The Divine's Feeler

Here is one of the oldest questions people ask: what am I for?

The answer this book gives is simple, and I find it more comforting every year. You are the divine's feeler.

Where the dance is felt

The dance of the Unknowable Future and the Immutable Past happens whether or not anyone is watching. He loves her. She is complete. Restoration follows disturbance as surely as night follows day.

But the dance by itself does not feel anything. He has no self that could feel. She is stillness. The feeling of it, the texture, the AAH and the OO, the ache and the relief, all of that happens somewhere else. It happens in you.

You are where the dance becomes felt. Every thought you have, every action you take, every emotion that moves through you is part of how love comes to be felt at all. In the old phrase I still like, you are the divine's way of feeling its own dance from the inside.

And it does not matter whether you are aware of this. It does not matter whether you believe in the divine at all. As long as you are experiencing your Reality, you are fulfilling the role. An atheist stuck in traffic is feeling for the divine as surely as a monk at prayer. The role does not require your agreement. It only requires your experience.

You cannot do it wrong

This means something that may take a long time to sink in.

You cannot do this wrong.

If your purpose is to feel, then every feeling fulfills it. The joy fulfills it, and the grief fulfills it. The clarity fulfills it, and so does the confusion. The days when you are a loving and patient person fulfill it, and so do the days when you are neither.

This is not permission to stop caring how you treat people. Everything we have said about history making still holds; what you do becomes part of the record and comes back to you and to others as Actual. But it is a release from the fear that you are failing at existence itself. You are not. You could not if you tried. You are a feeler, and you are feeling.

Witness

There is a poem of mine that tries to say this from the inside, and it ends with the thought that the dance is not about you, but without you it could not have been. That is the shape of your importance.

You are not the hero of the story. You are not the protagonist. He and she are the frame that holds everything. But they do not see their own dance; nodes do not see, and they do not feel. You are the one through whom it becomes visible at all. Think of the only person in a dark concert hall, and the music that would otherwise be vibrating air and nothing more.

The music was never about that listener. And without a listener, it would never have been heard.

Your attachments are part of the texture

You may be someone who feels you are falling short because you are still attached to things: a person, a possession, a reputation, a grudge, a plan for how life should go. Many spiritual teachings treat attachment as the enemy. I understand why. But I want to offer a gentler view.

Your attachments are part of how the dance is felt through you. The way you cling, the way you fear loss, the way you hold on past the point of sense, these are textures too. They belong to what is being felt.

You may, someday, find yourself loosening your grip. If you do, that too will be part of what is felt. But you are not failing your role by being attached. You are feeling what it is like to be a particular someone, holding particular things, in a world that keeps moving.

The quiet dignity of it

I find a quiet dignity in this. You are not here to fix the universe. You are not here to earn your place in it. You are not here to escape it. You are here to feel it, as yourself, from the one vantage point that only you will ever occupy.

No one else will ever feel your life. No one else will ever stand exactly where you stand at the edge where his love meets her stillness. What is felt through you is felt nowhere else, and it is enough.