On the Receiving End of What Is
Now and then I find myself looking at my hand – both looking at it with my eyes, from outside, and also seeing-feeling it from within – thinking that I am on the receiving end of this strange design.
“On the receiving end” is a key phrase that compelled me to sit down and write. Indeed, as I look at my hand – from the outside and from within – I know that I did not design this, I did not choose this, I did not make it. My hand is not of my own making. I am on the receiving end of this aspect of reality. It is a given. Whenever my consciousness (or, shall we say, self-consciousness) came online my hand had already been formed (or, shall we say, formed itself). I had nothing to do with it. I am simply now on the receiving end of this basic fact.
Unlike William Blake (who asks: “Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”), I do not ask the questions of design. In my own personal understanding of this cosmos, I do not presuppose a creator: for me this universe is beginningless and self-creating.
But that’s not what I am really trying to get at. I am still mulling over the idea of being “on the receiving end.” Aside from body, what else do I find on the receiving end of this life-experience? Here’s what. When I strip my consciousness of all its daily mind-forms, I inevitably find a basic sense of awe. A sense of awe that is burning bright through the forests of the life, as a kind of existential baseline, as a private truth. Is this awe too a mind-form, another false clothing layer of consciousness or is it, indeed, the primordial condition, the original face, as Buddhists say? Is this sense of awe (at the end of the meditative info detox) a choice or a given? I don’t know. But I do seem to find myself on the receiving end of it again and again.
And it is from this seemingly given place of awe that all this writing and musing emerges – the books, the blogposts, the poetry, the compassion, the understanding, the bewilderment, the clarity. Same goes for this bit of morning writing that you now find yourself on the receiving end of.
Somov | Lotus Effect | www.eatingthemoment.com
