One Most Excellent Question

The search for a path through life

Photo: The Palisades cliffs along the Hudson River, just after sunrise, as seen on my morning commute to New York City from Tarrytown, NY.

These cliffs are up to 540 feet high and were formed as a great sill of basalt by a lava flow 200 million years ago. In the morning they often look like they are molten all over again.

The Palisades are the dominant feature in my local landscape; the basalt actually forms the hill directly behind my house in the Sparkill Gap. It is an incredibly, incredibly hard stone, which is why the glaciers of the last ice age, which were nearly a mile high and deep right where I live, had little luck eroding it.

Rock on.

We’re confused and divided; but we generally don't see this.

Wherever we’re within ourselves at a given moment, we almost always believe we are whole.

We don't even see, for example, the way one part or another of ourselves dominates our conscious experience: for example, the intellect, or emotions. The only thing that can provide a unified field of gravity that draws us together into one single being is our sensation; and yet that, in most of us, is not a living thing with its own authority.

Perhaps in this context the most constant and useful question to put in front of one’s self is whether one’s sensation is experienced as a living thing with its own authority in a given moment. It probably isn't; and one probably finds onesself sitting there searching for and wishing for a way to "make that happen." Everyone wants a formula. That would make it easier.

Unfortunately, there aren't any formulas. All there is is an active question. An active question has an influence on the nature of being and the inner life that nothing else within a person can have.