I am surviving. Surviving moment by moment. I am aliving. Aliving experience by experience. How these moments are survived is practical. How these experiences are experienced is visceral. My words are somewhere in between. Literal surviving out loud. Practical rendering of visceral awareness. In thought. To share something of my aliving.
During the drifting tides of meditation in recent weeks, thoughts have been pressing. Much more so than in the past. They have felt agitated, slick and swollen with their own sense of urgency. As if they have had something important to communicate. Not necessarily the content of the thoughts, that wasn’t telling, but the thoughts themselves. They have had a growing sense of wanting to be thought. Gathering at the edges and jostling for a moment in the light. This has led to some thinking about thoughts.
Although perhaps not from within thought. So thinking is not a good verb here. More observation. Observation of thoughts. I’ve noticed their pushing. Their closing. Their closeing. Their cloying cling. A gradual change of texture crept near. They want attention. They have tried all sorts of ways to gain it.
Forming long chains, one after another.
Leaping from unseen places and landing with a splash.
Crowding in all at once to smother.
Exploding with increasingly dramatic flair.
Jump scares.
Showstoppers.
Made you stare eye poppers.
When I noticed their antics a move had been made. My attention had shifted. From within them to without them. Then something else happened. My attention shifted to my attention. Where it was. What it was. Why it was. Wonderfully, as is the way, notions began emerging. Not thoughts as I usually know them. Something other. Softer, fuzzier and further away. The evolution of thought as a tool for survival blended into awareness. Enabling us to interpret our experiences, consider them, explore them, imagine and select ways to respond, plan, execute their enactment and share with others to allow collaboration. Collaboration and survival.
So often our thoughts appear to betray us. Tangle us in knots that we don’t know we are in. Lead us down dead end cul-de-sacs we can remain in for months, years and decades. To help us survive. Their frantic, urgent, over baring hope for our survival. Even when our demise isn’t so imminent. Our thoughts usually operate a zero tolerance policy with regards to threat and report it where it most often isn’t.
Somewhere-inbetween – Gavin-Birchall
It may not be a coincidence that interest in what lies beyond thought, underneath it, all around it, grows as our relationship to survival changes. We live long enough to gather resources that give the illusion of physically safety. We live even longer and realise our survival really is finite. We choose to let go and surrender to our visceral experience. We see that the survival of all is more important than the survival of ourself. Whatever the path, moments arise, and repeat, and can eventually become our world, from which what was before, occasionally returns. Before passing completely.
There are those who consider thought to be a sense like sight, taste and touch. I am left wondering what it is that I am sensing and what my weather front thoughts are responding to. That I must survive perhaps. They are not clear in their focus but their character and behaviour are themselves a message. As is likely true for all of us, there are a number of reasons they might be gathering as they are. As is always true, all of the reasons will be involved. For now, watching the weather is enough.
Aliving – Gavin-Birchall
