Radiant Light

Fr. Arthur Poulin, a Catholic monk, painted “Radiant Light” after 9-11 to show that God was still here, the light was still shining. I have a giclée print of it in my living room, given to me by a friend. It is such a powerful painting, it radiates light. It opens, fills and warms my heart whenever I gaze at it, as I often do. This radiance is not outside of us. It is the light within each one of us that is beholding (being and holding) everything.

Dark times are nothing new. They have existed throughout history. Even if our personal lives are going well, many of us feel we are living through very dark times now on a national and global scale, and this can bring forth feelings of sorrow, grief, anger and fear. In the midst of this uncertainty and the often upsetting waves of emotion-thought, it is life-changing and transformative to be in touch with this radiant light that is here, even in the darkest times. It is at the core of our being, most intimate, closer than close, and it is boundless, without limit, all-inclusive. In it, there is no inside and outside, no self and other. It is what Nisargadatta Maharaj pointed to when he said, “The heart of things is at peace.”

This is not light as opposed to darkness, or good as opposed to bad, or peace as opposed to war. It is the light, the unconditional love, the primordial awareness, the One Mind, the unicity that contains it all. It is the bigger context, the groundless ground, the aware presence here and now. It is the realization that everything is the Holy Reality, the One Thing (or the indivisible no-thing-ness of everything).

The Unavoidable Forces of Creation and Destruction

Wholeness will always include the forces of both creation and destruction. They work together. It’s very helpful to remember the Old Chinese Farmer Story, narrated here in less than two minutes by Alan Watts:

That story always reminds me of the bigger context, the way it all goes together and cannot be pulled apart. The phenomenal world can only appear in polarities, which are always relative—the ceiling is “up” relative to the floor and “down” relative to the sky. It’s an interdependent, indivisible, seamless whole in which everything is included. Whether we like it or not, this is how it is at this moment. And obviously, it all belongs, because here it is.

Many explanations have been offered for why suffering exists, but clearly, it is part of life, and somehow, it seems to be an essential part. A never-ending life of only sunny days, temperate weather, material abundance and youthful well-being wouldn’t challenge us to grow. A good movie needs contrast, dissonance, conflict and challenges, without which it would probably be boring and flat. This primal fact of life is reflected in the powerful mythos of Christianity in which God, showing up in human form, is betrayed, abandoned and crucified (tortured to death) and then rises from the dead as Christ—the light that can’t be destroyed, the primordial awareness beholding (being and holding) it all—the One Mind of Buddhism, as expressed here by Zen Master Huang Po over a thousand years ago in China:

All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measures, names, traces and comparisons. It is that which you see before you—begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error. It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured. The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient things, but that sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek externally for Buddhahood. By their very seeking they lose it, for that is using the Buddha to seek for the Buddha and using mind to grasp Mind. Even though they do their utmost for a full aeon, they will not be able to attain to it.

—Huang Po (emphasis mine), translated by John Blofeld

We can’t attain (or lose) what we always already are—the radiant light of boundless awareness shining as this present experiencing, that which we see before us. But we don’t always see what is before us—we see what we think is here. By exploring this living actuality directly with open attention, we can become aware of how impermanence is so thoroughgoing that no separate, persisting things ever actually form to even be impermanent. We can recognize the seamless wholeness or no-thing-ness, and we can see how it seems to be divided by thought into seer and seen, self and other, and how that divided, me-centered mind wants only up and no down, birth and no death, light and no darkness, happiness and no sorrow, good and no evil. And we can begin to see directly, as it happens, how our suffering gets created by our resistance to what is, by our judgments, and by our seeking externally for what can only be found right here. And in this seeing (or awaring), our suffering begins to dissolve.

It’s important to remember that “good” and “evil” are human judgments, mentally dividing the indivisible and considering it from our limited and always partial human perspective. And this partial perspective has its place—we dismiss or overlook it at our peril. Life has many dimensions, from the subatomic to the cosmic, from the most gross to the most subtle and ineffable. From our human perspective, at the scale of everyday life, murder, rape and genocide are horrible. But at cosmic or subatomic scale, these events don’t even exist. And from the perspective of the whole universe, the horrible and the beautiful can’t be separated or pulled apart—they are an interdependent, inseparable whole. There’s no resurrection without the crucifixion. Creation and destruction, birth and death go together. And it’s all relative. We happily kill cancer cells, and we kill and maim millions of microorganisms every time we take a step or wipe our forehead, and we don’t give that mass murder a second thought.

This doesn’t mean we should ignore or deny life at human scale, that we shouldn’t feel our human feelings when we see or experience suffering, nor does it mean we can’t or shouldn’t act to change things—our responses and actions are all part of the dance, part of the movie, a play of unicity, something the whole universe is doing, a waving of the great cosmic ocean. But when we can play our part with an awareness of that bigger context, it puts everything in a different perspective.

We understand that what is cannot be otherwise at this moment, and that somehow, it all belongs. We may be working to change something, but we’re no longer fighting the nature of life. We can hold it all more lightly, more playfully, with less attachment to results. Seeing it from aware presence, the unconditional love that holds it all, we know that everything that appears to be happening is an essential part of the whole, even when, from our human perspective, it isn’t what we want. As Darryl Bailey writes, “At some point, the heart may open to the totally indefinable, unpredictable, and often unwanted movement that life is. Love is that openness of heart.”

To repeat the words of Huang Po: “It is that which you see before you—begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error. It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured.”

And in my experience, unconditional love and awareness are the transformative power, the light that illuminates and dissolves the mental knots that seem to bind us, the illusory solidity of what is actually no-thing-ness vanishing instant by instant. That isn’t something to believe, but something to discover.

Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed.
– Thich Nhat Hanh

A book that opened my Heart and left me with some deep questions:

I’ve just finished reading one of the most powerful and moving books I’ve ever read — Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart, by James R. Doty, MD. I think reading it probably re-wired my brain and it definitely opened my heart in new ways and my mind as well. Beautifully written and a real page-turner, it combines Doty’s truly remarkable life story with a bit of scientific information about the brain and heart and their connection, always written in understandable, interesting ways, as well as the simple but profound meditative guidance that he received as a child from a woman in a magic shop in his home town.

Doty grew up poor with an alcoholic father and a depressed and sometimes suicidal mother who rarely got out of bed. Doty got little parental attention, often went hungry, was sometimes bullied, and felt like a loser. His life begins to change when one day he stumbles upon a magic store and meets a remarkable woman who guides him, showing him how to calm his body and mind, how to let go of unhelpful thinking, how to open his heart, and how to set his intentions and use his mind to shape his reality. He becomes a neurosurgeon against all odds, has a NDE following a car accident, amasses great wealth and then loses it, makes mistakes and learns from them, does all kinds of great work including being a professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford University and the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education(CCARE). He has worked with the Dalai Lama and attended the eightieth birthday of Desmond Tutu.

Doty describes himself as an atheist with a “dogma-free open mind” and “an acceptance that I don’t need an absolute answer,” who knows “that there is more to this life than I can explain.”

At one point in reading the book, I was literally flooded with immense love. It was powerful. And for Doty, this is nothing metaphysical. It is rooted in the physical heart-brain connection. And it is something we can consciously cultivate due to brain plasticity. He talks about setting intentions and the potential for manifesting what we want.

Manifesting What We Want?!?!

I’ve never been a fan of the idea that “we create our own reality” and that we can manifest the life we want. I’ve tended to have a rather strong aversion to things like The Secret, that popular book and philosophy of manifesting which often seems to encourage the pursuit of materialistic, self-centered desires. And the belief that we create our own reality seems to me like a set-up for feeling guilt, shame and blame when we or others get cancer, go bankrupt, or otherwise fail to create a more seemingly perfect reality. That perspective ignores the myriad other factors beside our own minds that influence what happens to us, not to mention the infinite causes and conditions that shape our minds.

But in his second book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything, which I’ve just started reading, Jim Doty makes it clear that when he speaks of manifestation, he means manifesting from an open heart what is beneficial to the whole—not fulfilling materialistic, self-centered desires. And he stresses that for myriad reasons, what we want may not come to pass. And his approach to all this is very much rooted in science.

All of this has raised many questions for me that I am exploring, not for the first time, but anew, about intention, visualization and manifesting what we want. My own work has for many decades gone in a very different direction, one that was first opened up to me in childhood by my determinist father, who explained to me that free will is an illusion, that everything is a conditioned movement in which nothing could be other than it is in every moment—a perspective that instantly and ever since has felt true to me.

This understanding was later deepened in my exposure to Toni Packer and Jiddu Krishnamurti, both of whom pointed to the realization that the apparent controller is the same conditioned movement as what it is trying to control—the observer is the observed, the thinker is itself a thought, and free will is an illusion. And yet, they both saw a transformative power in open attention and choiceless awareness, which arises spontaneously in the absence of control and not as the result of will or intention. That awareness is not result-oriented. It simply illuminates what is. In their work and mine, the focus is not on imagining “the future I really want,” but on seeing what is, right here, right now, and tuning into and being that choiceless aware presence that is here prior to thought or intention.

That said, I can’t entirely dismiss the power of the intentional “mind magic” that Doty and others, including my own mother, have employed and experienced, and Doty connects it to brain plasticity and the physical brain-heart connection in many interesting ways, and he has certainly lived it in very real and truly astonishing ways.

I can reconcile these seemingly opposite perspectives with the understanding that the exposure to this possibility of intentional manifestation, along with the interest in and desire to engage in it, the ability to do so and to sustain it, and whether it works or not are all dependent on infinite causes and conditions. Thus, my mother was drawn to this, and it seemed to work for her, while my father had a very different personality and inclination. And ALL of it is the One Reality doing what it does.

Nonetheless, I still sometimes feel as if I’ve spent my whole life trying to reconcile my father’s determinism with my mother’s belief that we can do anything if we put our mind to it. They were very happily married, and somehow, I contain them both, and both perspectives are deeply embedded in my subconscious. Doty’s books seem to be provoking a new chapter for me in this somewhat unsettled and sometimes still unsettling koan.

Questioning things we’ve believed and written about (such as free will or its absence) can be very uncomfortable. I often wish I could come to some final conclusion about the nature of reality, some unshakeable certainty, some secure landing place, as so many others seem to do. But I tend to suspect that all such certainties are questionable. Toni Packer always pointed to leaving these questions open, questioning everything freshly, being open to new discoveries and insights.

One thing that has always struck me is that if you believe in the power to manifest, you are more likely to have that power than if you believe that everything is a determined movement of cause and effect. It’s a strange kind of chicken and egg affair. And in the same way, you’re more likely to be caught up in painful and debilitating thoughts and feelings of guilt, blame, deficiency, or false pride if you believe we play a major role (or the sole role) in creating our reality than if you believe it is all determined and could not be otherwise. What we believe clearly has some impact on how we move in life.

But do we choose what seems believable to us?

And what is the self that does or doesn’t have some say in what happens? In my view, the “self” is not a solid independent autonomous “thing.” It’s a moving, changing process, like a whirlpool in a river or an ocean wave, a process inseparable from the whole universe while also being unique and distinct in some way from everything else. That ever-changing process seemingly involves the brain, the nervous system, the whole body, the entire universe, and this ungraspable and unpoindownable non-thing that we call consciousness or awareness. Does that awareness emerge from the brain or does the entire universe come and go within that awareness like a dream? That’s another unresolvable chicken and egg question that people continue to ponder. I don’t know which it is. Maybe it’s both.

Where do my thoughts come from? Where do my desires, urges and interests come from? Where do my talents come from? Where do my strengths and weaknesses come from? Where does awareness come from? What moves my attention?

It is very liberating, relieving and freeing to see that there is no “me” creating or doing all of this. And yet, in some sense, this bodymind process is creating and doing much of it.

As the late guru Ali Da wrote:

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... The self is just like this clenched fist. Relax the fist and there is nothing inside... We are never at any moment in the dilemma we fear ourselves to be.

— Adi Da

Or, as the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Anam Thubten puts it:

We are the one who imprisons and we are the one who liberates. When we accept that responsibility we have finally gained spiritual maturity.

— Anam Thubten

I like to point out that “responsibility” is response–ability, the ability to respond. Perhaps responsibility refers to the ability to respond from wholeness rather than reacting from conditioned habit and belief. I’ve found that this ability to respond from wholeness, open aware presence and unconditional love cannot be willed into existence on command, but it can be intentionally cultivated, invited and encouraged through meditation and other means, including reading a book like Into the Magic Shop that suddenly falls into your lap at just the right moment. A truly great book. Deeply moving and transformative. And a great story as well.

Google tells me that Jim Doty died just over a year ago at the age of 69 from complications stemming from a hernia surgery that he’d had the previous year.

Love to all…

We say, “[Buddha] attained enlightenment,” but it may be better to say, “he completely forgot everything!”

– Shunryu Suzuki

There are so many words pointing to this “forgetting everything” or empty mind — letting go, relaxing, falling open, surrendering — silence, stillness, presence, not knowing — being just this moment, just being —

Shunryu Suzuki often spoke of beginner’s mind, the mind he encouraged Zen students to have. “If your mind is empty,” he said, “it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few… When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something.”

Of course, we’re not talking about literally or permanently forgetting everything, nor are we talking about trying to maintain a perfectly thought-free mind all the time. It’s about right now, in this moment, opening, letting go, holding on to nothing. If thoughts come, letting them come and go.

