art Agnes Martin
If we consider what we mean when we say “I am existing”, we simply mean that it feels like something is happening now. We don’t have any other experience of life. There is only the feeling of something happening now. Even if we don’t call it anything, it still feels like this immediate happening is happening.
If we consider it more closely, we may realise that we don’t have any way of saying what this happening is. We have many words for it (awareness, existence, being, self, world, trees, cars, people and so on), labels we’ve been taught to think, words that we’ve been taught to speak, but the labels don’t tell us what this happening is. They simply point to different portions of the event.
When we are one hour old, we don’t know what this feeling of something happening is and we still don’t know what it is. We’ve been trained to bark many words for it, but a seal, trained to bark on command, is not explaining existence. And neither is a person barking labels.
We can get a better sense of what this happening is, if we think the question, “What is there when there is no thinking?” If we think that question, then, at the end of the question, there is no thinking, but it doesn’t feel like nothingness. It still feels like something is happening. Let’s just be this immediate feeling of something happening.
No one is making this happen. If we sit here, resting, making no effort at all, this happening of the moment still happens. The process that you are still happens. We don’t create this happening that we are.
Our “existence” is an occurrence, an action, an event, a movement … moving on its own … happening automatically … becoming something new in each moment.
Sitting quietly, doing nothing, thoughts come, urges grow, actions happen. Action/rest, emotion/calm, clarity/confusion, anxiety/peace … all of this simply happens in whatever way it happens.
Relax. You will be whatever this moment presents, and you will do whatever you are compelled to do.
We are this unexplainable happening, moving to its unexplainable urges. There’s no way of saying what this is. There’s no way of saying why it’s happening the way it’s happening.
It’s an action, a movement, a flowing. The River of Life. The Great Spirit. The Unformed Ocean of Existence. Call it what you will.
Or perhaps, don’t call it anything. We don’t have to focus on false names and explanations. We can simply be this immediate happening.
This is it. The feeling of what’s happening now. Just rest … and flow. In whatever way you flow.
There’s nothing to be, apart from this immediate occurrence. Nothing else exists. There’s nothing to create. We are created in each moment. We are this movement, moving spontaneously, automatically. There is no “self” directing this. Any urge that arises is not our creation.
Why look for truth in fantasies of name and form, when it is so easily felt in the flowing of this moment?
Everything moves to an inner urge. Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, grass grows by itself. In the same way, we become what we have to be and we do what we have to do.
Like a flower, like a sunrise, like the galaxy itself. We are the wonder of creation, the warm, intimate, unfolding of this moment, always fulfilling its urges. Not a “world”. Not a “self”, not a “doing”. Not any of it.
https://www.darrylbailey.net/
