The Real and the Deep Real

The beauty of mere being

There is the world you can touch, and the world that touches you.

A glass of water stands beside the bed. Morning light passes through it and lays a trembling shape across the wall. Outside, a diesel engine turns over. Someone is already late. You lie there for another moment, watching water do this peculiar thing with light.

Nothing has happened. You could tell nobody about your morning and leave nothing out. Yet something has held you there.

At the Cliffs of Moher, it was the Atlantic striking stone. The scale of it made existence difficult to ignore. But the same strangeness is here, in a bedroom, before the day has properly begun.

We move through a world of recognisable things. Glass. Water. Window. Light. We know their names, their uses, where they belong. Familiarity lets us get on with living. Then, occasionally, something slips past the name.

A woman on a train falls asleep with her hand resting open on her coat. You notice the fine creases in her palm. The unguarded weight of a hand with nothing, for the moment, to do. Across the aisle, somebody scrolls through their phone. Fields pass the window. There is an entire life asleep opposite you, going somewhere you will never know.

Or music comes through an open window. You are walking down a street thinking about something practical, and a few notes reach you. Suddenly you remember the kitchen of a house you have not entered for thirty years. The light in it. Somebody moving behind you. How it felt to be alive before you knew what would happen.

The street continues. A van reverses. You wait at the crossing with this other time still moving through your body.

I think of these openings as encounters with the Deep Real. The ordinary world acquires an intimacy that its familiar names cannot quite contain. We feel implicated in what we see. Something reaches us, and for a moment the fact of being here becomes almost unbearably vivid.

Sometimes it arrives through beauty. Sometimes through grief, a dream, an unsettling coincidence. A face turns towards us and we see the years in it. We hear ourselves laughing and remember that there was a time we thought we wouldn't laugh again. Experience opens somewhere we had stopped looking.

There is room to wonder about these moments without deciding too quickly what they mean. Intuition, feelings, synchronicity and mystical experience are data, not instruction. Their force deserves attention; our interpretation still needs discernment. We can be deeply moved and remain free to choose what follows.

Perhaps this is where ontological fieldwork begins. With the willingness to stay with an experience before explaining it away or turning it into a belief. To feel how strange it is that a voice can enter through the ear and alter the weight of an afternoon.

The sacred ordinary is close enough to overlook. A shirt still warm from somebody's body. Rain darkening a meadow pasture. The small movements of a sleeping face. Each has its material explanation. Each can, without warning, become difficult to take for granted.

Later, you drink the water. The shape on the wall disappears. There are things to do, and you get up to do them.

What was so mere about any of it?