This relaxing and forgetting everything, this beginner’s mind is so easy, so totally effortless, and yet it can be so seemingly difficult for us humans with our complex minds. We are pulled into thinking again and again, and of course, thought has its place, but we tend to be compulsive over-thinkers. We try to think our way to some imagined enlightenment. We try to figure out the endless questions the thinking mind creates by more thinking: Do we have free will? What happens to us when we die? Is the fundamental ground consciousness or matter? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? What is the meaning or purpose of life? What should we do? We think and think and think. We listen to supposed authorities and hear conflicting answers to these questions and grow ever more confused. We try to think our way out of this confusion.

At some point, we hear that thinking is a problem, so we try not to think. And then we hear that trying is the problem. So we try not to try, and we get more and more tied up in knots, entangled in what seems to be a very real problem. But how real is it? And how real is the one who seems to have this problem, the one who seems to desperately need a solution, a breakthrough, a release, an awakening?

Can this “me” actually be found?

It has been said that the self is like a tightly clenched fist. Open the hand and there is nothing there. Clenching is what takes effort; opening is effortless.

Feel the spaciousness, the openness of this awaring presence that is always here-now. Is it possible for one moment to let everything go, to relax the grip? We may discover that the apparent “me” and its apparent problems can vanish completely.

And then, when the mind-body-fist clenches up again, as it probably will, we can notice how this happens—what thoughts are being believed, what is happening in the body. Are we breathing? Can attention shift from the thoughts to the sensations, feeling the sensations? Going deep into the sensations with open attention, what is found? Are they solid? Do they stay the same? Is anything substantial there? What is at the very core of them? And can we notice the spaciousness, the openness of this awaring presence that we are? Does it have a boundary or an edge? Are the thoughts and sensations other than this awaring presence, or is it one whole undivided seamless happening? Are we the character in the story, encapsulated inside the body, never quite good enough, seemingly needing to have some big awakening or get rid of some neurotic tendency in order to finally be okay? Or is that character a kind of mirage that comes and goes?

This isn’t about metaphysics or philosophy. It’s about our actual direct experiencing right here, right now. It’s about THIS that no words or concepts can ever capture or pin down. Words can only point. At the end of his long spiritual search, Buddha finally sat down and forgot everything. The twentieth century sage Papaji always said, “Stop. Be quiet.” Ramana Maharshi sat in silence. Nisragadatta smoked and sometimes yelled but pointed always to the same placeless place, the same stillness at the center of the storm. My teacher Toni Packer often said, “Stop. Look. Listen.” John Butler, a contemporary mystic and former organic farmer says, “If something seems complicated, beware. Truth is very, very simple.”

The nondual pathless path isn’t about attaining something that isn’t already here. It’s about giving open attention to here-now, exploring the nature of this living actuality, seeing through all the ways we overlook what is most simple and most obvious and become entangled in ideas and conceptual confusions. And it’s about opening, again and again, NOW, to the silence, the stillness, the presence, the aliveness at the heart of being.

Love to all…

Can we see the beauty in the flower that is withering, in old age and death? Can we see the Holy Reality shining forth even in the places we regard as ugly, disturbing or unwanted? Can we find the gift hidden in the apparent imperfections and even in the most deeply disturbing things? Can we notice the unbound awareness, the unconditional love that is beholding (being and holding) it all? Can we see that our human foibles are no more personal or controllable than the outer weather? Can we see and appreciate the beauty in life just exactly as it is?

The Holographic Timeless Eternal Now

Excerpted from Chapter Two: The Immediacy of Presence, Here-Now, in my last book, DEATH: The End of Self-Improvement:

The present moment is a fleeting instant between past and future, gone before we can even perceive it, but Now is timeless and eternal. There is no end to Now. Nothing comes after or before Now. We may think the past is really back there, but actually, when it happened, it happened Now, and Now, it has vanished completely…

Without thought, this moment is without plot or narrative. It has no meaning or purpose. There is no main character, no “me,” at the center of it. There is simply present experiencing—a snowflake landing in a fire. It may all seem quite solid if we don’t look too closely, but if we pay attention, we find reality is actually fluid, ephemeral, effervescent, impossible to grasp or pin down. It keeps changing shape without ever moving away from right here, right now. It is completely obvious, never hidden, and yet strangely elusive if we try to take hold of it. It is at once immovable and constantly in motion, unchanging and yet totally in flux. It is an unbroken whole of infinite diversity. It defies all words and categories.

Now is holographic—it contains the past and the future. Everything happens Now, and yet, a symphony wouldn’t make any sense, it wouldn’t be music, without the context, without a memory of the notes that have come before and an anticipation of what might come next, without the sense of progression and relationship between what came before and what is arising now, and without the expectation of what may come next. The same is true of a novel, a play or a movie. This is precisely what makes it meaningful to us. But at the same time, we can see that each note happens Now, that the future resolution will happen Now, and that the context for the whole unfolding symphony (or story) is Now. Past and future are Now, memory happens Now. “Relationship” is simply a description of this seamless happening that all happens Now. That Now-ness doesn’t deny past and future. It includes them. No concept can ever capture reality, so beware of fixating on one side of any imaginary conceptual divide. Life itself cannot be pinned down or captured by formulations.

When we’re fully alive to the naked reality of the present moment, it turns out to be an astonishing and extraordinary miracle, this luminous awaring presence bursting forth as flowers, leaves, mountains, oceans, chairs, tables, planets, rabbits, giraffes, zebras, people, birds, tornados, planets, stars, random acts of kindness, horrifying acts of cruelty—one seamless and shimmering display, appearing and disappearing in the vastness of Here-Now.

— from Death: The End of Self-Improvement

Doing Just One Thing

There’s a tremendous beauty and depth to be found in doing just one thing and being fully present with the infinite richness of just drinking a cup of tea, just washing the dishes, just sitting quietly, just being fully present with one activity or one thing. When walking, giving our whole-hearted attention to walking, to the sounds we’re hearing and the sights we’re seeing, feeling the breeze, smelling the smells, feeling the legs moving and the feet touching the ground. Being totally present to this ever-changing, infinite richness where we actually are.

I’m not suggesting this in some rigid, methodical, unbending, self-improvement oriented way. Many years ago when I encountered my Zen teacher Mel Weitsman reading a newspaper while drinking his tea, I questioned him about “doing just one thing,” and with a smile, he replied, “Just doing reading newspaper and drinking tea.” I love to play music while exercising, I sometimes listen to music or public radio while driving, and I often sing while driving, doing the dishes, and in the shower. Years ago, immersed in the meditation culture of mindful attention, I felt like I “should” be mindfully doing “just one thing” at all times, and it was incredibly freeing at some point to break free of that idea, to relax. So mentioning this possibility of “doing just one thing” is not about the right or wrong way to do things. It isn’t a prescription for spiritually correct living, but rather, something to explore.

Beware of the Inner Drill Sergeant

That’s the voice in our head that orders us around, tells us how poorly we’re doing and how we need to do better. This drill sergeant is nothing more than a bunch of conditioned thoughts, rooted in the illusion of being an autonomous separate self with free will, the “me” who always could and should be doing better. This drill sergeant hears suggestions as commands. It thinks in terms of good and bad, right and wrong, success and failure. It takes everything personally. If I can’t stop smoking, I’m not trying hard enough. If I’m depressed, I should buck up and snap out of it. If I can’t, I’m a weak-willed, lazy failure. If I’ve been meditating and going on retreats for decades, I shouldn’t still be experiencing ____ (fill in the blank). The inner drill sergeant loves to beat us up and berate us. It’s harsh, judgmental and unforgiving.

But the truth is, there is no separate, independent, autonomous self steering our ship. Like a wave in the ocean, we are never separate from the whole ocean. The one who is supposedly in control is a mirage-like illusion. Our words and actions, our moods, the movement of our attention is all an activity of the whole universe. None of it is actually any more personal than the outer weather. Everything is a movement of the totality, a movement in consciousness, and all of it is a kind of play, a waving of the great ocean of being. I often call it the movie of waking life.

Consciousness seems to love movies—all kinds of movies—happy ones, sad ones, comedies, tragedies, love stories, horror stories, thrillers, war stories, romances, the whole range of possibilities. It includes everything! Consciousness is like a multiplex movie theater with infinite movies playing simultaneously. Consciousness easily gets lost in its own creations.

There are all kinds of helpful pointers and suggestions that the universe offers to itself to wake itself up from confusion and suffering. But beware of the inner drill sergeant trying to turn these suggestions into commands for How to Be a Spiritually Correct and Successful Nondual Self. That’s just another movie.

As for the whole sticky issue of free will (and more to the point, who has it?), I’ve written about it quite extensively in my books and in other Substack articles and articles on my website if you’re interested. Zen teacher Steve Hagen said it quite well: “Are you breathing? Or are you being breathed? You need not answer. There is no essential difference.”

Nothing Is Lacking: An Article by Paul Gerstein

I really loved this article by Paul Gerstein, transcribed from a 2016 dharma talk. It talks about how Zen is not a self-improvement project, but rather a matter of being just this moment, exactly as it is, and discovering that nothing is lacking and that the things we imagine are holding us back may in fact be marvelous gifts. Paul is a Zen teacher, retired ER physician, dharma successor of Richard Clarke, and the author of the book Form is Emptiness, an Insider’s Guide to the Heart of Zen Buddhism. You can read the article here:

Naked Zen: Nothing Hidden

This Extremely Marvelous Tail

Paul Gerstein · Living Dharma Center · Northampton, Massachusetts…

Read more

18 days ago · Naked Zen: Nothing Hidden

Or, if you prefer, you can hear Paul read it here:

Naked Zen: Nothing Hidden

Podcast Episode 4: 'This Extremely Marvelous Tail'

Listen now

14 days ago · Naked Zen: Nothing Hidden

You can find many more talks, some in audio, some transcribed, some in both formats on Paul’s Substack.

AI, Substack, and Two Things I’d Like My Readers to Know

(1) My feelings about the AI Audio version of my articles: Substack includes an audio feature at the top of my posts on the app (not online or in email versions). This audio is a synthetic AI voice “reading” the post. I’m glad it’s available for people who are visually disabled or truly unable to read or look at a screen. But unfortunately, Substack doesn’t make it clear that it is an AI rendering, and having that “Listen” button right there at the very top of an article seems to suggest that it is a perfectly good way to take in my post.

In fact, it distorts and sometimes obliterates the intended meaning in many ways by what words it does and doesn’t emphasize, where it pauses or doesn’t pause, inflection, speed, mispronunciations, etc. As a writer, it’s painful to hear it. One way in which it gets very confusing and misleading is with my use of quotations from other people. I often include a quote without introducing it first, and a reader looking at the text can visually see that it is a quote, but the AI reader simply reads the quote as if it were part of my text, and then says the name of the person being quoted, which I always include below a quote, and then goes on with my text as if what followed might be the words of that person. So it’s very confusing and easily misleading as to who said what.

Maybe one day I’ll have the energy and inclination to figure out how to read and record them myself and to actually do that with each post. But my time and energy is limited, and so far this hasn’t happened and I’m guessing it probably won’t.

(2) I never use AI to write

Substack recently announced a feature that allows readers to scan text published on Substack to see how much of it is estimated to be written by or with AI assistance and how much of it is human only. I’m all for this, but I also have no doubt that this AI tool will sometimes get it wrong, so I want to let you all know that I never use AI to write and can’t imagine that I ever would! So if the new AI tool ever says otherwise, it is mistaken.

Love to all…

This is Bishal’s description of the interview:

Have you been trying to fix yourself—to eliminate all your apparent imperfections? Have you been waiting for a final, dramatic enlightenment experience? Our guest in this episode, Joan Tollifson, author of Death: The End of Self-Improvement, suggests that seeking enlightenment as a future event can become the ultimate me-trap. Instead, she points to the radical simplicity of attending to this present moment exactly as it is. In so doing, we discover that reality is already an indivisible whole, and the separate “me” we struggle to perfect is largely a mental construction. Joan invites us beyond the endless project of self-improvement, often fueled by subtle self-rejection, and toward a genuine transformation that comes through recognizing the wholeness already present. Her insights are not abstract philosophy, but are discovered through decades of living with disability, recovering from alcoholism, making peace with a lifelong finger-biting compulsion, and discovering grace within cancer. In every seeming adversity, she has found hidden blessings, and she sees God in the toilet roll and Buddha in the sh*t stick—the sacred shining through even the most ordinary and unlikely places.

Bishal is a great interviewer and a beautiful being. He is a professor of religious studies at a university in Rochester, NY, host of The Spiritual Context podcast, and a very dedicated, long-time spiritual practitioner who has explored many different traditions. On his podcast, Bishal has interviewed people with a wide range of different spiritual perspectives. His interviews, this one included, are roughly 2 hours, but you can always take it in smaller bites.

You can also find the interview on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as audio only. But I think the video adds a lot, so I recommend the YouTube.

Love to all…

No Big Breakthrough?

With some realization comes imperceptibly, but somehow they need convincing. They have changed, but they do not notice it. Such non-spectacular cases are often the most reliable.

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

Some people have sudden, dramatic awakenings. We’ve all heard such stories, and these stories and ways of talking about “enlightenment” and “awakening” immediately set everybody else up to search for an imagined Big Bang, line-in-the-sand, explosive future event (for ME!) after which nothing will ever be the same.

