On spontaneity in aware living.
Rich or poor, the man or woman who has no space in inner daily living is impoverished.
~ There’s a deepening exploration of daily aware experiencing in terms of what we’ll call ‘spontaneous living‘. I’ve felt for months now a growing movement toward less and less inner and outer restrictions, reactions, patterns, structures, formulas, and sundry often petty obligations that seem to whisper or shout their daily demands – those habits of mind that conditionally label, define, and deny the free-flowing spontaneity of purely observing, of simply being.
So, while I’m less inclined to read books, let alone quote from them these days, here’s a beautiful rendering from Jean Klein whose book ‘The Ease of Being’ happens to be sitting at my elbow gathering a little dust this morning! He writes about the role of meditation as the ground from which spontaneity arises:
“Being in meditation brings a new way of living from moment to moment, a living that cannot be divided into compartments: some time for business, some for eating, some for meditation, and so on. You cannot go in and out of meditation. It is the support of all activity. In the diversity of everyday life the background remains always the same and all activities are spontaneous expressions of this background.
…In meditation, living is spontaneous. Life flows on without reference to a controlling centre, an ego. The I-image looks for survival in situations. It seeks security in repetition and acquired patterns of behaviour. It endeavours to make everything new and unknown into the known. As long as this controlling sense of individuality is functioning, we can never come to spontaneous living, to the non-state from which all states spring.”
Indeed, aware living is meditation, without a ‘me’, a meditator. Enjoy what you are – love, loving it all. 🙂
