Into the One Will

To take another look at how we can come toward opening to the One Will, we begin with sensing our body. The precursor to that is to become aware of what our bodily senses are reporting to us. Proprioception gives us the position of our body, while our kinesthetic sense puts us in contact with the movements made by our body. Our sense of touch reports on skin contacts, enteroception brings contact with the state of our internal organs, thermoception detects heat and cold, and our sense of balance enables us to stand and walk upright. These are our normal body senses. General awareness of all that is sometimes called mindfulness of the body.

Sensing includes all that but goes beyond it in a crucial way: the generation, accumulation, and awareness of the sensitive energy, the energy from which the foundation level of our soul, our inner body, is built. The work of sensing is an act of will, beginning with attention to our body. Merely holding our attention in a part of our body generates and puts us in touch with the sensitive energy.

You can try this by focusing your attention within one of your hands for a few minutes. Then notice your immediate experience of that hand, especially as compared to your experience of your other hand, in that moment. You are sensing the first, but not the second. This work can be extended to other body parts and to the whole body, though we do not try to sense individual internal organs, so as not to interfere with their instinctive functioning. Sensing can be the ongoing bedrock of our inner work. The body is always available and always now. Sensing the whole body creates a platform for other modes of spiritual practice.

From the vantage point of being in our body, in our sensation body, we can also turn our attention to our mind, to our thinking function. Sometimes we do that and thoughts evaporate, leaving us with a quiet mind, an inner peace. Usually, though, we find a plethora of thoughts, sometimes chaotic and frenzied, and sometimes a calm train of associations. If we can stay rooted in the present, with the help of sensing our body, we can watch these thoughts come and go, come and go, endlessly. We see that they are not us, that they do not speak for us, rather they speak for themselves and arise from random impulses impinging on our storehouse of experience and attitudes. It comes to appear as a mechanism, like an artificial intelligence system based on our lifelong accumulation of training data in the form of experience. Give it a prompt and it responds, and then responds to that first response, and onward in a never-ending chain of associations. This is not I. By focusing our attention on our mind, the sensitive energy of the mind, the mind energy, gets generated and accumulates, resulting in us being able to know our thoughts as thoughts, and even to see the quiet, spacious, conscious mind behind and between all the thoughts.

A similar situation exists with our emotions, only more viscerally than our thoughts: input and response, action and reaction. This too is not I. By focusing our attention on our feeling center in our chest area, the sensitive energy of feeling, the feeling energy, gets generated and accumulates, resulting in us being able to feel our feelings as feelings, and even to feel the conscious peace and equanimity at our core.

All three centers, body, mind, and feeling can function in much higher and more subtle ways than the automatic functioning of associations and reactions, and even than the sensitive functioning of contact through the sensitive energies. This occurs through presence.

Notice that the work just described, of being in contact with our body, mind, or feelings, is an act of attention and intention, in other words, an act of will. To step toward presence, we work on being in contact with our body, mind, and feelings simultaneously. While this may sound difficult, it turns out to be quite natural. Being with all three brings us into wholeness, which in turn brings the conscious energy into play. And that energy helps us be attentive, in a virtuous feedback loop. Rather than pinpointing parts with focused attention, we spread ourselves, our attention, into the whole. Pure and strong attention, as an act of being here, entrains all our parts, all our centers, into the single whole that is us. This is presence, and the one who is present, the one who is attentive, the one who is being here, is our I.

This presence, this I, is the threshold of the spiritual. We see that our I is not separate, is not centered in us, and indeed does not have a center. Our I is a radically different way of being and seeing than we are accustomed to. And yet it seems entirely natural, easy, and right. When we are not identified with ourselves, with our name, when we are not caught in some part, when we allow will to flow through us, we become an open emanation of the Sacred. It is not that we come into the One Will, rather the One Will comes into us. The reality of our personal kinship with all life and our sharing of substance with all things is revealed in that vast One Will, which surrounds us and permeates the world, including us. The world is sanctified by our participation in that One Will.

This is a deeper form of presence, wherein we can no longer say who is present or whose presence it is, only that there is Presence. No boundaries. No inside and outside. No me and not me. Simple, direct, stainless and pure.

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