But for most people, as Shunryu Suzuki put it, enlightenment is more like getting wet in a mist. It happens gradually, imperceptibly and often goes unnoticed—thankfully, because it isn’t a personal achievement to claim or take pride in. And it’s an ever-new, always now unfolding.

As has often been noted, the best way to delay awakening (or pretend that it is absent here and now) is to seek it elsewhere and elsewhen. As Nisargadatta advised:

Stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing.

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

But we don’t believe that. Instead, we habitually think, “This can’t possibly be it. I’m not good enough. I’m not there yet.” We think and think and think about “it” and “me,” believing the thoughts that tell us, “This isn’t it,” “You’re not there yet,” “You don’t get it,” and so on.

Of course, waking up isn’t simply a matter of believing the opposite thoughts. It’s more about seeing through ALL the thoughts, especially the root thought—the “me” thought, the mirage-like central character in the story who supposedly is or isn’t enlightened yet. Waking up isn’t about beliefs at all. It’s about experientially discovering the nature of right here, right now.

Right here, Right now

In direct experience, there is always only this eternal timeless immediacy or present-ness here-now, this one bottomless moment, ever-changing and yet always right here, right now. Just this!

If we enter deeply into any apparent form—the body, the mind, any emotion, any so-called physical object (a chair, a house, a mountain, a continent), we find nonsubstantial, unresolvable, thorough-going impermanence or groundlessness—nothing we can grasp or pin down. And as they say in Buddhism, everything self-liberates, because the moment anything appears it has already disappeared, instant by instant.

When we fancy ourselves to be a particular thing with a name, we see ourselves as we would a cork in a stream. What we do not realize is that there is only stream. What we fancy as particular is, from the first, only movement, change and flow… It’s not that the universe is made up of innumerable objects in flux. There’s only flux. Nothing is (or can be) riding along in the flux, like a cork in a stream; nothing actually arises or passes away. There’s only stream.

– Zen teacher Steve Hagen

This is always the case, whether it is noticed or not. This streaming here-now-awaring-presence is the common factor in every different experience. Even thoughts, memories, daydreams and imaginings occur here-now as momentary shape-shifting appearances of the ungraspable, unpindownable, streaming flow and flux.

To realize this, to make it real in our life, is liberating. But realization doesn’t mean simply holding it as a philosophy or a belief, but rather, discovering it in our actual direct experience. Not yesterday or tomorrow, but NOW—now being the only reality there is, the eternal, timeless presence. This realization is ever-fresh, always new.

So if we feel depressed, heartbroken, devastated, sad, lonely, outraged, terrified, anxious, or any other disturbing feeling, we might explore it on the spot and discover its nonsubstantial, unresolvable, unpindownable, groundless and impermanent nature. We might feel it as pure energy or sensation, changing instant by instant. We might notice its no-thing-ness, its emptiness, and how it is already gone if we don’t hold onto it with thought.

Is Love a Deeper Truth than Hate?

Some say love and hate are equal and that spirituality should not emphasize beauty, joy or love because that’s dualistic and denies the reality of ugliness, despair and hate. But in fact, I do feel that love is a deeper truth than hate. I don’t deny that hate and apparent ugliness show up in this movie of waking life, and of course, those are equally a movement of the whole. To discover their sameness or equality as inseparable aspects of a seamless whole is a profound and liberating discovery, but that doesn’t negate the profound and liberating difference between them either. Both sides of the coin are true: sameness and difference.

I often give the example of Hitler and Buddha, each representing a facet of reality and an aspect of each one of us. I compare them to two waves in the ocean, one of which we think of as deluded (or evil) and the other as awake (or good). Both are equally movements of the ocean, both equally water, but the difference is that the Buddha wave knows that, while the Hitler wave is caught in the delusion of being independent and separate from the ocean, out to conquer or control the other waves and somehow “purify” the ocean. Their experiences and actions will be different as a result. It will all be a movement of the ocean, but the ocean includes the capacity for discernment and waking up from delusion.

There is no permanent, unchanging, separate individual who is permanently either awake or deluded. No one is all Hitler or all Buddha. And “Hitler” or “Buddha” can never really be pulled out of the flowing whole as some static, persisting, substantial, independent, autonomous “thing” apart from the whole. “Buddha” and “Hitler” (like chairs and tables and dogs and cats and oceans and waves and me and you and good and evil) are always only conceptual ideas that thought has carved out of an ever-changing seamless whole. We can call one of these conceptual abstractions “good” and the other “evil,” but both are a choiceless movement of the whole, inseparable from one another, and neither ever departs from being this indivisible aliveness that we are. The actuality is never really divided up—it is seamless. The perfection includes it ALL.

But again, the whole includes the capacity for differentiation and discernment. Buddha is the realization (or making real) of that wholeness, while Hitler is the delusion of separation and what follows from that delusion. Naturally, we want to wake up from such delusion on both the personal and global levels.

Speaking from my own experience, when I’m caught up in hate, anger, defensiveness and other “negative” mind states, I feel separate, tight, contracted, identified as a separate “me,” threatened by something seemingly outside of me. This is suffering and it feels like delusion. When I feel love, joy, and so on, I feel a sense of wholeness. In that wholeness, there’s no me, no separation, no problem. It feels like the deeper truth.

So yes, there is an aspiration, an interest, a devotion here to what brings forth the Buddha in me, and to seeing and seeing through and waking up from the Hitler in me. Who is doing this seeing, discerning and waking up? The whole ocean is doing it, and that doing happens through passing waves like you and me.

Nirvana and samsara, like ocean and wave, are not one, not two. Nirvana could be described as a different way of seeing samsara, and part of that different way is the discovery that we never depart from this all-inclusive whole, that we are both Buddha and Hitler and everything else as well, and than none of it has the solid, substantial, separate, autonomous, observer-independent, objective reality that we think it does.

A Different Way of Seeing

In my writing, I speak of finding the perfection in imperfection, seeing the sacred everywhere, discovering the beauty in what is conventionally considered ugly, seeing the humanity and the divinity in everyone, even when we deplore their actions and beliefs. In my experience, this is far more liberating, for myself and the whole world, than doing the opposite: speaking of the imperfection in everything, finding the ugliness everywhere, and seeing the evil in everyone. Importantly, I don’t deny the imperfection and evil, and I do consider it important to see and acknowledge that, especially in myself. I’m never talking about spiritual bypassing, “hiding in the light,” ignoring the darkness, or glossing it over with a happy face.

But there is a way of seeing things that brings forth relief, relaxation, peace, love, happiness and joy—and there are many habitual ways of seeing and thinking about things that bring forth misery, conflict and suffering. In helping me to discover and realize the former and see through the latter when it arises here, I’m grateful to all my spiritual teachers, friends and companions—those I was blessed to work with in person, and those I’ve known only from their books or recorded talks. They all encouraged me, and continue to encourage me (even when they are no longer living) to wake up right now. That was the first and most important key: NOW.

It is the clinging to the false that makes the true so difficult to see. Once you understand that the false needs time and what needs time is false, you are nearer the Reality, which is timeless, ever in the now… Reality is what makes the present so vital, so different from the past and future, which are merely mental. If you need time to achieve something, it must be false. The real is always with you; you need not wait to be what you are. Only you must not allow your mind to go out of yourself in search.

– Nisargadatta Maharaj

The moment you enter the Now with your attention, you realize that life is sacred. There is a sacredness to everything you perceive when you are present.

– Eckhart Tolle

In simple presence with what is right here now, be it joyful or painful, an amazing freedom reveals itself. It cannot be described or explained in words. It is the freedom to be totally, effortlessly the way things are at this moment.

– Toni Packer

Consider love, not as a particular feeling or sentiment, but as the mystery that allows all feelings and sentiments to be, the space in which every experience exists. Think of it as life, the very life that you are and that everything is—a great incomprehensible indivisibility, a mystery that welcomes all moments, without question or reason, because it is all moments.

– John Astin

This moment, is all there is — it is One Eternal Moment — One Instant.

– Gilbert Schultz

Presence is not simply paying attention. It’s the state of being fully here. It’s the realization that life is not happening somewhere else, at some other time, to some other person. It’s happening now, in this moment, in this breath. Most people spend their entire lives everywhere except where they actually are... Presence is the return home. When you’re present, the mind stops dividing reality into good and bad, past and future, sacred and mundane. You stop being a spectator and become the experience itself. Every sensation sharpens. Every breath deepens. The ordinary begins to reveal its holiness.

– Damien Echols

To be truly awakened is actually very ordinary. It just means that you are here as the trees are here. You’re here as the flowers are here. That’s all it is. You’re here, rather than lost in a world of not here. As you relax and deepen into the present moment, no matter how ordinary it appears to be, then slowly and gently the deeper levels of Presence will open up…

God cannot be known with the mind. God cannot be understood or defined. The best that the mind can do is believe in God. But to believe in God is a very poor substitute for knowing God through your own direct experience. And once you know, there is no need for belief.

For me, God is the silent Presence at the very heart of all things present… If you want to experience the living Presence of God in all things present, you will have to come to where God is. You will have to come out of the mind and become present. When we become fully present, we will begin to sense the Presence that is in everything. This Presence is what I mean by God.

– Leonard Jacobson

“Being Here Now” and “All There Is, Is Here-Now-Being”

Writing about wholeness or nonduality or spirit is inevitably paradoxical because the living actuality that is being talked about can’t be grasped by or contained in words. It can be pointed to, described, invited, celebrated, but the menu is never the meal and the map is not the territory. The pathless path involves exploring the territory itself and eating the meal. In the absolute sense, there is no way not to do that, since THIS is all there is, and in that sense, even the map is the territory and reading the menu is eating the meal. We can’t not be here now. And yet, relatively speaking, there are discoveries and discernments that can prove liberating, not as beliefs—because those are always shadowed by doubt—but as living experiencing, here and now.

Thus, I continue to value both the path of mindful presence or “being here now,” bringing open attention to the bare actuality of this present moment, feeling bodily sensations, hearing sounds, seeing thoughts as thoughts, feeling the presence, the aliveness of everything, and the ever-fresh discovery that everything is included in this here-now-presence, that there is only here-now-being, that nothing can actually be pinned down or separated out from everything else, and that all of it is a kind of dream-like appearance that vanishes instant by instant, endlessly self-liberating and refreshing itself.

I enjoy marinating or basking in presence (or spirit, if you prefer that word) in silence and stillness, opening into it more and more deeply, dissolving into it—and I also find it endlessly relieving and liberating to realize that being lost in thought or caught up in an emotional whirlwind is equally this indivisible ocean of being, that I’m never really lost or bound in the ways I can sometimes imagine that I am—in fact, that small “I” who imagines itself lost or found, enlightened or deluded, is only a mirage. And it is only that mirage that cares about eliminating all mirages and purifying “me.”

I value many different paths, pathless paths, direct paths, and non-paths to being awake in this one bottomless moment that is all we ever have, this placeless place of ever-present immediacy where we always already are, finding the grace in suffering and the enjoyment in simply being alive. Spirituality is as ordinary as those items on my hospital breakfast tray in the photograph above. Yet all of it is absolutely miraculous and extraordinary when we’re really seeing it, as if for the first time, which in fact, it always is.

Love to all…

This is a really wonderful talk given on July 4th by Jiryu Rutschman-Byler, the current abbot of Green Gulch Zen Farm. Jiryu is one of my top favorite contemporary Zen teachers. I’ve shared some of his talks before, and I very highly recommend this one:

What I’m Reading Now

I’m also really enjoying Zen teacher Norman Fischer’s book Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls, published back in 2008. I’ve loved a number of Norman’s other books, especially When You Greet Me I Bow and What Is Zen? Plain Talk for a Beginner’s Mind (co-authored with my old friend and former housemate Susan Moon), and I’ve enjoyed many of his dharma talks over the years. Norman chooses The Odyssey in part because the central character, Odysseus, is “a man of twists and turns,” an imperfect character like all of us, on a journey back home.

As those of you who’ve read my most recent book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, may recall, I used a quote from Norman as one of the two epigraph quotes at the beginning of that book. Here is that quote:

Practice is not about overcoming human problems. It’s not about becoming serene and transcendent. It’s about embracing our lives as they really are, and understanding at every point how deep and profound and gorgeous everything is—even the suffering, even the difficulty. So we forgive ourselves for our limitations, and we forgive this world for its pain. We don’t say, “That’s not pain.” It is pain. You don’t say, “It’s not difficulty.” It is difficult. But when we embrace the difficulty… we see this is exactly the difficulty we need, and this difficulty is the most beautiful and poignant thing in this world.

— Zoketsu Norman Fischer

Love to all….

This ungraspable mystery

There is an undeniable felt sense of presence here, a knowingness of being—and something is undeniably showing up. This that shows up appears and disappears and sometimes appears as so-called dreams during sleep.

Waking life is itself very much like a dream, a dream that includes falling asleep and having other dreams within the larger waking dream. Unlike these smaller nighttime dreams, the waking dream has an apparent continuity that makes it seem more real. But everything that appears is changing in every instant. Like the flipping pages in a flipbook or the frames in a movie playing, there is the illusion of continuous things. But the only actual continuity is the awaring presence beholding (being and holding) it all, the ever-present immediacy of here-now, this one bottomless moment.

