Almost a week into my business trip, a few comments from my daily work here which I will insert without a photograph, since I can't get them set up properly from here in China.
Today, I am in Xiamen.
I really need to deepen my actual insight — my organic, cellular insight — of the fact that I don't know who I am. I need to experience this organically, in the body, as a physical component of the energy that I am made of.
Perhaps it's important, even before I have this insight, to sense this energy, because all of what I am arises directly from this energy — all these things that I call myself, thoughts, physical sensations, feelings, and so on — everything arises from this direct and tangible vibration, this influx of an animated and living quality from some other level, that then exists in this body.
I find myself in the middle of this experience, and it must be sensed within life — not just when I close my eyes and sit quietly in the morning.
It must always be sensed, not just sometimes. Make it organic.
It needs to be active, engaged within the reality of other people and all the ordinary demands of life: objects, events, circumstances, conditions. Not ones that have been artificially created: the spontaneous ones that are constantly around me.
Sometimes there is enough presence to lift me into a moment when I see more clearly. But above all, before that, there is a fundament, a ground floor, in which there is an unknowing. And that ground floor is where I need to find myself, because I need to have this unknowing quality as a vibration within me long before anything lifts itself into contact with a greater understanding.
I suppose this is probably a rather complicated way of describing what Jeanne de Salzmann refers to as "seeing my lack," yet perhaps her definition needs more definition, if you know what I mean. In asking myself the question of what she means by those words, I find myself drawn to a more specific set of observations, which includes this sensation of unknowing.
Seeing that I don't know who I am may already be a component of what is called self remembering. I'm not sure, because I have never actually understood the idea of self remembering completely. I have had many different extraordinary experiences you might call self remembering; or you might call them something else. No one knows what anything is; we pick these phrases and words and we throw them around as though there were understanding, when the fundament — the ground floor — is that there is no understanding, and that's what needs to be seen first.
What there is, instead of understanding, is an incredible amount of presumption, and a constant and unrelenting action of ego. This is an essentially destructive way to approach life, yet ego emerges almost effortlessly to try and interfere with the inflow of higher influences. It is extremely well concealed, on top of everything else — if I catch a glimpse of it at all, I'm lucky.
I've collected a number of impressions during the trip, but the overwhelming one is one of seeing how little shame there is in us. In examining the things that are going on in myself — and around me — and the things I read in the news — I see a world where we all ought to understand how unbelievably tiny we are, and quiet down like church mice. Instead, everything is bluster and aggrandized manifestation. We could be treating each other honorably, but look at how we are. The lack is plain to see.
It's difficult to write about these things, because I see that I have probably an entire book's worth of material in me about the last few days of sensation and expression and the particular point I am in in examining this question of ego. But I'm not going to write any books. I am just recording snippets of impression. The wholeness of the question, and its relationship to the existence of the organism — this is the exact point.
Those who can follow me here, please do so.
May your soul be filled with light.