Sight Fishing For Wonder

Morning Thoughts #94

There’s an innate strangeness to every existing moment, waiting to be discovered. Something that should be impossible is taking place: the act of conscious perception. Can you feel it? Well, they don’t want you to. When all seems normal, you will behave normally - which is to say how they taught you to behave. Normal action is controlled action. Ecstatic connection with chased reality is the essence of religious wonder. It's extraordinary only because of the distance usually kept, often at our keepers' hidden demands.

Civilization, to function, has to tamp down our feelings of wonder. Its mundane and often thankless tasks are a hard sell when up against states of transcendental bliss. And I am not one to deny that civilization has produced much to its credit. Whatever this life is, though, it is not what we’ve been told. How could it be? We haven’t been told so much as we’ve been persuaded, creating the combustion of desire within us to prolong the gasp of their economic machine. Progress is churning. We are the cream being turned into butter. The sinking feeling in your gut whips around and around once it has reached its depth.

And I wonder too about thinking. It might also be a trap. I am not sure we could think our way out of this distance (the normal). We have to perceive our way out slowly, observing sunrise by sunrise. Fresh air knows best; follow it. Too much thinking is what got us here; too little creative thinking is what keeps us trapped. Imagine a way out, and then, after escape, set your excess imagination free from you as well. Once out, you can look out. Less taking it in, but taking it as it is. And the final step is “taking it as it is” in. Not one with reality but two. You are its companion, the unreal element among it, but no longer against it. Opposites interacting but no longer contaminating.

The potential exists to think ourselves out of everything. Let us see to it this power is applied to every thought that distances the incredible essential. Behold, the world has closed in again through delight in sunrises, sunsets, river sitting, bird watching, and sipping morning coffee in crisp clean air. Thinking through (and out!) the human in us, may we become little more than enlightened perception (and oh there is nothing more!). Beauty, the perception of it, the feeling of it biting into our depths, may it be coaxed there silently. The best thoughts are fishermen, silent on the shore of something great in our lives. They have led us here and have almost caught it: a sunrise so beautiful I don’t mind the hook in my mouth. The hook, friends, is the inescapably human within us. But we can use the hook for our own ends; let us walk to the rivers and decide upon the day’s catch.

The conscious engine whirls, but let it not be the normal one. We are blessed with these depths. Thought has dug and dug itself into us, and yes, it can hide and repress much down there, but it also means that there is now space for better sights, for so much beauty, to dive down and be felt so fully, turning consciousness into just another wonderful sense. May your thoughts blossom into feeling; come the holy metamorphosis of sight into wonder!