That awaring presence gets conceptually contracted, seemingly encapsulated inside the apparently separate bodymind, and conflated with the central character in the story of our lives and the phantom operator who is supposedly authoring and thinking our thoughts, making our choices and having our experiences. That character seems to be on a journey through time and space, a journey that supposedly began at birth (or conception) and that will apparently end at death. But when we look for this character, this author-chooser, it cannot be found. When examined closely, even the body, which initially seems solid and independent, turns out to be ever-changing movement, continuous birthing and dying, inseparable from its environment and from everything it supposedly is not.

Within the dream, humans have endlessly investigated and explored and tried to pin down the nature of this appearance, which they call reality. Most dream characters believe there is an objective, observer-independent world “out there,” made of something called matter, something that is proving to be ever-more unpindownable and empty of substance. A few dream characters throughout the ages have suggested that, like a dream, everything that appears is the activity of a universal dreaming consciousness, refracted through an infinite number of different holographic viewpoints. I don’t claim to know.

In what is called the 21st century, the central character in the dream has probably heard many labels and explanations for what this reality is: atoms, quarks, dark matter, consciousness, awareness, Consciousness, Primordial Awareness, spirit, cells, neurons, brains, neurochemistry, waves, particles, intelligence-energy, being, presence, no-thing-ness, emptiness, interdependence, unicity, wholeness, here-now, and sometimes simply The Mystery or The Unnameable or The Ungraspable or “just this.”

Capital letters are often employed, and they make it seem more like something has been definitively pinned down, as in “This Is It.” THIS = IT. Which, upon reflection, seems like nonsense. THIS is simply THIS. Any “IT” is conceptual and imaginary. And THIS is unpindownable and inconceivable. So what are we even talking about?

Speaking as Joan, the central character in “my” waking dream, “I” have no idea what “this” is. Or rather, I’ve had and expressed many ideas, but THIS (the living-dreaming actuality itself) is not an idea. It’s a felt-experience, always right here, right now. Of course, it becomes an idea as soon as it is thought and spoken about, but then paradoxically, every idea turns out to be nothing other than THIS showing up as thoughts, words, concepts and ideas, and those only appear as experiences here and now.

And then, feeling-experiencing-sensing-awaring-being is quite a mystery the more closely one looks into all that, as is so-called “consciousness.” And of course, much like the eye that can’t see itself, unicity can never be seen as an object, because it is too close and nothing is outside of it to see it, and anything perceivable or conceivable, however subtle, is impermanent and partial (this but not that). But then, every wave contains the whole ocean. And so, at a certain point, saying anything at all feels like nonsense.

And yet, words keep pouring out. Uncontrollably, unbidden, from no one knows where. Supposedly, Joan is authoring this text, and indeed, an index finger belonging to this apparent character appears to be poking at the keys on a computer, an action which seems to be causing these words to appear on the screen, words that “you” (whatever that is) are now reading. How exactly are “you” translating these funny black squiggles on a screen into something apparently meaningful? Science might be able to offer some kind of reductionist explanation, but experientially, it’s simply happening all by itself. Mysteriously. No one is doing any of it, and none of it is any more personal than the weather.

My waking dream and your waking dream seem to have many things in common, and yet also some differences. So in the dream, characters can fall in love and form communities and work together, but they can also argue and disagree and misunderstand one another and feel misunderstood and alone, and sometimes all of that misunderstanding and disagreement results in groups of characters dropping bombs on other groups of characters, or trying to wipe other groups out, or sometimes trying to “open their hearts and minds” and understand characters who seem to have incomprehensible views of what is, in this dream, so obviously and undeniably taking place! Are all dreams equally true? Equally false? Equally “just dreams”? (Whatever answer one gives to these questions, a dreamed up Zen Master will whack you with a dream-stick and shout, “NO!”).

Everything written here so far could lead one to feel helpless, hopeless, lost in a meaningless existence or simply confused and bewildered. Or, it could bring forth anger and resistance: “My life is NOT just a dream!” or “I am definitely NOT just a dream character!” (Of course, that word “I” does refer most fundamentally to something that is not confined to the dream character).

What has been written here so far could also bring forth a great sense of release, relief, happiness, peace, acceptance, playfulness and freedom. Not the freedom to do whatever “I” (the character in the story) want to do, but the freedom to be just as I apparently am, which turns out to be ungraspable, ever-changing, and unpindownable. And it’s also the freedom for the apparent world to be just as it apparently is, which also turns out to be ungraspable, ever-changing, and unpindownable—a multiplex dream cinema with billions of different holographic, fractal dream movies playing simultaneously, all of them depicting what is supposedly “the same world.” Which brings to mind a question posed by the great (dream) Zen Master Dogen many centuries ago: “Is it that there are various ways of seeing one object, or is it that we have mistaken various images for one object?”

The thinking mind loves to play, endlessly dancing, sometimes taking itself very seriously, or sometimes, simply being playful, like a child enjoying a summer day, converting a large cardboard box into a train or an airplane or a space ship and riding it to an imaginary destination.

To go back to where we began, there is an undeniable knowingness of being present and of something happening (or appearing). There is an intermittent thought-sense of being a particular limited character in a particular location, and this “me” is a kind of mirage made up of ever-changing thoughts, images, sensations, memories and stories, all appearing here along with what we call traffic sounds, bird songs, aromas and smells, colors and shapes, ideas and imaginations and these funny ungraspable little bursts of energy called thoughts. No actual solid boundary between “inside” and “outside” (or between this and that) can be found.

Here it all is! The mystery. The miracle. The intelligence-energy dreaming and playing. No-thing-ness appearing as everything. Formlessness appearing as form. Ever-present, ever-changing unicity. Here-Now, this one infinite and eternal bottomless present moment from which we never depart. This undeniable aware presence. This ever-fresh aliveness. And magically, it all disappears again and again into deep sleep and then wakes up again. As someone said, we open our eyes and a world appears.

The train whistle. The egret flying over. The morning light rippling on the green leaves. The blue sky. Words pouring out and vanishing. Rivers emptying into the sea. Birth and death, kindness and cruelty, life feeding on life, shadows dancing on the wall, each moment dissolving like last night’s dream. One infinite undivided ungraspable whole, just as it is.

A few Quotes

I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

— Eugene Ionesco

Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream
merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
life is but a dream.

— children's song

Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

― William Shakespeare, from The Tempest

When you wake from a dream which was seemingly vivid and real, where has it gone? How substantial and how real was the dream?

— Sailor Bob Adamson

Just as the dream state is untrue, the waking state is also an appearance. Both happen spontaneously. Our talk is also taking place in a dream.

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

Contrary to popular spiritual terminology, it is not about waking up but rather noticing that this reality dreams eternally... Our experiences and perceptions result from consciousness projecting meaning onto neutral patterns of energy, creating an illusion of personal significance and narrative. In reality, everything is a dynamic, unresolvable play of consciousness that doesn’t need to be solved—only recognized for what it truly is.

— Peter Brown

People desperately want to describe existence and, historically, they speak of matter, energy, consciousness, spirit, oneness, and mystery. But descriptions are merely limited interpretations. All of them. They can never tell us what life actually is…

Even the sense of existing disappears every night, only to reappear. It’s like a light blinking off and on.

When it’s on, our so-called life appears in its flow. Bodies, needs, interests, concerns, urges, and actions—family situations, national events, international events—all of these arise and fade as passing appearances in a formless event…

These forms don’t actually exist; they’re like ripples in flowing water…

Our appearance, direction, and actions simply happen. This realization is freedom…

At some point, the heart may open to the totally indefinable, unpredictable, and often unwanted movement that life is. Love is that openness of heart.

— Darryl Bailey

A dialog with Nisargadatta Maharaj:

Maharaj: Each moment contains the whole of the past and creates the whole of the future.

Questioner: But past and future exist?

M: In the mind only. Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only….

Q: Your reduction of everything to dream disregards the difference between the dream of an insect and the dream of a poet. All is dream, granted. But not all are equal.

M: The dreams are not equal, but the dreamer is one. I am the insect. I am the poet — in dream. But in reality I am neither. I am beyond all dreams. I am the light in which all dreams appear and disappear. I am both inside and outside the dream… I am what I am before, during and after the dream. But what I see in dream, l am not.

Q: If both dream and escape from dream are imaginings, what is the way out?

M: There is no need of a way out! Don’t you see that a way out is also a part of the dream? All you have to do is to see the dream as dream.

Q: If I start the practice of dismissing everything as a dream where will it lead me?

M: Wherever it leads you, it will be a dream. The very idea of going beyond the dream is illusory. Why go anywhere? Just realise that you are dreaming a dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out. The dream is not your problem. Your problem is that you like one part of your dream and not another. Love all, or none of it, and stop complaining. When you have seen the dream as a dream, you have done all that needs be done.

— from I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, translated by Maurice Frydman, Acorn Press, pp 115-117 (chapter titled “Living Is Life’s Only Purpose”)

John Astin’s New book Available now

John Astin has a new book out, Everything Is the Doorway, available from Amazon in both paperback and Kindle formats (and I think audible is forthcoming). I haven’t read it yet, but knowing John, I’m sure it’s great. So I very highly recommend it.

Love to all…

from the ungraspable mystery having fun pretending to be a clueless one-handed androgynous 78-year-old primate writing Substack articles on nonduality! What fun!

As I sometimes do, I’ve borrowed a few parts in what follows from a previous article, with changes and the addition of new material. Even though some of the words are the same, I hope it will land freshly, right now:

The Vast Stillness Here and Now

There is an openness here, a vast spaciousness, a stillness, a presence — can you feel it?

Open, spacious, warm, radiant, vibrant, loving, all-inclusive, full of everything and yet utterly free and empty—formless, shapeless, limitless—dancing as infinitely varied appearances.

This open aware presence is our most fundamental nature, the ground of being, the ground of love, the groundlessness at the core of everything, the immediacy of here and now, the emptiness and fullness of everything.

Open, clear, boundless, ungraspable and yet most intimate, closer than close.

I’m not pointing to abstract ideas or philosophies to think or reason about. I’m pointing to something experiential, alive, right here, right now.

This openness beholds everything from wholeness rather than partiality. In this open aware presence or unconditional love, there is compassion for everything being just as it is. There is no inside, no outside, no separation, no division, no other.

When suffering comes, when there is uncertainty, darkness, confusion or despair, what shifts things in my experience is when I finally just stop—stop all the mind spinning, sit down in silence, and simply be here, fully present, allowing it all to be exactly as it is, not trying to fix it, not resisting it, not trying to think my way to happiness—but simply being present to the whole happening. Being still. Being quiet. Being. Just simply being. Letting everything be as it is. Being this open aware presence. Just this. Simplicity itself.

I can’t “do” this stopping or make it happen on command. But there is a remembrance that comes through grace, a remembrance that this is what works and a capacity, at least sometimes, to stop and be still and open to this. And that capacity grows.

And in that stopping, there is the ever-fresh discovery that there is space here for everything, that everything is included, that everything is the Holy Reality, even the darkness.

Towards Simplicity

One of the people who has touched me most deeply is my friend the mystic John Butler. John says, “If something seems complicated, beware. Truth is very, very simple.”

This video I’m sharing is about 17 minutes long, and it is John’s introduction to a solstice weekend retreat he recently gave on the theme “Towards simplicity.” After the talk, Nitya Mukta sings a beautiful kirtan chant as the solstice sun rises. Altogether, I found it exceptionally beautiful.

John is always speaking from and pointing to this stillness, this spaciousness, this open alive presence that can also be called God or unconditional love or Consciousness or many other words. But what matters isn’t the labels we give it, but the felt-sense, the direct and immediate experiencing and being of it.

And of course, in dissolving into this presence, there is no “me” dissolving into “it.” There is simply this all-inclusive wholeness with no inside, no outside, no separation, no division, no other. Just THIS, as John likes to say:

Love to all…

Just this, right here, right now

Being here is simple. Effortless. Unavoidable. This one bottomless moment is the only actuality, and here it is. This presence is ever-changing while never departing from the immediacy of right here, right now. In being just this moment, there is no problem. There might be pain or practical problems to solve, but it's not a problem—it's simply what is.

But we humans get tied up in imaginary problems. Lost in thought, we are easily hypnotized by stories and beliefs and overcome by feelings of deficiency, anxiety and dissatisfaction. We fear death, try to control the uncontrollable, and search for certainty and something to grasp. But paradoxically, in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense freedom.

The way out of our suffering and confusion is in letting go of the search for a way out. Not resisting what is, not seeking something else, not trying to figure everything out, but relaxing and opening, giving our full, whole-hearted attention to right here, right now, just as it is. In this open aware presence, there is no seer apart from the seen. The extraordinary is revealed in the ordinary, and everything is seen as sacred, even what seems broken. From here, responsive action emerges from wholeness and love.

This falling away of imaginary problems can only happen now, not once and for all or someday in the future, because now is all there actually is. What is offered here invites firsthand exploration and direct discovery, not belief or dogma. There is no finish-line, no method, no future goal, only this ever-fresh aliveness.

– from joantollifson.com

Nothing Is Hidden and Our Life Is Enough

Zen teacher Barry Magid, one of my favorite contemporary teachers, wrote a beautiful summation and distillation of his work and his essential message on his Ordinary Mind Zendo Substack which I very highly recommend:

Ordinary Mind Zendo

How Do We See Our Life As Enough?

It’s been an interesting experience editing this new collection of my talks, going over things I’ve said the last decade or so since the last book. And while occasionally there’s something I’ll come across that I’ll be surprised by — oh, I don’t remember talking about that — for the most part, you just see recurrent themes coming up over and over again…

Read more

2 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Ordinary Mind Zendo

Paths Not Taken: A Birthday Reflection

I turn 78 in a week, and I found myself reflecting on paths not taken.

