Rebuilding the UI

It seems to me that our practice is in a sense no more than a phenomenological user interface (UI) for the metaphysics of the contemplative life. What we are, beneath the structures of our frail and temporary selves, is no more than the open ground itself. We are appearances, wavelets that come and go, and flicker for a moment in the brief light of our human consciousness; but wavelets are water. They are the stream itself, waving for an instant here, and then there. Our fellow creatures, human and otherwise, are likewise ripples on the same measureless stream. Whatever we each of us do disturbs the surface minutely, or substantially. Perhaps to do so intentionally and with love has more effect than we dream, even. At least it cannot fail to change things, somehow, in the direction of good. Charles Williams called it coinherence. But it is hard to sit and take account of these things. Thought is merely about, not of. Human beings, all through recorded history – and undoubtedly before…