining their lives. Whether they do it from deep, shallow, small, or large perspectives, the action is nearly unavoidable. We have to see how we are and question ourselves in order to make basic moral decisions, such as, in the case of millennials, whether to get that tattoo we always wanted, or pay our college loan. Whether to use the food stamps for Doritos or fruits and vegetables. 

Unexamined, decisions like this, each one of which defines our relationship between our inner and outer life, our responsibilities, our health, and how mindful we are of our relationship to the world and other people, tend to go off the mark.

Speaking as a recovering alcoholic, I can say for certain that the one thing that helped me get sober was the contemplation — the observation — of where I actually was while I was drinking. AA stresses this kind of self-evaluation. It is not a luxury; it is a necessity for survival. I not only had to see where I was; I had to call up many people I had harmed and make amends to them. That action took place only after I had engaged in enough self observation to understand the harm that I had done others. 

There was no path to putting things right without that work.

This tool can be useful in any ordinary life situation; and the spiritual side of that tool is also emphasized in AA.

As to traditionalism, I think it arose long before the mid-1800s. The idea that all moral and spiritual authority, in fact all knowledge itself, comes from God and is ultimately beyond human understanding, is an ancient one that was, at a minimum, nearly ubiquitous current in medieval European society, even if the word wasn’t used to describe it. 

The 1800s produced a lot of isms — traditionalism, rationalism, transcendentalism. Almost all of these movements seem to be alive and kicking around us as I write this essay. So we basically still live in the 1800's: we are colonial, rationalist, racist, self serving and imperialist. 

In a not-so-strange but instead predictable twist of fate, other nations and peoples who were subjected to these forces by white Europeans more than 200 years ago have followed our own society into the same quicksand, instead of improving things. So many want  to get on the bandwagon of hatred, blame, accusation and discrimination, one almost begins to think there must be something good about it.

We can do better; but not if we don't start by seeing how we actually are.

Go and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Moment Opens

April 4

This morning I find myself in the middle of experience of life once again. 

I sit down. 

I don't know what I'll write.

The moment opens.

My imagination is designed to extend its branches into the future. It's designed to grow its roots in the past. Yet the trunk of my tree, the solid organ of awareness that keeps all the fluids of spiritual life flowing upwards and downwards, is here in this now. 

The stubbornness of my mind and its insistence on dwelling in the past and future causes me to look away from where I am now; and in fact where I am now is all there is.

I ought to pay much better attention to this. Everything that is truly needed in life can be found here and now. The past and the future are mere accessories to it. My sensation, my intelligence, and my feelings are all designed to be here where I am, not invested in things that have already happened or things that might happen or I wish would happen. The present can include all those things, but it is never of them.

This morning I was reading Meister Eckhart's sermon, On Detachment. In a certain sense, what he says in the sermon applies to my question about Being in the immediate. To Be in the present bereft of concern. To attend to it with attention and kindness and love, without any special regard for its nature other than these essential qualities of Being. All this has something to do with detachment. 

I meet today as it is. I meet the facts as they are. I don't use “alternative” facts – my own alternative facts, or anyone else's. The facts are simple things that emerge from within the receiving of life as it is. Each moment it is so… or it is so. This needs to be appreciated without baggage. Metaphysics travels best when its suitcases are left behind.

I don't even really want to think about being detached. That, as well, is a form of attachment. Much of thought begins by making things more complicated than they actually are. The immediate, if I understand the term properly within my organic sensation, is unmediated in the sense that it hasn’t been interfered with by my thinking part. It's simply what is here. It doesn't concern itself so much with what isn't here... only exactly to the precise extent necessary.

Speaking of the stubbornness of the mind, it must be noted that the mind – the associative intellect and all of its machinations –is largely dispensable. Like a disobedient child, it insists on being here and inflicting my presumptions on every moment that arises; yet the moment itself already has freedom in it insofar as the mind doesn't touch it. 

I can enter that freedom within the immediate moment if I'm willing to move one step —one tiny step, that's all—past where I am in my thought, and into my body and my sensation. This isn't far away, and it's not such a big thing. Not exotic; just practical. If I allow this, then life and the sensation of it becomes the teacher.

Ask a pupil in this action, I can learn something about what is happening here. About life. And I’d like to understand life: in every real moment I see so clearly that I don’t understand much of anything, and that any real understanding has to begin first with Being. 