I began college as an art major, was a painter and later did serious photography and darkroom work for a while, then at one point I considered getting a PhD in English literature, but I left all that mostly behind to focus my energy primarily on spirituality (or whatever this is, I’ve never found a satisfactory label).

Twice, I seriously considered a gender transition and both times decided against it, settling instead on being nonbinary, although I rarely use the label. (More on that below).

When Toni Packer asked me to be one of the people to carry on her work, I could have lived out my life at Springwater Center, the meditation retreat center where I was once on staff, as one of the teachers there, but I didn’t.

I imagine we all have many paths not taken, which brings to mind a favorite poem by the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, The Blue House, excerpted here:

I stand in the dense forest and look towards my house... As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its wood has been impregnated with four times joy and three times sorrow. When someone who lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person himself does the painting, without a brush, from within…

It is always so early inside here, before the fork in the road, before the irrevocable decision. Thanks for this life! Still, I miss alternatives. All sketches want to become real.

Far off over the water a motor stretches the summer night’s horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We don’t really know it, but we sense it: there is a sister ship to our life which takes a totally different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

—Tomas Transtromer, The Blue House, from Selected Poems 1954-1986 edited by Robert Hass

Reflections on Gender, in Celebration of LGBTQI People Worldwide

In honor of Pride Month and in celebration of the wonders of the LGBTQI community, to which I belong, I want to promote a movie I haven’t seen yet, but one that looks wonderful and very important. It’s a documentary called Second Nature, and it debunks the myths that females are inferior and that being queer is unnatural. It explores the 1500+ animal species who engage in same-sex sexual behavior and parenting, change sex, form matriarchies, and more. The trans actor Elliot Page, who narrates the film, and queer filmmaker Drew Denny, who directed it, were guests on Democracy Now recently talking about the movie and showing some clips. You can watch Part One here and Part Two here, and you can see a trailer for the movie and learn more at the movie’s website here.

I’m currently reading Judith Butler’s book Who’s Afraid of Gender? Much of it is not news to me, and I don’t always see entirely eye-to-eye with Judith Butler on everything, but overall, so far, it’s a brilliant book. I’m resonating with most of it, and it has been changing my mind on a few things. Definitely worth reading.

I’m a slightly bi-sexual, mostly lesbian, nonbinary queer person who seriously considered a gender transition. Like most LGBTQI folks of my generation, I grew up in a world where we LGBTQI folks were mostly invisible. We were illegal and considered sinful and mentally ill. We did not appear in the cultural mirrors of TV and movies, or if we occasionally did, it was in a negative way. If outed, we would lose our jobs and often be shunned by our families and communities. Gay beatings were commonplace, and one gay man I knew was stabbed to death. I had my first relationship (in secret) with a woman in college in the Sixties, before Stonewall, the rebellion in NYC that ignited the modern LGBTQI movement. (As I wrote about in my last book, I was at my former lover’s deathbed here in Ashland many years later alongside her partner of the previous 20 years).

There were many painful things about being in a lesbian relationship, in secret, back then. And transgenderism, especially female to male, was almost entirely invisible in the world where I’d grown up. I checked every box growing up for being trans. But I had no language for it, and the very few trans people I did hear about were male to female.

But things were beginning to change! The Sixties and Seventies were a transitional moment in history around the world. Here in the USA, we had the Anti-War Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement, the Gay Liberation Movement, and an Independent Living and Disability Rights Movement for an accessible society. Things began to change dramatically for the better for people like myself and many others. Over the next decades, we made enormous progress in all these areas.

But there is always a backlash, and history moves between progress and regress, and now, we have an authoritarian president whose administration, and the Republican-MAGA-pro-Christian nationalist far right who are now in power, are trying to undo all of this progress that has been made. This administration is ever-more blatantly white supremacist, clearly anti-LGBTQI and especially anti-trans, apparently intent on putting people with disabilities back into institutions, eliminating the social safety net as much as they can, building concentration camps (aka detention centers) and with great cruelty deporting and imprisoning many immigrants, people of color, critics of Israel, journalists, and we never know who might be next. I admire the very real courage of progressive independent journalists and everyone who is brave enough to speak out.

As I’ve written about, I make an effort to listen to people on all sides of the political spectrum and to encourage open listening and constructive dialog. I’ve disagreed at times with some of the things the left has pushed. Before the 2024 election, although I knew Trump would do many things I didn’t like, I thought comparisons of Trump to Hitler were overblown and exaggerated. I no longer think they are. I am deeply concerned.

And in many parts of the world, LGBTQI people are still executed. So clearly the struggle for LGBTQI liberation is not over by any means, nor are the struggles against racism, sexism, the marginalizing of people with disabilities, and the struggle to care for this Earth and to go beyond war.

I don’t usually talk about political things in my Substack, but in the face of what is unfolding now in this country, and in many other countries as well, I cannot be entirely silent. I know that some of you probably see it differently, and that this may invite some contentious comments, and I would like to ask people to please keep comments on all this reasonably brief and respectful, and I may or may not respond. I really don’t want to get into political discussions and debates in Substack comments. I don’t find that a particularly good venue for serious open dialog on contentious issues. But I will read all the comments, as I always do, and knowing me, I’ll probably respond. In any case, I did need to speak out at least once about what’s going on. And I did want to celebrate the LGBTQI community around the world!

I encourage everyone to please check out the links I provided about the Second Nature movie, and maybe even to check out Judith Butler’s book.

Individual Zoom Meetings

Yes, I’ve resumed individual Zoom meetings after my 3 month break, although I’m scheduling fewer every week than I did before (I’m getting older, have a bit less energy, and need time for both physical fitness and contemplative silence). My fees went up a while back—currently it’s a sliding scale of $100 to $150 USD. If you can pay the higher amount, I appreciate it, but any amount in that range is fine. Meetings are an hour long. I hold them Monday through Friday (and occasionally on Saturday) at either 1 or 2 PM Pacific Daylight Time (same time zone as San Francisco). You can learn more about these meetings and how to set one up here.

Gratitude

I again want to express my profound gratitude to the many readers who make periodic or ongoing donations. Your generosity is very deeply appreciated and sustaining. The income I get from zooms and donations, along with a small amount in book royalties, is all vital to my ability to continue to meet the rising costs of living and hopefully get through however many years are left to me in relative comfort. I live very simply, but I do have rising HMO fees, maintenance expenses on an aging car and on my small aging condo, plus the rising cost of groceries and other basic needs, and I do buy books and subscribe to one or two streaming services for movies and other occasional luxuries.

If anyone would like to donate, there is a “donate” link on my Substack home page and a donate button on my website home page.

Again, thank you all! 🙏

My books in the order they were written:

Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is

Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues about Nonduality

Nothing to Grasp

Death: The End of Self-Improvement

People often ask me which book I’d recommend first, and I can’t say. They’re all quite different. Nothing to Grasp is a concise articulation of my essential message. I like it a lot. Painting the Sidewalk with Water is mainly a collection of talks and dialogs transcribed mostly from my public meetings in Chicago in the early 2000s when I was heavily steeped in radical nonduality. My first book, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life (published in 1996), is a spiritual memoir that begins with my birth, gives a bit of my early life story including coming out as a lesbian, sobering up from alcohol addiction, being in the radical left, and then focuses mainly on my work with Toni Packer, but also includes working with my first Zen teachers, Mel Weitsman and Charlotte Joko Beck, and later discovering Advaita through Nisargadatta, Jean Klein and Gangaji. Awake in the Heartland (first published in 2003) and Death: The End of Self-Improvement (published in 2019) both combine personal stories with expository and poetic prose about nonduality. Death: The End of Self-Improvement, in addition to being about nonduality, is also about aging, dying, and going through cancer.

All my books explore questions of identity, free will, addiction, suffering, transformation, awareness and the nature of experience. They all point to the simplicity and immediacy of right here, right now, just as it is, and they all invite a kind of meditative exploration that is direct, non-methodical, awareness-based and not result-oriented. I write from my own direct experience and insight, but my perspective has been informed by my engagement with Buddhism, Advaita, Christianity, Sufism, radical nonduality and Toni Packer’s nontraditional “work of this moment.” You can learn more about all of them on my website books page.

Love to all…

Sitting quietly, feeling a deep sense of Presence—

Open Silent Still Listening Presence

infinitely subtle, precious beyond measure, sacred, ungraspable

Outside the open window, the leaves of the redbud are moving slightly in the gentle breeze of a hot June morning. Everything is green, rich and marvelous, bathed in light, and that light is love. The sounds of the wind are so delicate, so soft

Everything is deeply quiet

open, spacious, vast,

this presence is all-inclusive, boundless, undivided, most intimate, vibrantly alive, pulsating with energy

no name or explanation can touch it; it cannot be reasoned or figured out

This morning, all the names, explanations and theories have fallen away,

there is simply being here

open

listening

being

enjoying this vast aliveness

wide open

immeasurable

there comes a time
when you have to let go
all the words
all the teaching
and trust the infinite

– Billy Doyle, from The Mirage of Separation

We search for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense freedom.

Maybe later, the spaciousness clouds over, the mind tightens and spins, grows confused and troubled by uncertainty, caught in anxious thoughts and worries—the body contracts, compulsively reaching for something to soothe the discomfort, something that will in fact only magnify it, while the old grasping for certainty reaches for some conceptual formulation that it hopes will provide a satisfying final answer, which it never does—thinking and thinking, judging the phantom “me” who seems now to be such a hopeless mess, the “me” who was totally absent earlier when there was only the green leaves and the breeze and the vast openness —

Is it possible in such a moment of confusion and distress to simply let all of this be just as it is? To relax the grasping, to open and be still in the midst of the storm, not needing it to abate or resolve, simply beholding the whole of it with love, allowing it to dissolve in its own time? Not getting caught in the trap of looking to repeat the morning’s wonderment, but being fully present with what’s here now?

In his new book on consciousness, A World Appears, Michael Pollan quotes Zen Roshi Joan Halifax telling him that Zen is about “being radically open to things just as they are, not grasping at or rejecting phenomena, but simply being present and at ease with moment-to-moment uncertainty and groundlessness and letting openness or not-knowing deconstruct our version of reality. It is the method of non-method.”

Or as Toni Packer put it:

“No matter what state dawns at this moment, can there be just that? Not a movement away, an escape into something that will provide what this state does not provide, or doesn’t seem to provide: energy, zest, inspiration, joy, happiness, whatever. Just completely, unconditionally listening to what’s here now, is that possible?”

Every moment is new. When we stop and enter it deeply, it reveals the infinite subtlety

of these ever-changing faces of experiencing, all of them jewels when truly seen

in the delicate infinitely subtle aliveness of this immediacy, this awake presence

the beauty, the joy, the love, the wonder is in the presence

precious beyond measure, sacred, ungraspable

never the same way twice

In his book The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle describes his awakening. He writes, “The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminous filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes… Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, an empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.”

Ever since I read those lines, I see light as love. Everything is bathed in love.

Practicing the Presence of God

(or simply, Practicing Presence)

After I wrote this piece, I found myself listening to a beautiful talk by James Finley on Brother Lawrence and “the practice of the presence” that moved me very deeply.

It feels like a perfect addition to this post. It’s the first talk on Brother Lawrence in Jim Finley’s “Turning to the Mystics” podcast series. It's about 30 minutes long and would best be listened to meditatively, with your full attention.

I’ve always had a deep love for Brother Lawrence, a humble French Catholic religious brother in a Carmelite order who lived from 1614 to 1691. Brother Lawrence worked for years in the monastery kitchen, engaged in what he called practicing the presence of God. Jim uses passages from Carmen Acevedo Butcher's translation of Brother Lawrence's Practice of the Presence as a stepping off point.

Jim Finley is a contemporary Catholic mystic (pictured above) whose powerful autobiographical book, The Healing Path, had a very deep impact on me. Listening to Jim always carries me right into presence. He survived an abusive childhood, spent a number of years as a monk in a Trappist monastery with Thomas Merton as his spiritual director, studied and then practiced psychotherapy with a focus on trauma after leaving the monastery, remains a devote (and very open-minded) Catholic and has explored many other traditions as well, especially Buddhism. Now in his eighties, Jim was married twice and has two adult daughters. He is a truly beautiful man.

If you’re allergic to the word God or to any form of Christianity or to expressions that point to something outside the purview of logic and rationality, this probably won’t be for you. I would have stumbled over a few parts of it not that long ago. But this time, I was open to it, and it opened my heart in a profound way and touched me very deeply. If you’re open to it, I very highly recommend it.

You can listen to the podcast and find more information here, and you can also listen (audio only) on YouTube here.

Love to all…

Two Inseparable Truths

In one response to the question What IS This?, Buddhism speaks of the Two Truths, the relative (or conventional) truth and the absolute truth. From my perspective (and that of Buddhism), it’s very important not to lose touch with either one. They are both here simultaneously. They arise together. Fixating on either side to the exclusion of the other is delusion.

The relative is the apparent world of discrete forms and the relationships between them. It is the world of cause and effect, birth and death, here and there, this and that, you and me, time and space. It is the capacity to distinguish healthy from unhealthy, good from bad, kindness from cruelty, love from hate, apples from oranges, and you from me. It is our much needed sense of healthy boundaries and limits. It is the functionally necessary sense of being located in a particular time and place. It is our unique individuality and our concerns for healing what is broken, discerning injustices, and acting in wholesome ways.

