Another Choice

The practice of abandon

The more our physical consciousness learns to appreciate the quality of this presence and to trust this axis of conscious force – at times a burning honey, at times a breath of vertical, radiant freshness – and the more we may observe its action or influence in our life. The noise and the agitation, the insistence and the arrogance, the heaviness and the opacity of our emotional movements and our impulses, of our mental functioning and of all this incessant and futile activity – are little by little as if seized with their own inanity. Even what are considered as our noblest and most commendable sentiments and opinions become aware of a sort of gross aggressiveness, while emotions that are supposed to be subtler discover themselves, in a sudden clarity, to be fallacious, pretentious and intrinsically vain. Likewise, most of the exchanges taking place between individuals are revealed as such: plain trading negotiated for their respective satisfaction; and, whenever there is the authentic possibility of transmitting and giving to the other and of receiving what is transmitted from a deeper source, the impression that remains is so calm and generous that one wonders how one could have lived so long in this indigence and this ceaseless bargaining. Thus, instead of drawing from the vital energies, whether environing or specific, which no longer seem compatible with the quality of the engagement in the world, one now turns to the axis of Force and wishes to learn and renew oneself in it. For there lies always, in the background, this ugly leavening of the “me, I”, this incurable parade of existence in the name of the misshapen and discordant entity of our ego.

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Gradually, through small openings and little disasters, the wearing out of our tinny resistances and fears and dreads and repeated bumps and knocks into our mirrors – to soon be thankful to whatever made us slip and trip – we observe as if other laws in action or other principles at work in the details of physical existence.

Our intelligence is incapable of identifying the processes of an action that seems like a circular pressure everywhere at once, an attention that is present in every second of time and yet most

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