A herd of deer galloping past me in the early morning sunlight. Everything is God—the train horn, geese honking, the body moving through sunlight, trees soaking up light, the pond still as glass, vast openness, the dazzling dark, the whole amazing mystery—dancing, singing, twirling, spinning, silent, still, empty, full. Just this!
—entry from an old journal
I don’t believe in God, but I have felt the presence of God since I was a child. God to me is a word for what is most intimate—the very core of my own being, that which reveals itself in silence and stillness, the listening presence beholding it all, the openness of the Heart, the emptiness and fullness of everything, the awareness or unconditional love in which everything is held, the light that is shining forth everywhere, as everything.
Do I always feel in touch with this? No. Sometimes consciousness seems to contract, shrink and harden, and I am filled with doubt, uncertainty and darkness. I feel separate and lost. Life can be challenging, as we all know, and for any sensitive being, there is inevitably pain—our own and that of the world at large. What can potentially fall away is the overlay of unnecessary suffering and confusion on top of the unavoidable pain in life. The pathless path of spiritual awakening is an unfolding discovery of how we do our suffering, and where the freedom we long for is actually found:
“Your suffering is your own activity. It is something that you are doing moment to moment....You will continue to pursue every kind of means until you realize that all you are doing is pinching yourself. When you realize that, you just take your hand away. There is nothing complicated about it. But previous to that, it is an immensely complicated problem.”
—Adi Da (aka Da Free John, Da Love-Ananda, Franklin Jones, etc.)
That pinching activity is the movement of thought, creating and believing in the illusion of separate, encapsulated, solid, persisting forms, including the apparently separate and autonomous self. That which sees or realizes this is awareness. And the freedom we long for is only ever found right here, right now. It is never actually absent, although it can seemingly be overlooked.
You might be wondering, can we choose to take our hand away as this quotation seems to imply? The illusory “me,” which is only a thought, has no power to do anything. The power is in awareness or presence, or we could say, in God. And God is not other than the very core of our own being.
The pathless path of spiritual awakening is not about belief, but it does have an element of faith. Those two words are sometimes used synonymously, but as I see it, faith is not the same as belief.
“Faith is radical trust—trust in life and trust in God… Going forward in faith is not a train ride [where we just need to board, and then it will bring us to our destination]; it’s more like walking on water… Praying means opening our heart to the Great Mystery—to life, to God. This open confrontation changes us personally and thereby changes the conditions of everything else, as well. The smallest change we make in the great network of the world influences the whole… In the end, the Mystery is the Unknowable. And if something is unknowable, then it cannot be put into words. We may experience it by letting it take hold of us, but we cannot ourselves take hold of it.”
—Brother David Steindl-Rast, OSB
On the pathless path, if we’re lucky, there is a developing capacity to see (as it happens) how we get caught up in unnecessary suffering and confusion, and to relax the pinch of thought, to let go of what is past, and to open, to re-turn our attention to Here-Now, to presence, which is another word for God—to melt or dissolve into this vastness—to knowingly be this one bottomless moment, this awaring presence, this aliveness, this no-thing-ness that we actually always already are.
The Way has many twists and turns, many apparent mistakes and setbacks, many long hard slogs—and that’s where faith is called for, faith in life itself—the ability to get back up, to let the past go, to begin anew. Faith is a kind of resolve, constancy or vigilance—that which allows us to (metaphorically) walk on water. Not getting discouraged. Realizing that everything belongs, even the apparent mistakes:
“Of all the pitfalls in our paths and the tremendous delays and wanderings off the track I want to say that they are not what they seem to be. I want to say that all that seems like fantastic mistakes are not mistakes, all that seems like error is not error; and it all has to be done. That which seems like a false step is the next step.”
—Agnes Martin, the painter
Every morning, I sit still in silence on my meditation cushion simply being present, not knowing what will happen. Attention moves around by itself from sounds to thoughts to bodily sensations. It gets mesmerized sometimes by a train of thought, and a whole mental movie world unfolds in the imagination, and then at some point, like a soap bubble, that whole world pops and is replaced by the sound of an airplane flying over or the cheeping of a bird or an ache in my knee. Sometimes everything grows very still and quiet and deep and there is a profound sense of God’s presence, and then another thought pops up or another sound or bodily sensation captures the attention, and these too are nothing other than this same radiant presence. Sometimes I pray. Yes, I talk to God, who is none other than my own Heart.
And then it’s time for breakfast—and there’s no real dividing line between sitting still on the cushion and moving around making breakfast, except that the sitting is quieter and less physically active, while the preparation of breakfast involves singing and humming and opening and closing the refrigerator and the cabinet and peeling and washing and stirring and eating and so on. And then the day is full of activities and thoughts and sensations and words and conversations with myself and with others, and sometimes in the evening I watch a movie, or read, or sit again in silence. And then it’s time for bed, and there are dreams and the non-experience of deep sleep and then waking up. And it all happens here-now in this immovable one bottomless moment that is ever-changing but always just this.