The absolute is the emptiness of all forms, the fact that no-thing ever actually persists, and therefore, never actually exists as some-thing that can be carved out of the whole. No-thing can be separated out from everything it supposedly is not, and all apparently solid forms are actually unresolvable, thorough-going flux. This is the recognition that reality (otherwise known as Here-Now) is a limitless, boundless, seamless wholeness or unicity, one without a second, no-thing-ness appearing as everything. In the absolute, there is no birth and death, no inside and outside, and no separate thing to cause or effect any other apparently separate thing. There is no self separate from the totality to be in or out of control, or to have or not have free will. It is impossible to pin down where any apparent person or thing begins or ends, and there is no such thing as beginning or ending.

Both of these perspectives, the relative and the absolute, are present and discoverable in this very moment, right now. They show up together!

Most humans are living completely from the relative or conventional perspective, or more accurately, they think they are! Explorations in nondual spirituality and practices such as meditation are one way to deconstruct and see through that perspective, not just philosophically, but through direct experience and observation, and also to discover (or notice, or realize) the absolute truth, not as a mere idea, but as this direct immediate experienceable reality right here and now. This deconstruction and realization is very liberating and wonderful.

But then, spiritual people often get stuck for a while, and sometimes forever, in the absolute perspective. They seem to see and acknowledge only the absolute truth. They deny that relative reality has any reality at all—which, from what I regard as a misunderstanding of the absolute perspective, it doesn’t. Buddhism identifies being stuck in the absolute as perhaps the greatest form of delusion. I would say that the absolute includes the relative—they are not one, not two. Non-duality includes duality. Otherwise, it would be dualistic. As Zen Master Dogen put it, true realization is “leaping clear of the many and the one,” not fixating anywhere.

The relative view might be regarded as a map produced by the brain and nervous system and by conceptual thought, a map that is very much needed for everyday functioning. The relative view seems to divide, abstract, label, organize and reify the otherwise ungraspable aliveness and thoroughgoing flux of present experiencing, allowing us to navigate our everyday lives. As they say, the map is not the territory. But mapping is something the territory is doing, and as an aspect of this living reality, and as a map, the map is every bit as real as the territory it describes, and every bit as ungraspable. And any way we formulate or conceptualize the absolute (seamless, boundless, undivided, whole, and so on) is itself another map, as is the very notion of relative and absolute.

From the absolute perspective, there is nothing to practice, nowhere to go, and no one apart from everything else to do any kind of practice. There is only NOW, just as it is, never the same way for even an instant, always just this. Time and space are appearances with no actual reality, as are apparently separate people. The only real eternity is the eternal NOW; the only actual infinity is the immediacy HERE, this placeless presence from which we never depart.

But the absolute shows up as the relative, and from the relative perspective, there is indeed a journey over time, documented by photographs and videos, and there is undeniably a person here, a conscious and evolving bodymind organism, a unique human being who is making that journey through time and space, someone who was born and will one day die. That person might be compared to a whirlpool in a river or a wave in the ocean. It is ever-changing and never separate from the river or ocean, but it nevertheless has a kind of recognizable form or patterning of energy, integrating and eventually disintegrating. Along the way, that person (that patterning of energy) changes and evolves, acquires knowledge, learns from experience. There are things to do, and changes that can be made in the world at large. Injuries can be healed, things can be repaired, mistakes can be identified, corrected and forgiven, plans can be made and carried out. There are apparent choices and decisions, and we don’t confuse apples with oranges.

BOTH of these perspectives are real. To deny either one is to miss half the truth.

In Buddhism, they have these precepts, and it is sometimes said that from the relative perspective, it is impossible not to break the precepts. For example, the first one, not killing, is broken every time we wipe our forehead or take a step, each time killing countless microorganisms. But from the absolute perspective, it is impossible to ever break the precepts because there is nothing apart from everything else to kill or be killed. The relative view is crucial for everyday life. But realizing the absolute view gives us a deep peace, freeing us from guilt and blame, knowing that nothing is ever really destroyed in the way it seems to be, and that everything is an impersonal and uncontrollable activity of the whole universe with no fixed form, dissolving instant by instant.

I find life to be more complex, nuanced and mysterious than the absolute perspective alone can fully contain. Because after all, relative reality is undeniably and miraculously showing up, right here, as seemingly real as real can be! And if we use the realization of absolute no-thing-ness to dissociate, to sugarcoat or deny the pain, grief and horror in life, to deny our humanity, or to avoid taking responsibility for our actions in slippery ways, then in my opinion, we have missed the mark. To take one mundane example, if your partner mentions that you’re not doing your share of the housework, and you respond by saying there’s no self and no house and no choice and nothing could be other than how it is, this is a kind of slippery cop-out. You’re mixing up different dimensions of reality. What you’re saying may be absolutely true, but the truth of it is not in the ideology, and the ideology is being used in that case as a justification or excuse for not taking responsibility in appropriate ways by claiming a false kind of helplessness or lack of response-ability (ability to respond).

The great Buddhist sage Nagarjuna deconstructed all views of reality. He said: “Emptiness is the relinquishing of all views,” and he added, “Those who hold to emptiness as a view are called incurable."

Oneness and multiplicity, stillness and movement, killing and non-killing, self and non-self, choice and cloicelessness, relative and absolute are all evident right here, right now. You can’t deny either side of the coin. And none of these formulations can capture reality. Reality is ungraspable and unpindownable. And yet, we don’t confuse apples and oranges. Not one, not two:

An Evolutionary Perspective

I’ve long found Darwin’s theory of evolution quite compelling, and in recent decades, a number of people have applied an evolutionary perspective to spirituality. Ken Wilber is one of them, and my friend Tim Freke is another. I’ve found myself resonating with this perspective more and more.

As I’m seeing it these days, the universe is evolving, partly through each of us. Human society is evolving. Consciousness is evolving. We are each evolving. No two humans are in exactly the same place in that unfolding process, and for each of us, that process involves many tiny steps forward and often back again, as well as sometimes big leaps and major backslides. Being human is always a mix of clear days and cloudy ones. Sometimes we are driven entirely by habit and conditioning, much of it unconscious, and at other times there is an open aware presence that seems free from all of this, allowing new possibilities to reveal themselves and come into being.

Some days when I feel anger rising up in me, or when I start to bite my fingers, the ability is here to stop. Sometimes the desire to explode in anger or bite my fingers simply evaporates in open aware presence. At other times, I’m off balance, more tangled up in the mind, aware presence seems more obscured, and those urges to explode or bite overwhelm this organism. There may be a desire to stop, to not do that, but the old, habitual part of me that wants to explode or bite is stronger in that moment than the newer, more evolved part that wants to not do that. And so, in that moment, I uncontrollably speak in anger or compulsively bite my fingers, unable to stop myself.

Some days this bodymind system is more evolved than on other days. Based on my experience, I have a strong sense that centerless, boundless, all-inclusive, open aware presence or unconditional love is the leading edge of evolution, but it’s not always fully online yet. I sense that aware presence is unconditioned, free of the past—a space from which the new and unexpected can emerge. I can’t prove that, and I might be wrong, so I don’t hold it as a belief. But I experience the shift from caught-up-ness in the story of separation and encapsulation and the freedom and spaciousness that arises when that is absent.

Sometimes this evolutionary process is messy and frustrating, and often it’s really hard, like being squeezed down the birth canal into a new unknown. Longing is perhaps a kind of evolutionary pull, as I wrote about in my last post, “The Heart’s Inmost Request,”pulling us toward an unimaginable future, not unlike those first sea-dwelling creatures long ago that were somehow moved to wriggle out of the sea onto the land. Everything is always becoming something new, instant by instant, always now. And we don’t really know how it all works or what is or isn’t possible.

And yes, ALL of what I just described—the pull of longing, an evolutionary process of becoming, conditioning and freedom from conditioning—ALL of this is in the realm of relative reality. In the absolute sense, all of this is non-sense. It doesn’t exist. All of waking life is like a passing dream or a movie, made out of nothing substantial, vanishing into thin air.

And yet…

The Greatest Miracle

Finally, I’ll leave you with another beautiful talk by one of my top favorite Zen teachers, Jiryu Rutschman-Byler, the current abbot of Green Gulch Zen Farm, on “The Great Miracle”:

Love to all…

The ungraspable immediacy of this one bottomless moment

No word-concept can capture this living reality. It is at once immovable and ever-changing; infinitely varied and yet undivided and without separation; endlessly evolving while going nowhere (now/here); utterly ordinary and yet totally extraordinary. It is multi-dimensional, multi-faceted, shape-shifting, unpindownable, and yet always “just this.” It is never absent. It is all there is. Nothing stands apart from it. Nothing is other than this indivisible unicity.

We don’t need to seek it because we are it. It is all there is. And yet, it includes our sense of separation from it and our searching and longing for the wholeness and love that sometimes feel absent. The perfection of this indivisible unicity includes our apparent imperfection and brokenness and all our moves to heal and evolve and dissolve into the unbroken wholeness we are.

The Heart’s Inmost Request: an evolutionary movement of Love

When I give careful attention to what is happening here, I can often feel a profound ache, a yearning or longing in the heart for what I can only call God, although you may call it something else. It is something deeply intuited that is sometimes deeply known and that at other times seems absent or lost. It is ineffable, ungraspable and impossible to capture in words. It is felt to be at once most intimate and yet also transcendent, infinitely vast and beyond the beyond—a luminous darkness that can never be seen because it is too close—that which is most subtle, the stillness at the heart of stillness, a deep knowingness that all is well. I might also call it unconditional love or “the peace that passeth understanding.” It is a deep sense of wholeness and well-being.

I alluded to this kind of mysterious and powerful longing in my second book, Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is:

Internally, the ground beneath my feet continues to crumble and dissolve. I am cast back again and again into not knowing. Baby sea turtles hatch on the beach and must make it to the sea. Some make it and some do not. It is all part of the biological flow, those that make it and those that don’t. When I am identified with this apparently separate individual bodymind, then I am afraid I’ll be one of those turtles who don’t make it. I’ll die on the beach. My life will be down the drain. This is a tragedy only to the illusory ego, not to Life Itself. Life itself is an experiment, a play, an unfolding process of discovery and exploration, with forms constantly being created and destroyed. Permanence is not in the forms. There are many failed-experiments, many discards, tragic only from the egoic point of view.

I think of that movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where all these people were being called, and they kept feeling attracted to this shape, and this one man kept making the shape with his mashed potatoes on his dinner plate. It turned out it was a mountain, a place where the beings from outer space would be, to which these people were being mysteriously drawn. But the people had no idea why they were feeling compelled to play with their mashed potatoes. Their families thought they were losing their minds.

We see a dim shape, we feel it, we’re not sure what it is. We’re being drawn by something we cannot know. I’m being drawn by something I cannot explain or even understand. I might be a discard, a failed experiment, someone who never makes it to the space ship, a baby turtle dried up in the sand. Or I might be the new. It doesn’t matter either way. We are swept along, used, used up. Sacrificed. Swallowed.

— from Awake in the Heartland

Or consider this, which popped out at me yesterday from a very old piece of my writing, a quote I had included there from Brian Swimme Ph.D., an evolutionary cosmologist:

Love begins as allurement—as attraction... the basic dynamism of the universe is the attraction each galaxy has for every other galaxy... This attracting activity is a fundamental mystery... The Earth does not think: “Well, it’ll be a good thing to be attracted to the Sun. That way, humans can warm their tea in black bags and save on electricity.” The Earth is simply attracted. The electron is simply attracted. The galaxy is simply attracted. You are simply attracted. This mysterious attraction that we call “interest,” or “fascination,” is as mysterious, as basic, as the allurement that we call gravitation… Love begins when we discover interest... By pursuing your allurements, you help bind the universe together... How will you awaken your creativity? By responding to the allurements that beckon to you, by following your passions and interests… If we follow what truly interests us, then everything reveals itself.

— Brian Swimme, from The Universe Is a Green Dragon

(A curious aside: I once served on a jury in Oakland, California, and the trial went on for a week, during which we on the jury bonded in many ways. Our forewoman, an African-American school teacher, told me that she dreamed one night that I was in some way, which I can no longer remember, connected to the book The Universe Is a Green Dragon—the mysterious currents of love showing up in the most unexpected places).

What I Can’t Not Do

In my recent post Sewing the Invisible Rakusu: A Story about Endurance and Walking on Water, I wrote of a kind of commitment, endurance, intention or devotion that I summed up as simply what I can’t not do. This is exactly the attraction that Brian Swimme wrote about in the quote from him above, and it is the mysterious pull that I described in the excerpt from Awake in the Heartland.

Since I published that post, I’ve added a bit to my description of what it is that I’m committed and devoted to, and I’ve revised the online version. You can read the complete expanded version here.

Jim Finley, a contemporary Catholic mystic, on contemplative practice:

A contemplative practice is any act, habitually entered into with your whole heart, as a way of awakening, deepening, and sustaining a contemplative experience of the inherent holiness of the present moment. Your practice might be some form of meditation, such as sitting motionless in silence, attentive and awake to the abyss-like nature of each breath. Your practice might be simple, heartfelt prayer, slowly reading the scriptures, gardening, baking bread, writing or reading poetry, drawing or painting, or perhaps running or taking long, slow walks to no place in particular. Your practice may be to be alone, really alone, without any addictive props and diversions. Or your practice may be that of being with that person in whose presence you are called to a deeper place. The critical factor is not so much what the practice is in its externals as the extent to which the practice incarnates an utterly sincere stance of awakening and surrendering to the Godly nature of the present moment.

