Being Inspired in the Moment

 During the study group today, someone had asked the delightful question, "What's your favourite skandha?" I paused to reflect on it, as I am often inclined to do so, and then came up with the word: sensation. I enjoy sensation the most because we can contemplate changes more easily and directly as opposed to say, the body or perceptions, or even thoughts. But perhaps more importantly, sensations can be direct portals into a world of being that is not mediated by words, concepts or comparisons. I remember hearing a song lyric that goes "feelings never lie", and I believe that sensations (which are somewhat more basic in nature than feelings) are much the same in that they simply register qualities in the brain rather than saying something about them, as we would normally when we interpret a song or a text.

One can easily be inspired in the moment if they are able to stay with sensations as they are naturally occurring, without judgment, so far as they point to the impermanence of the mind. And this is quite real because these sensations are not mediated by interpretations or comparisons with the past. Sensations simply are--and their facticity points to something that simply cannot be compared to anything else. As soon as I overlay a memory (perhaps of something subtly beautiful, expansive, or nice) onto the current sensation, I am adding something more to it, and this takes me away from its presence. This happens all the time without my truly being aware of it. Suffering happens when these two thoughts (the current and the past) get mixed together into one essence, and I think even boredom happens because the sensation is no longer alive: it's being confused with a thought that is ossified. Labels tend to be like this, in the sense that they over-define the moment while denying its subtle qualities of being. And yet, just as I am writing this piece,  I am recognizing that we need a language to envelop this process of being with our experiences without trying to romantically embellish or diagnose them. 

There is almost a kind of "taxonomy of the heart" that can be explored here: the ways in which the bodily sense gets washed over with abstractions (trying to label the sensations according to cultural ideas, wishful thinking (wanting the sensation to be different) and even reifying the sensation into a static thing which it is not--not to mention trying to solidify the sensation by linking it to a body part. But these mechanisms only falsify the fleeting nature of sensations by providing a false sense of knowing through these overused concepts, such as the body anatomy we learned in school, or psychoanalytic theories etc.