In our mental world, we worry about the meaning or
meaninglessness of life, we wonder about our purpose, we
judge and evaluate ourselves and compare ourselves to others,
we seek escape from the vulnerability and the pain and the
heartache that life inevitably brings, and we seek exciting and
pleasurable experiences that will thrill us and maybe also
enhance our self-image in our own eyes or in the eyes of others.
We go on long journeys, sometimes for decades, searching for
enlightenment, or the perfect partner, or the perfect place to live,
or the perfect career, or the perfect friends.
But meanwhile, right here, there is the utter simplicity and
wonder of life itself - the sounds of rain, the freshness of the air,
the ache of grief, the taste and texture of this moment, just exactly
as it is. And it never stays the same, for everything is always
changing. The universe literally begins anew in each moment.
And really, this moment is all we have. But we so often ignore
this vital reality, overlook or dismiss it. We don't really notice the
wonder and the beauty of it, even the wonder and beauty in its
sharper, darker, more bitter and challenging forms. We want
something else, something bigger and better, more exciting or
more pleasurable, or simply different.
As many of you know, I'm working on a fifth book now, a book
that explores death and growing old. But it has another aspect
now as well, namely the end of my long search for transcendence,
and the embrace of groundlessness and not knowing - waking up
to the simplicity of being just this moment, exactly as it is. Not
knowing what all this is or why it's happening or what will happen
next. Living in groundlessness, rather than desperately trying to
find ground in some transcendent metaphysical ideology - e.g.,
that Consciousness is all there is, or that Consciousness precedes
the brain and Mind precedes matter, or that awareness is ever-
present even after death, or that I am boundless awareness and
not a person, or whatever that transcendent ideology might be.
I could always see quite clearly that these were all actually beliefs
and not verifiable facts. But sometimes, when self-doubt is a deeply
ingrained psychological pattern, we override our own intelligence
and insight and doubts again and again, and swallow what others
who seem more enlightened are telling us. And sometimes, even
when we tell ourselves (and others) that our search has ended, we
are actually still seeking.
Yes, I can feel a sense of boundless awaring presence, the spacious
openness of here-now that has no center and no boundaries. I can
feel this vast listening silence, and the emptiness at the core of
everything. When I look, it is obvious that we can never experience
anything outside of consciousness, and that every experience is an
experience in and of consciousness. But there's a metaphysical leap,
some teachers call it "higher reasoning," that moves from these
direct insights into the metaphysical conclusions I mentioned
(e.g., Consciousness is all there is, Consciousness precedes the
brain, I am awareness and not a person, and so on.)
I can even sense into being the Ultimate Subject, that which
remains beyond everything perceivable and conceivable. These
were never just intellectual ideas in my head, there were felt
experiences, intuitive realities. So, they seemed real. And they
were real as experiences. But that's all they were: sensations,
intuitions, experiences. And when mixed together with
metaphysical ideas that I was imbibing from the Advaita world,
it was easy enough to arrive at the conclusion that I am boundless
awareness, infinite consciousness, impersonal presence or
the Ultimate Subject beyond all experiences - and it was easy to
overlook the fact that I had taken a leap from direct experiencing
into metaphysical belief. And I'm not saying any of these beliefs are
false, only that they are based on what is actually simply another
experience, another sensation, another intuition, another idea.
They have, through "higher reasoning," reached a philosophical
conclusion that is in no way verifiable as Ultimate Truth.
But we cling to these conclusions in our search to avoid
groundlessness, uncertainty, vulnerability, lack of control, and
the reality of not knowing. We turn them into Ultimate Truth.
Of course, when I was dispensing this kind if teaching, I would have
insisted that it wasn't "just another experience, another sensation,
another intuition or another idea." I would have insisted that it was
That in which all experiences appeared and disappeared. It was the
unchanging, ever-present, ground of being. And I could easily
experience it that way. After all, everything appears in awareness.
It's truly easy to hypnotize ourselves or to be hypnotized by
teachers, and it's so easy to slide over from direct insight and
experiencing into metaphysical conclusions and beliefs. It's a subtle
line we cross, and we don't always see it, especially when we are
surrounded by a whole subculture that is reinforcing the belief system
and the assumption that some metaphysical idea is actually Truth.
In such transcendent teachings as Advaita, which come out of
Hinduism, one is no longer a mere mortal or a person, no longer a
vulnerable body or a vulnerable human mind, but instead, one is
boundless awareness, infinite consciousness, God - unconditioned,
indestructible, imperishable, free. Again, I'm not saying this is all
untrue. In fact, I feel that such teachings do point to certain realities
about life - that there is something right here that is open and free
and unconditioned, and that the universe (or whatever this is) is
infinite and eternal, and that we are a momentary expression of
something much larger. Death may be the end of "me" and "my
story" and my particular movie of waking life - I assume it will be -
but it's not the end of this larger wholeness of which "Joan" is a
momentary and ever-changing movement, like a wave on the ocean.
The fear of death comes from being exclusively identified as the
wave, and imagining the wave to be a solid, fixed, independent,
separate thing rather than a flowing movement of the ocean.
But if we go to the opposite extreme and deny the reality and the
preciousness of this body-mind-person, this unique and unrepeatable
wave that will never happen again in exactly the same way, and if
we try to identify exclusively as the whole ocean and not the wave,
we miss something very important. We miss the actual living reality
of our life - the taste of tea, the sounds of rain, the smell of garbage,
a burning pain in the gut, the bright red fire truck streaking past,
the joyous companionship of a good friend or a beloved dog and
the grief when they die. We miss the actual life of this moment;
the raw, unmediated aliveness of this very moment, just as it is.