—James Finley

Two Beautiful Interviews that I very highly recommend:

The two videos below moved me deeply, brought me to tears, and they both give me hope for humanity. I found them very inspiring and positive.

(1) Amanda Knox, who was prosecuted and jailed for a crime she didn’t commit, speaks of reaching out to her prosecutor years later with kindness and developing a positive relationship with him:

(2) Marianne Williamson interviews Ron Garan, a former Air Force combat fighter pilot and then NASA astronaut, about the spiritual awakening he had from being in space, seeing the undivided earth, and working with Russians on a common project. He also talks about what it will take for humanity to evolve beyond this critical inflection point at which we find ourselves:

Ron has attended a retreat with Rupert Spira, and Rupert will be talking with him on June 17. (You can watch that conversation here.)

Health Update

I’m happy to report that this body is largely healed from the abdominal surgery I had in March to repair and revise my ostomy. I’m gradually rebuilding my core muscles and overall fitness after having had to abandon almost all of my fitness routine since December. It’s good to feel it all coming back.

What initially seemed like bad fortune (the hernia tear that led to the repair surgery in March) has turned out to be great good fortune, just like in the famous Old Chinese Farmer Story. My new ostomy stoma (still going by the name Otto after all), which is the part of my intestine that comes out my abdomen and empties into a bag, is a much better size and shape than the previous one, allowing me to now use pre-cut bags, plus I’m using a new type of bag system that gives me a great deal more freedom and peace of mind than I’ve had since I first got an ostomy following a stage three cancer back in 2017.

I continue to be cancer free as far as I know, except for another very tiny minor basal cell cancer on my face that will be sliced off in August. All in all, I’m doing very well, turning 78 next month, very grateful I can still walk, hear, see, live independently, manage my own affairs, write Substacks and meet with people occasionally on Zoom—in short, very happy to be alive. But also well aware that things can turn on a dime, that older old age is approaching, and that death is waiting patiently in the wings, ready to dissolve this form back into the earth and return this mysterious presence to the germinal darkness from which it sprang.

Love to all…

“Stop, Drop, and Be Held in the Dark”

A friend sent me this link to a Sounds True podcast of Tami Simon in conversation with Andrew Holecek, author of Total Eclipse of the Mind, about “the ancient practice of full immersion in complete, sealed darkness.” (They wear dark masks for part of the conversation). Andrew is “an interdisciplinary scholar, author of ten books, longtime practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism,” and “after fifty years of meditation, psychedelic exploration, and completing a traditional three-year Tibetan retreat, Holecek calls [immersion in darkness] easily the most transformative practice he has ever done.”

I listened to this conversation and was blown away. I'd heard before of people going on extended dark retreats, I know they sometimes do this in Tibetan Buddhism, but that had always sounded totally unappealing to me. One teacher I spent time with on Zoom, the late Peter Brown, sometimes recommended time in the dark to people, but not in the way Holecek does, at least not that I heard, so I was never moved to try it. But this conversation moves me to try it, not for long stretches of many days as some people do, but for short periods at home. The conversation alone had such an impact on me that I want to share it with all of you.

Listen Here

In their conversation, Tami and Andrew explore:

• What actually happens to the mind in extended darkness—and the neurological science behind why it’s so transformative

• The descent of the mind through conscious, subconscious, and collective unconscious layers—and what waits at the bottom

• Dark retreat as a “sober psychedelic”: how the brain generates its own endogenous DMT in extended darkness

• The practice of enantiodromia—when extreme contraction suddenly flips into extraordinary openness

• How to work with panic, trauma, and unwanted experience using the “reverse meditation” principle: feel it, but don’t feed it

• Why appearances don’t matter in the dark—and why so many people emerge in tears, feeling safe and held for the first time

• The four-step process for integrating darkness into daily life, from sleep masks to dedicated dark rooms

Roshi Joan Sutherland and The Zen of Endarkenment

Listening to this conversation with Andrew Holecek brought to mind the Zen teacher Joan Sutherland, who notes that “about 96% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy,” and who considers both enlightenment and endarkenment essential in the “lifelong process” of awakening. Enlightenment is “the brilliant illumination that lifts us out of the suffering world,” and endarkenment is “the radiance of the deeps that lets us find home in the world… the heart that breaks open to life, rests comfortably on the unfathomable mystery of existence, and is easy with uncertainty, complexity, and what courses underground.” She writes: “Everything comes from the same dark, everything is filled with the same light. Which isn’t to say that everything is completed just yet; there is still more horror and viciousness than it’s possible almost to bear. But aren’t those the very things most in need of inclusion in this agonizingly slow, grievously uneven awakening?”

Joan tells us that, “In the eighth century, a new kind of Chan Buddhism developed in response to a cataclysmic time in Chinese history: in the space of ten years, two-thirds of the population died of rebellion, invasion, famine, and disease… A few Chan innovators had a fierce desire to leap out of the usual ways of doing things and into new territory—not to escape the catastrophe looming around them, but to more fully meet it… Chan practice wasn’t about getting free of the world; it was about being free in the world. How do we fall willingly into the frightened, blasted, beautiful, tender world, just as it is?... This true self you are looking for, [the old Chan masters] said, is not just here, in your own heart-mind, but everywhere. Everything you see is buddha nature; everything shines with that light. Everything you see is you—and this at a time when what you saw included blighted fields, refugees starving by the roadside, deserted towns. There’s something so moving about the large and generous spirit of these [Zen teachers] who responded to the devastation around them by saying, This is all me. This is all you. They showed that the way to come to terms with life’s pains is not by turning away from them but by moving deeper into life.”

There are some marvelous videos that you can find on her website, in one of which she says: “About 96% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy,” and she asks, “How do I include that 96% of the dark? What if there’s this whole underground thing happening? What’s it like to be in that moment?” She says, “I tend now to think of a vast original dark that is nondual and that holds the light and the dark within it… this vast dark and the manifest lit world that comes out of that… There is this great dreaming going on underneath everything all the time.” She speaks of “learning to rest on that mystery, lie back on that fathomless sea… to come to rely on the fact that there’s nothing to rely on… to feel the beauty of that and to love that mystery, in some ways to become devoted to that mystery.” And she speaks of “our willingness to get our hearts broken and to stay broken, in the understanding that the broken heart is open and connected.”

A Semi-Retreat in the Midst of Daily Life

I’ve been on a kind of semi-retreat at home this week, inspired by my friend the satsang teacher Dorothy Hunt, who is leading an actual in-person retreat this week—I’m still going shopping, getting a haircut, having physical therapy, working out, going to a doctor’s appointment, holding a Zoom meeting, dining with friends, answering email, even watching a few episodes of a Hulu series on my iPad, and now listening to Andrew and Tami and preparing this Substack—but in between all this activity, I’ve spent less time online and more time than usual sitting in silence, doing nothing, both in my home and also out in nature. It’s been refreshing, and I’m heading back into that silent stillness now and for the rest of the day until dinner. And hopefully for most of tomorrow as well.

Love to all….

A rakusu is a small bib-like Zen Buddhist robe worn around the neck. In many Zen schools, you sew together many tiny square pieces of cloth, and then your teacher does some calligraphy on the back, including your new “Buddhist name,” and the robe is given to you, along with your new name, at an ordination ceremony where you take the Buddhist precepts and become officially part of a Buddhist lineage.

Sewing the Invisible Rakusu

Many decades ago, when I was a Zen student, I sewed one rakusu almost to completion before destroying it, and then did it again, again almost to completion, and then again destroyed it. Suffice it to say, I had some ambivalence.

I tend to question and doubt things. Uncertainty is uncomfortable, and we humans habitually grab for things to make us feel certain, and I’m no exception. But inevitably, whenever I do that, I end up questioning and doubting my apparent certainties.

Recently, I’ve once again been questioning everything I believe and all the things I’ve said in my writing about nonduality, love, God, wholeness, consciousness—everything I’ve asserted or felt certain about as well as what it is I’m doing. This is an uncomfortable process—it comes unbidden—very much like being squeezed through the birth canal into an unknown place.

My main teacher, Toni Packer, was a former Zen teacher who left the traditional aspects of Zen behind to work in a more open way. At Springwater, the meditation and retreat center she founded where I was on the residential staff for five years, we had no robes, rakusus, ordination ceremonies or Buddhist names. Toni stripped away all the extras leaving only silence and ordinary life. She felt that identifying with a tradition (or with any other group identity) was a false and dangerous habit leading to division and conflict. What are we if we don’t cling to any identity?

I’ve often longed to be part of a spiritual community and tradition, but every time I’ve tried it—and I’ve tried it many times and imagined it even more times—it never feels quite right. Springwater came closest, and Toni did ask me to be one of the people to carry on her work, but even then, I had to leave and find my own way, which in some ways differed from Toni’s. Like Toni, it seemed my path was having nothing to grasp and nowhere to land. And maybe at times I am carrying on her work, which (as she would be the first to say) belongs to no one. But sometimes I feel that I’ve fallen very short of that.

In recent days, off and on, I’ve been going through something of a dark time—this uncomfortable doubting and questioning—along with feeling unbalanced or ungrounded at times, often in my head more than my body, often lost in storylines and mental confusions and out of touch with the simple presence that is so grounding. My fingerbiting compulsion was very flared up for a while.

And for a while recently, I was really feeling the horror and uncertainty of the national and global situation we are living through. I always follow the news of the day, and I don’t over-indulge in depressing and terrifying stories—I’m pretty good at keeping my intake at a manageable level. And mostly, the current catastrophe is kind of in the background. I’m much more focused on what’s right in front of me here and now. And I know that what is cannot be other than it is in this moment, and that what looks like bad fortune can end up being good fortune, and that we don’t really know what the universe should or shouldn’t be doing, but still...

The rise of fascism in this country and all the horrific suffering in Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, Lebanon and all the places where people (and animals, trees, plants and buildings) are being bombed all began to permeate the foreground for a while. I was feeling it deeply, more than usual.

I also feel much ongoing concern about AI and where that will go, especially given that it is mostly in the unregulated hands of corporate greed and the struggle for power and dominance.

I can also feel at times a deep sorrow that seems connected to getting old, to the body gradually falling apart, and all the potential nightmares of older old age drawing nearer, especially in a country where fascism is taking over and the social safety net is being torn asunder. Maybe it is a feeling of primal loneliness and vulnerability.

And in this dark night, all the spiritual platitudes about everything being okay and nothing really happening have felt hollow.

The theory of evolution makes sense to me, and of course that process wouldn’t stop with human beings as we know them. Like many others, I feel that there is an evolutionary process going on now, an evolution of consciousness. On one end of that process, we are not far from our chimp ancestors, driven by primal instincts. On the more advanced edge, we are evolving into a different consciousness that is freer from the automatic pulls of instinct and conditioning and more awake to a wholeness that sees beyond the personal and the tribal.

I feel myself somewhere in the middle of that evolutionary process, moving more and more into the light and then being pulled back into the darkness. And when I go through a dark time, maybe being squeezed again through the evolutionary birth canal, in the pain and darkness, there is a strong pull to descend into cynicism, despair, bitterness, anger and addictive behaviors. I bite my fingers compulsively, think uncontrollably, and feel the urge to drink again (which I don’t do).

I know this isn’t the direction I want to go in, because I know from my own experience how it is to be in that other, more evolved, place. Finding our way beyond that strong pull back down into the darkness is what I think Brother David Steindhl-Rast meant when he said faith was like walking on water.

It brings to mind something Adam Bucko once said in a talk I heard that I found very moving. Adam is a Christian contemplative and now Episcopal priest, originally from Poland, who at the time of this talk was working with homeless youth on the streets of New York City. He said that someone had asked him what his biggest challenge was in his ministry. The biggest challenge he faces, he said, is showing up at those times when grace doesn’t seem to be present, when it seems to him that he has nothing to offer. His greatest challenge is showing up anyway, trusting that somehow God will show up too.

That is how I’ve often felt—that I’m totally lost and have nothing to offer—and yet, however dark it seems, next thing I know, everything changes. The dark night turns out to be the birth pains of something new, the light always returns, and faith is that capacity to keep going when the darkness comes. It’s what my first Zen teacher, Mel Weitsman, meant when he said, “Endurance is everything.”

In that same talk, Adam Bucko quoted (or paraphrased) Henri Nouwen, the Dutch Catholic priest and author:

The spiritual leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in the world with nothing to offer but his or her own broken and vulnerable self.

—Henri Nouwen quoted or paraphrased by Adam Bucko

Recently, I’ve sometimes come to think of my pathless path of waking up right here, right now, outside of any tradition or any place to land, as sewing an invisible rakusu. A rakusu is a symbol of commitment, like a wedding ring, and there is in fact a kind of commitment in this pathless way, a kind of endurance, intention or devotion. It’s what I can’t not do.

You might ask, devotion (or commitment) to what?

• Finding the sacred everywhere, in every moment and in every being. And by sacred, I mean infinitely full of unresolvable mysteries, beauty and love; worthy of attention, reverence, awe, wonder and devotion.

• Silence, stillness, presence, awareness, love, wholeness, openness, freedom, equanimity, the open heart.

