Essence Intelligence

As of today, the blog undergoes a shift. My focus will be on the daily experience of developing EI, Essence Intelligence. This is no small task, for I am taking on something known at a level that I would call pre-verbal. True wisdom on this topic does not lie in an intellectual understanding of essence, but in its embodiment. Where we would normally seek first to understand, in order to become, here the better counsel is to become, in order to understand. We are walking an old road here, well traveled by seekers before us, but it is still a road that takes us to the edge of the map, uncharted, a road known by its walking.

So, I intend to write about daily practice in exploring living out of Essence. Let's start here then: the pause. This is a simple practice, but it holds layer upon layer of depth, in fact, it holds "the keys to the kingdom." Rainer Maria Rilke writes of being the "rest between two notes." It is in that space between the notes that we find an entry point to essence, in the pause, in that briefest of moments between inhale and exhale. Everywhere there are pauses, if we pay attention. Listen to their invitation and follow it. Living out of essence requires a pause, an acknowledgement that we must stop our habituated ways of seeing, and live out of an identity far deeper than the personalities created by our incessant thinking and the history we replay. The pause, the rest between notes, is an empty place in terms of sound, but it is rich in access.

Access? What I am suggesting is that the pause become a place where we drop out of our local mind, and into the deep silence that holds essence. Instead of, "I think, therefore I am," in that silence, we are left with "I am." In the "I am" is essence. In the pause, we make space for our larger nature, our essence nature. More on this later, but for now, please find a pause, drop into the silence, and let your essence flow into the quiet which comes when the mind chatter stops. Find the pause between the breaths. It will take you home. No instruction manual is needed. We are making a space to remember (re-member) who we are, at our essence.