Think about it. We all thought we understood what life was, what was going on—and then the virus came along and turned pretty much everything on its head. Now it turns out that the only definite thing we can say is, "I am." Most other assumptions are shattered. There's a lot of talk about that; yet the essential point is that this shock brings us a bit, even if a little bit, towards Being, by disrupting the perpetually arrogant flow of our assumptions.

I can’t begin with understanding in order to figure out how to Be.

I know this sounds complex and sounds like some sophisticated form of metaphysics, but it isn't. It’s an inner action that acknowledges the simplicity of life instead of embroidering it until the fabric is concealed under all the needle work.

This simplicity, which I can become much more intimate with, is of very fine texture and equal to the greatest of blessings. 

It’s ours to participate in in so far as we are willing to leave ourselves behind, and instead inhabit this most immediate and most sacred quality of Being—

which is our birthright.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.

The Composition of Being

April 2.

I'm sitting here quietly with an eye to gathering inner force before the day begins in earnest.

There's always the outer world and my response to it. The circumstances in the outer world are immensely complex, beginning in the molecular and ending in the personal. 

My responses emerge from an equally complex inner space which, as Rilke pointed out, I don't know much about. 

Even if I become aware that it's there, its workings are mostly hidden and remain a mystery. Both worlds, inner and outer, begin with the molecular. I say this rather than with the atoms, because atoms as individual entities haven’t yet formed the complex and essential relationships where our level of life begins.

So everything begins in the molecular; and a gathering of molecular vibrations from outside meets a gathering of molecular vibrations from inside. It's between these two sets of circumstances —what Victor Frankl called stimulus and response, as a friend reminded me last night—that my agency inserts itself. By this I mean, my awareness, my Being.

Awareness, if it's present, causes me to become responsible to what takes place in the space between the two worlds. The moment that I become aware of them, a phenomenon called care has the potential to arise. I can take responsibility – that is, I can be there for what I do, instead of letting it affect me as a reflex.

In my own experience, there's only one factor that provides the continuity of awareness that makes this possible, and that's the organic sensation of Being. 

This sensation of Being is a subtle force of intelligence at the exact rate of vibration needed to fill the interval between the inner and the outer world. I'll draw an analogy in musical composition to try and explain this.

Musical composition finds its essential center of gravity in the tension between the moments of silence, where no note is played, and the moments where a note is sounded. There are times when the tiniest inflecion of when one of those notes begins makes a huge difference to the way the sound of the song projects itself, and whether or not it creates an interest in the listener. I've noticed, for example, when working with others on vocal parts, that it's very difficult to convey the inflection of phrasing to them. One might need, for example, to begin a note a tiny fraction of a beat early in order to make it sound right –and knowing this when composing is a matter of instinct. All of it depends on how all of the other notes are functioning together, the way their vibrations blend. It's in the timing. 

That being said, composition to a great extent relies on exploiting the spaces between the other notes, creating separations and then knowing exactly what to insert between them. 

A space between two notes with exactly the right vibration inserted between them creates a subtle form of magic which can't be explained in words; but anyone who listens to music carefully instinctively understands it with a different part of themselves. Musical theory knows that there are laws about such things, and manages to explain some of them. But you don't need to understand musical theory to know whether a piece of music sounds correct or not. 

Even when it does, a piece of music can be correct and not sound good.

The vibration of organic sensation is something like this. Like musical notes, it has a range of expression, but in and of itself it is an instrument – the instrument — which is uniquely capable of inserting a special kind of awareness within each moment. It's an organ.

It provides the continuity which is lacking in the attention-capacity of the intellect. Another way of expressing it is that it has a durability and a voluntary action that the intellect is incapable of. 

In actively experiencing this, one discovers that the intellect is relatively weak; but organic sensation is extraordinarily strong when it's active. It provides a bridge that fills the gap and allows a nearly constant sense of presence.

One might think this provides answers; but that isn't quite true, even though there are some significant “answers" in this observation. Actually what it does is position me actively in the place where the question of what life is arises. 

That question needs to be asked perpetually and without any respite. The moment that this question falls asleep, I act automatically and without care. 

My intention today – as every day— is to act with a little more care, and my sensation becomes the majority partner in that effort: but only if I understand its nature and make room for it. 

I'm called to care about life, especially my relationship to others. The parts of my inner being that are obscured from my direct inspection can provide tremendous support for that, if I learn to respect them and offer a place for them in the landscape of my daily awareness. 

Sensation is one such part.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.