All kinds of experiences, insights, shifts, openings and transformations seem to happen in the course of a lifetime. Why such things happen when they do, or why one person can sober up or quit smoking while another cannot, or why one person turns into a saint while another becomes a serial killer no one really knows. None of these things are really personal. Like the outer weather and all of its changes, the inner weather is also a movement of the universe, of life itself, and all of it passes away. All experiences pass. Death erases it all—and that’s actually wonderful because that’s why life is so alive, because it’s dying moment to moment, instantly liberating the past and making room for the new.
Am I religious? Zen teacher Barry Magid defines religion as “moment to moment reverence and awe, and the kind of attention that treats ordinary things as extraordinary and worthy of that kind of attention.” If that is religion, then I am definitely religious. But I’m not religious in any formal or traditional sense, although I’ve been known to enjoy religious rituals and mythologies, but without ever taking them literally. They’re an art form to me, a kind of play. Like great art, they can evoke something profound, something that is beyond words. I love the Catholic mass, Gregorian chants, Hindu bhajans, whirling dervishes, Rumi’s poetry. I have a devotional bhakti streak in me, and it manifests as devotion to the rain and the wind and the people around me and the dog next door and the sounds of the freeway and the sunlight and my morning coffee. I tend to prefer the word spiritual over the word religion because organized religion can be such a disaster movie. But it’s not always that way, and I’m not allergic to the word religion, and certainly not as Barry defines it. And, of course, spirituality can also take many foolish, delusional or dangerous turns.
But spirituality as I mean it is simply the aliveness here and now, the ungraspable immediacy of direct experiencing, the simplicity of what is. My ostomy bag is as spiritual as the temple or the holy books. The spiritual path doesn’t go somewhere else—it wakes up to right here, right now. Seeing through the false, not trying to grasp the Truth, enjoying what is, not landing anywhere, not fixating on any single view, living without any final answers. The only reliable ground I’ve found is groundlessness, as unsettling and unsatisfying that can seem when we think about it, but when we actually relax into simply being here now with nothing to grasp, it is a huge relief. Groundlessness is another word for God.
In the beginning of the search, we often look for the answers “out there” somewhere. And it’s fine to have humility and recognize that someone else may have something to teach us. I’m deeply grateful for all my teachers. But no one else can live or see or wake up for us, and we’re all unique. We’re not here to be someone else. And no one really knows what anyone else experiences or needs. With luck, we begin to trust our own direct insight and sensibilities, our own unique life and this ever-changing, unmediated present experiencing, right here now, just as it is, which is really all we ever have.
In the beginning of any spiritual path, we tend to be very result-oriented and judgmental about how we’re doing. Our “spiritual practice” can seem to require effort and may feel like drudgery at times. There seems to be a “me” who is doing it—sometimes well and sometimes poorly. But we come to realize that there is no “good” or “bad” meditation, and that there is actually no one doing any of it. That seemingly separate little “me” who seems to be doing all this is seen to be only a mirage. Gradually, giving open attention to presence and to what is becomes natural, the imaginary goal disappears along with the evaluations of how it seems to be going, the path becomes more playful, and more and more is included in what is.
In the beginning, our neurotic habits seem like obstacles and problems, and our goal is to eliminate them, but eventually they are recognized as simply impersonal and meaningless shapes that this presence (or emptiness) is momentarily taking, and it no longer matters in the same way whether they stay or go. Some things do fall away, and often, with luck, there is a greater sense of acceptance and peace with life as it is. But we don’t turn into flawless saints who are always happy. That is the enlightenment myth, the myth of permanently enlightened people—and that is an oxymoron.
Although no one else can do this for us, at the same time, none of us exists as an independent island. Life is an intersubjective, interdependent, dialectical, relational activity. As Ramesh Balsekar put it in his version of Indra’s Net, “The universe is uncaused, like a net of jewels in which each is only the reflection of all the others in a fantastic interrelated harmony without end.” I often feel that all of us are like jazz musicians—listening, improvising, riffing off one another, playing together, spontaneously creating an unpredictable musical whole that is never the same way twice and that continues to explore and evolve and unfold itself. In this post, for example, I’m playing with Ramesh Balsekar and Adi Da and Agnes Martin and Brother David and many others who are off stage and out of sight, including all those who have touched and influenced this life.
Why do I write these outpourings? I don’t know. It’s simply what I’m moved to do. Why do you read them? You also don’t really know, although thought can conjure up reasons and explanations. But somehow, here we are, writing and reading, one whole happening, not one, not two, just this.
So thank you for listening and for being here in this fantastic interrelated harmony that includes all the apparent disharmony. I encourage us all to trust the simplicity of what cannot be doubted, our own direct experiencing, our own lives, and the possibility of being here without answers or beliefs, open, not knowing, simply being, just as we are. And whether you call the heart of things God or some other word doesn’t matter. What matters is discovering and marinating in this vast spaciousness that has room for everything to be just as it is, and that holds on to nothing.
with Love and gratitude for you all…..
I love the shared marinating, happy marinating!
Thank you, Joan. The words you share resonate on so many layers. And… “What’s in a name?” Whether we give it the name God, spirit, or the energy of love…it’s here, there, everywhere even if we don’t recognize it some of the time on most days and much of the time when life feels heavy…my takeaway is that it’s all part of the play. We need the bit players and support team to pull of the production. 💗 (I loved Slow Horses, too btw☺️.)