meditation brush

14 stations + coda

Life is the feeling of energy.

The feeling of life is simply a feeling. It is internal to itself.

Yet it embodies a rare propensity: to exist, perceive, prevail.

Perception underpins the mind-body complex, a self-fashioning interplay (call it the Droste effect or mise-en-abyme).

Somehow, within the melee, a distinct ego-structure is assumed. Each new experience, arising from a range of infinite possibilities, is assimilated.

These experiences extend within spacetime as physical and phenomenological events: desire, will, impressions, thought, stress, behaviour, affection, determination, etc. This extensive world we claim as our own.

Inhabiting it, we adopt identity as a steady image, adapting as the same. Memory reinforces the process, ensuring pattern recognition as self-familiarity.

However, and distressingly, the image is also a mirage. We take the gift as owned. On further examination, the measurement of events in spacetime – while it offers a sense of continuity – turns out to be makeshift, an affectation (see Adlam: ‘all at once’; Hoffman: ‘a headset’; Zuboff: ‘false boundaries’).

Unavoidably, the ongoing effort required to maintain a settled identity proves disquieting and perilous because any standalone self remains unsalvageable. It, too, is a makeshift.

Awareness and attention (within that awareness) are the delivery mechanism guiding a way through an over-invested relationship with the world. Their skillfulness can be cultivated, which is mindfulness, which is disentangling the entire fabrication.

The world is without imperative.

Living things are the world’s intentionality.

Beyond the world’s allure, which is compelling, one progressively divests the assumptions that gird all structuring. One moves again into the open: propensity unbound.

Wholes throughout. Parts throughout. Empty throughout.

Lodge right here.