I seem to have misplaced my ground of being this morning. If you see it, perhaps you could feed it and send it home? Such imagined loss is not important in and of itself I suppose, but that sentiment itself is a quality of such a misplacement. I struggle to determine what is important. In that struggle it is likely that I might manufacture some importance or other. Something might even take on the status of a necessity or crisis. Or perhaps I will resort to the habitual. I am not anywhere. I am consensually in some particular place, but I could be anywhere, the distinction between this place and that place becoming arbitrary. This day and the next have some agreed upon name and sequence, but this has no particular meaning to me unless I consider something that I imagine I must do within that arbitrary structure of agreement. Perhaps I consider something or someone that I imagine to be missing and so locate myself. I have some desire by which I see myself. I see myself in the production of my suffering. I understand the apparent luxury of my condition. From that point of view the hermit or sadhu lives the most luxurious of lives. I am incapable of such luxury. I cannot afford such luxury.
Why would I write about this rather than something else? There is no reason. The misplacement of my ground of being initially seems important in some way, itself occurring as if something was missing. This fades. The moment of misplacement does not occur as such. It can be said not to have occurred at all. And yet it seems to have occurred in memory. I experience some discomfort initially with a sense of not knowing, even in the conditional sense we might call disorientation, in which the memory of orientation must still be present. I am disoriented. Really? With respect to what? I cast about for my grid system of up and down, here and there. I have some memory in which I imagine that I do know. I have some imagined ground of being in which my actions are apparently contextualized and so take on the quality of the meaningful. The absence of that itself occurs initially as meaningful. Something is wrong. Something is missing. Something must be done about it. In the initial moment, it is a general feeling of something, but even that is too uncomfortable for long and I begin to specify the possible something as the necessary something. Any moment now I will have a plan and a schedule. It would just be too unbearable not to.
I am sorry. Perhaps you are offended with my foppish, irresponsible talk in the face of self evident necessity of this and that. Of course I have that necessity too. I am even obliged. You may imagine that I am a solipsistic fool. In my foolishness I do not consider myself solipsistic in the slightest. Quite the reverse. In my own foolishness and idiocy I do not imagine myself to actually exist... or rather I only imagine myself to exist. The 'world' is not an illusion, but I almost certainly am. It seems to take a great deal of effort to keep that illusion in place.
Perhaps in the absence and discomfort of my apparent misplacement, I despair. No particular future unfolds. There is no hope. Despair is the state of having no hope, that arises with desire for some hope. With no expectation of hope this despair dissolves. Perhaps then I am resigned. I do not imagine that some possible future will or can emerge in some particular way. I am resigned to my fate. It is written and some I did not and is not writing it. My resignation occurs in the remembered and produced context of an expectation that perhaps I could and should be writing such a future. Such a future should then accord my minuscule slice of perceived reality as if it were the truth of things. I will insist upon this. Perhaps in the moment of such insistence the correlation between some unfolding and my expected knowing do not seem meaningful to me. Has it ever turned out according to my efforts, machinations and imaginations? I do not think so, though I can tell a very persuasive story saying that it has. It is a story. I like stories.
There are magnolia trees outside the window. They do not exist because of me. I do not exist because of me. I do not even see them. I only have access to a kind of emanation or reflected shadow of the tree, actively produced by the active production of my point of view... all of which I actively pretend is passively happening as a given condition. I see it through a window, in a moment. The leaves shine with sunlight and shake in the wind. It is simple and I appreciate the simple beauty of it, but I do not see the tree any more than I see myself. Perhaps, I feel the tree. I may recognize something about this. I am contemplative, but not of some imagined tree as an object over there. It is not an audit of my emotional state with regard to the tree or that type of sentiment we sometimes call feeling. It is another sense that may go unnoticed, since it cannot itself be quantified. We might call it intuition, but only very gently. It has to do with the capacity to perceive wholeness as such, without recourse to sum, calculus or the world of becoming. This often starts with a misplacement of what we might imagine as our familiar ground of being(useful). Such a contemplative act does not take place in the mind. It is not a thought activity. It is not itself languaged. Language, thought, analysis, synthesis, arising emotion, sensation and such may all be apparently taking place. Nothing is known and accounted for and that is itself not the absence of something. This all takes place inside the contemplative state of being, in which the whole is directly present; not the reverse.
When this is encountered I might also encounter a kind of duality or sense of duality between whole and parts. The particulate activity is useful. It is merely useful. The contemplative is not useful and has no objective; no object. It is a moment of being, in which there is no useful ground of being. When we are being as the particulate, such a duality is extremely meaningful. We will argue about it. Wars will be fought. As the whole there is no duality. It does not constitute a point of view and is not constituted of any such. The whole as such is only intuited; witnessed; contemplated; appreciated. From the point of view of the particulate, the whole becomes most sensate in its absence. I recognize what was there and is no longer there as whole. Haha!
I long for wholeness, as if it were missing. The actions of our particulate dissection seem to grow ever finer in a desperate attempt to construct a wholeness that is already present. Soon, soon we will have constructed the whole. I will have painted reality and called it reality, forgetting that I am only remembering. There are depths to this. A seemingly endless recursion. I suffer the apparent absence. I suffer my own construction and machinations. My attempts at such a construction themselves become the necessity of my actions and reality. Every moment of phrenetic action to construct the whole from its parts creates greater and greater fragmentation, requiring even more phrenetic activity to address... This itself is a sort of whole, available to intuition and contemplation in all its horror.
This fallen blossom of magnolia did not know it was falling. Should I glue it back on the tree, even in memory? Should I demand of the tree that these blossoms not fall? I believe I will go inform the tree of its failures soon... I am sure I can fix it.
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