It was a beautiful morning. I had watched a barn owl glide across the field as dawn limned the horizon with gold and palest pink. The sky was beginning to turn blue and the drive to work on almost-empty roads was accompanied by birdsong. It was one of those mornings where it felt good to be alive…. even though, I realised with a start, I wasn’t sure I really knew what that meant.
How does it feel to be alive? It is not as if most of us have anything to compare it with. It is an either/or situation and anything in between is actually neither, for consciousness seems to be elsewhere. What we think of as ‘feeling alive’ is really feeling emotion and sensation. It is hard to even separate thoughts, emotions and perceptions from who we are and how it feels to be us, here, now.
How did I feel? When I looked at it from this new perspective, I could not answer. Take away the sensation of sitting in a car… the pressure of seat and wheel, the thrum of the engine, the warmth of the morning rays through the glass, the faint tang of petrol and the sound of birds. Take away the emotions that react to movement, to the start of a day’s work, to spring mornings and the first cherry blossom… and what is left?
Were my body unable to feel, see, hear or otherwise engage the senses, I would still be alive. If heart and mind were so numbed that I was dead to emotion, or if consciousness were lost, I would still be alive. It would be no kind of life from our normal perspective, but it would still be life. How would that feel?
It is odd that we use that word, ‘feeling’, for so many different purposes, from emotion, to touch, from opinion to health…as if we cannot dissociate our idea of being alive from feeling in some form or another.
I slowed to watch a hunting hawk, feeling the discomfort caused by the pressure of foot on pedal, wishing, for a moment, that my body still behaved as it had when I was young. Could I remember what it felt like to be young? Not the thoughts, physical sensations or even the uncertain, unconfident emotions of youth, but what it actually felt like to be young? No, I realised, I could not. Nor could I even say, in those same terms, what it felt like to be older. Yesterday and today are too vague. There is only what I feel like now.
I could catalogue sensation, emotion and reaction, but that is all just a processing of sensory and social input. If the body is the interface between the world and the brain and the brain the interface between body and mind, mind must be the interface between the brain and… what? Consciousness? Being? Spirit? Soul? What was the next link in the chain… Where is the ‘I’ in all of that…and is there even an ‘I’ at all?
Caught in the limbo between home and destination, yesterday and tomorrow, there was only the road and the moment and both were part of a journey, a process in a constant state of change, but not without purpose.
For a moment, there was a glimpse beyond normality to Mystery. For a moment, I almost understood. But such things cannot be grasped, only, for want of a better word, felt. All that remained to put into thought was the consciousness of a road that leads to a somewhere that is everywhere. A somewhere that makes no distinction, no separation, between the road, the traveller and the destination. Only the journey is.
There is an odd sort of serenity in that. The vehicle may break down, the traveller may not know the way and the road may fail, but the journey is always itself, carrying us forward with purpose.
Reblogged this on Not Tomatoes.
Thanks for reblogging, Alethea.
A journey with a purpose is all about feeling. The world as we see it every day is all about feelings. This is the foundation of learning and understanding.
It was more that the journey is purpose… it is almost impossible to put it into any kind of words that make sense 😉
Got it! 🙂
🙂
Thanks for sharing 🙂
(I) enjoyed your musings into ‘an odd sort of serenity’; not a bad place to be, this realization of a journey.
Thanks, not so muc a place to be as a reason, perhaps.
Reblogged this on anita dawes and jaye marie.
Thanks for sharing, Jaye x
A fabulous post, Sue. Interestingly enough, I just watched a video about a little girl who said that the seven wonders of the world are sight, hearing, touching, smelling, feeling, loving and tasting. It is so true.
That’s beautiful, Robbie.
Lovely post, Sue.I think however that you come closest to the heart of it in the first three and a half lines. Where you’re not thinking – you are simply ‘being’. Once you – or any of us -starts thinking, rationalizing, reasoning etc.about the ultimate ‘I’ or about what life is etc. and trying to analyse our experiences in that way, we are off down a road which gets ever more convoluted and ultimately turns in on its own self. Because the mind – i.e. thought – which is necessary to do that reasoning etc., cannot go there. As you say – those things can’t be grasped or understood. What you’re looking for is beyond mind and thought. We have to leave mind behind, and in silence, feel and be. And that thoughtless awareness, that consciousness that feels and ‘be’s (!) is the source of the ‘I’. Though of course it’s not the personalized little ‘me’ that we customarily think of as being who we are.
I quoted in a post a short while back, the words of the wonderful Ramana Maharshi – “You are already That which you seek.”
“…One glimpse of It within the tavern caught, better than in the Temple lost outright.”
I like to think. I feel we were given minds to use… and if the only place it takes me is the realisation that the mind is too small to do more than perceive a brief flash of understanding, that is better than staying in darkness. It may be only a small step on the way, but at least it gives an idea or which way to look.
Indeed, we were given minds to use. I’m saying however that there is wisdom in recognising the limits of the mind’s usefulness. As a tool, properly used, for solving all sorts of more or less practical problems, it’s wonderful. But it has no intuitive aspect; it has no means of going beyond the practical and theoretical. The mind’s a wonderful servant – but it’s a terrible master. And I think the massive over-use of the mind in our society – where it has in so many areas become the master – is one of the reasons for the ever-deepening mess we’re getting into. And the quote from Omar Khayam – as I’ve always understood it anyway – is supportive of that – i.e. all the reasoning in the world from churchmen and women won’t take you half as far as the odd gem of unintentional perception voiced over a few shared glasses – in vino veritas!
That’s why I like Omar so much. Wine, whether from a shared glass or pouring in a glimpse of truth, loosens the bonds of mind.
You always make me ponder things!
That’s the idea, Traci 😉
Lol, yes. I quite enjoy having to figure out what I think on things when I read your blog!
I love that we have the ability to let the mind wander at will…and find it eventually leads us somewhere new 🙂
There is a lot to ponder in your post, Sue.
It had me thinkng, Michelle.
Thanks, Traci x
Thanks for sharing, Traci x