• Discovering the power of attention. Noticing what I’m giving attention to and how it affects me. Noticing (as it happens), seeing through and waking up from the hypnotic trance of habitual thoughts that seem to be objective reports on reality. Questioning these thoughts. Noticing that the thinker is itself a thought-form.

• Epistemological humility, groundlessness, not knowing, beginner’s mind, open listening, being willing to change my mind and question or let go of cherished ideas. Not landing on one side of any conceptual divide, such as free will or choicelessness, self or no self, person or no person, path or no path.

• Giving open attention to the groundless ground of being, the awaring presence being and beholding everything, the ever-present but often unnoticed undercurrent of alert stillness, the radiant aliveness shining forth in every apparent form.

• Being rooted in this here-now-presence, meeting whatever is showing up with love and curiosity, not with judgment or condemnation. And when I fail, as I often do, beginning again, freshly, here and now.

• Recognizing myself as the whole universe and all beings as both my community and as my own self, knowing there is no real separation.

• Realizing (making real in this life) the true home right here in this one bottomless moment, this ungraspable immediacy, just as it is.

Why do I say not landing on either free will or its absence? As I see it, response-ability, or the ability to respond from aware presence rather than conditioned habit, and “choicelessness,” or the absence of personal free will, are both conceptual formulations, maps, pedagogical tools, each one pointing to something experiential and livable, each valuable in different moments. I feel it’s important not to get stuck on one side of any apparent duality, and not to land or fixate on any one-sided formulation. To the dualistic mind, choice and choicelessness seem like irreconcilable opposites, but in my actual lived and living experience, they are both included.

Why neither self nor no-self? Because what do we mean by self or person? I feel we’re like waves in the ocean. The wave is an ever-changing, evanescent, ungraspable movement or activity of the ocean—not a solid, persisting, independent form—but it’s not nothing either. Wave and ocean are “not one, not two.” We can’t deny the person, the human being, and yet we can’t pin it down or find its limits or where it begins and ends. We are both ocean and wave.

Likewise, I find that there’s a place for both “being here now” (a sometimes deliberate activity of being mindfully present, seeing and seeing through the thoughts and stories that captivate us, and returning open attention to the immediacy of this very moment) and “all there is, is here-now-being” (recognizing the absolute reality of no division, no duality, no owner, no separation, everything included). I find that “being here now” reveals and realizes (makes real in our lives) the undivided wholeness of “here-now-being.” Otherwise, the latter may just be a nice idea or belief. It’s easy to latch onto (or dispense) false comfort, security and certainty in a world that is often uncomfortable, uncertain and insecure.

And for all of us, being in this particular evolutionary moment with all its dangers can be quite challenging. It’s easy to descend into the darkness of hate, cynicism and despair. It’s easy to start behaving like a mirror image of our un-evolved president and the others in his cabinet. But maybe we can realize that they are doing the only possible for them given their nature and nurture and life experiences. Maybe we can find these same behaviors in ourselves in some form, recognizing these as human tendencies. Maybe we can even see these people with love and compassion, even as we may abhor and resist what they do. I strongly believe, from my own direct experience, that love is a far more transformative power than hate.

The invisible rakusu is not completed yet. Maybe it’s never completed. Maybe it’s always being sewn and then taken apart again. Maybe that’s how life moves.

Love to all…

How Simple Can This Be:
Just What Is, As It Is

This one bottomless moment is ever-changing and yet it never departs from the immediacy of right here, right now.

Experiencing is an uncontrollable, infinitely varied, ever-changing kaleidoscopic display that the pattern-seeking mind conceptually abstracts, divides, labels, categorizes, analyzes and explains.

One moment there is what the mind has labelled “compulsive fingerbiting,” the body tense and seemingly imprisoned by an unwanted compulsion from which it cannot escape, and in the next moment the biting has stopped and there is vast open spacious presence and all sense of encapsulation or limitation has vanished.

There is the image seen in the mirror or in a photograph and there is the vast openness in which the image and the entire universe appears.

There is contraction and relaxation and the desire to be permanently freed from contraction and the desperate search for a cure. There is waking up again and again from that hopeless and painful curative fantasy and simply feeling-being the so-called contraction without separation, without judgment, without storyline, without a “me” who is suffering from “contraction.” Simply sensations, and at the center, no-thing at all.

There is restlessness and boredom and that desperate desire for relief, and there is joy and amazement and wonder at the beauty everywhere, the light on the green leaves, the songs of the birds, the baby birds poking their tiny heads out of the hole in the tree snag, the dog rolling happily in the grass.

There is absorption in the riveting drama in a Hulu series unfolding on an iPad and there is the end of the story, the credits rolling, the iPad closing, the characters that were all so real a moment ago dissolving, and now there is the living room and the body growing sleepy.

There are headaches and surgeries and love affairs and break-ups and births and deaths and endless horrors unfolding on the news and astonishing beauty and acts of love and kindness and disappointments and successes and failures and thoughts arising and vanishing and people coming and going and decades passing by.

What is it all about? What does it all mean?

Perhaps we don’t need to figure it all out, to know with certainty what it all is or how it all works. Perhaps we can’t. Perhaps we can simply be here as this whole happening, present and aware, enjoying and being and beholding the whole show. Noticing the thoughts we have about ourselves and others, noticing the desire to be free from all ambivalence, doubt, uncertainty, pain and imperfection, and then maybe relaxing and being exactly as we are—flawed, imperfect, sometimes restless and contracted, sometimes in pain, sometimes upset and unkind, sometimes filled with awe and love and wonder—never the same way twice.

What are we? A person? A soul? A body? A mind? Boundless awareness? Pure consciousness? Maybe we can drop all the words and ideas, all the labels and categories that seemingly divide the indivisible, trying to make sense of the ever-changing sensations. Perhaps we can simply be the whole amazing, sometimes messy, multi-dimensional, multi-faceted, ever-changing immediacy of right here, right now, just as it is. In fact, we can never actually be anything else! And perhaps we can notice that any attempt to grasp this immediacy, pin it down and box it up is both futile and unsatisfying.

And of course, conceptualizing happens—labeling, categorizing, talking, writing—and this, too, is simply another movement as ungraspable as the ocean waving and the bird singing and the morning breeze touching the skin.

Being Interested In What Is Here Right Now

Excerpted from The spirit of Inquiry by my friend Richard Witteman:

One of the things I love about this work is how practical it is in everyday life, how the spirit of inquiry keeps bringing me back to direct experience, to what is here, right now.

The spirit of inquiry has a quality of simple honesty. A willingness to be with the tapestry of feeling and sensation just the way that it is, no matter what the weather. An honest and intimate in-touch-ness with what is really here.

This doesn’t have a hard edge – it’s not a mechanical exercise, a willful overcoming of the wandering mind. There is… a sense of moving from the black and white shadowy world of distracted thought, to the immediacy of vibrant colors and rich textures…

Recently, someone asked me what I have learned from years of experiencing this meditative way of being, and this answer spontaneously came, “I’ve become interested in what is here.”

How many days and weeks have been spent being interested in what was, in what might be, in what should be… in what was lost, in what I might get, in what I might lose… in what I want, in what I definitely don’t want? So many impulses to pursue the fleeting promises of safety and love, fulfillment and security, of finding happiness. Discovering, time and again that these promises lead only to labyrinths – where each turn leads deeper into an unsatisfying maze, into a deepening dream of separation.

Considering this now, I feel this is the heart of meditation: Simply being interested in what is here – being more interested in what is… than in what was, what will be, or what should be.

Being interested in what is going on here, in this moment, in this body – including everything. Getting to know that which is under our noses… The full resonance of sensation, of color and light and sound, of feeling, thought and imagination. The subtle realms of impression and feeling and vibration and resonance which go beyond the usual categories of thought and emotion. The full, rich current of being alive, the whole continuum of being… beyond any sense of what should be, what should not be…

The spirit of meditative inquiry is an open interest, an open question. A question that leads not to seeking answers, but to the immediacy of what is: seeing what is fresh, what is unfolding, what is arising. Being interested in the wholeness of what is here, in the mystery of what is – including the mystery of awareness itself. If I don’t try to name or define the dynamic of this moment, then what is here, what is really going on?…

We discover that what is being referred to as “here and now” is a wonderful and unfathomable place, with dimensions and qualities beyond our wildest imagination…

And in being interested in what is here, a wonderful thing is revealed: even though it feels as though we are lost and struggling and separate, the truth is that we never did leave home. Separation really is just a dream. We cannot actually be separated, we can only imagine alienation and separation.

The interconnection of all of life is so complete, that absolutely nothing can happen on its own, we can never actually be alienated. Our very existence is an interconnected expression of wholeness, no matter how much our thoughts may protest that it is otherwise. Maintaining suffering is a losing battle. How can a drop of water pretend that is not a part of the river, even as it swirls within countless currents while gliding towards the sea?

This spirit of meditative inquiry is not something reserved for special occasions like the silence of retreat, or when I am in a really good space. The practicality of being interested in what is here is that it is really useful in times of stress and difficulty. Amidst the pressures of everyday life, amidst the overwhelming world situation, at work and at home – pausing to ask what is really going on, to feel the wholeness of what is here…

… including the people who are here, the feelings in the body, the temperature of the air, the qualities of the room, the sounds. To see how these thoughts and feelings are not taking place in isolation, to feel the context of everything that is occurring.

We begin to feel what it is like to… return our interest to what is here, to be intimate with this moment. To realize that all of this is taking place right here, all the imaginings of the past and future, the imaginings of what should be – all of this is nothing more than the dynamic activity of this moment.

As this here-ness starts to feel like home, it becomes possible to notice when the restless call of thought arises. The call to go on the quest, to enter the labyrinth, to achieve something great, to become enlightened. The promise so compelling… “Follow me, and you will find happiness, security, fulfillment, love, abundance, wealth.”

Right here, in mid-stream, as the body quivers with the pull, to pause and see the call for what it is. And to recognize where the call will take us – to know the destination is a labyrinth of restlessness and confusion, unfulfilled promises, receding dreams, loneliness and separation. A turmoil without end…

And in the spaciousness of letting go, when I am not preoccupied with pursuing gain and loss, what is it that is here? What is this open space, this being-ness we call awareness? If I let go the name, if being-ness becomes an open question, what is the direct experience of being, of presence? Is there an observer who is aware? Does awareness have a source, or a beginning or an end?

Staying with this open question, not trying to answer it with words… letting it dissolve my ideas of self and other. Just the sky of awareness, opening and swallowing all the bits and pieces of what I think I am, all my theories, beliefs, and assumptions. Swallowing my pursuit of happiness.

Discovering that real happiness is right here in presence, in the simple joy of being. In coming back to what is here. Pausing, taking a breath… being, simply being.

— Richard Witteman

Richard is one of the people Toni Packer asked to carry on her work. Richard has been leading retreats at Springwater since 2003. He was a student of Roshi Philip Kapleau at the Rochester Zen Center for ten years, and in 1982 began working with Toni Packer. Richard has been part of Springwater Center since its inception. He has also spent time with other teachers including Gangaji and Anam Thubten. Richard divides his time between his home in northern California and Springwater Center.

The Simplicity That Brings Total Relief –

a one-to-one session with Alexis:

I enjoy Alexis and resonate very much with this simple message in which there is absolutely nothing to do or not do, nothing to lose touch with or come back to, because everything is simply what is appearing, and it needs no correction, no improvement. This is perhaps the most liberating message there is when it is really heard.

Love to all…

What do we really want? What really matters?

Chapter 10 from my first book, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life, takes place in the 1980s, after I began practicing at the Berkeley Zen Center (where they have been happily “accomplishing nothing since 1967” — see photo above). It describes my first dokusan (or formal private meeting) with Sojun Mel Weitsman, who became my first real Zen teacher. Mel was the founding teacher and abbot of Berkeley Zen Center. He was a very tender-hearted, wise, grounded man with genuine humility. He came across as very ordinary, and in that, he was truly extraordinary. I continue to absorb and learn from his teaching and from the way he lived. This is Chapter 10:

What Is It?

I started sitting at the Berkeley Zen Center. One day Mel Weitsman, the abbot and teacher, passed me in the garden and said, “We’ve never talked.”

“Talked?” I said.

He told me that it was possible to meet with him, to discuss your Zen practice. So I signed up. Maybe he could tell me what I should do with my life.

The following week, I went in to see him at 5 o’clock in the morning. He was waiting for me in a tiny candlelit room with an altar. I was breathless. I bowed to him the way I’d been told I was supposed to, and sat down on the cushion opposite him. My heart was pounding, my throat was dry. I felt as though I were meeting God.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

I nodded nervously.

“What comes up when you sit zazen?”

“I think about the future a lot,” I told him. “I always do. I can’t decide what to do with my life.”

“Do you have to do something with it?”

“Well, I mean, I think about going to acupuncture school...or becoming a therapist...”

“What are you doing now?” he asked.

“I do massage. But, I mean, that’s probably crazy. I’m always worried about what people are thinking when they arrive for the first time and I answer the door! A one-armed masseuse, it sounds like a bad joke.”

“If you think you can do it, then they’ll think so too,” Mel said. “I don’t see a problem.” He smiled. “What else are you doing besides massage?”

“Oh, I’m writing a book. And I study karate. And I do photography. And political work sometimes, although I’m not doing very much of that anymore. I feel kind of scattered. I start things and don’t finish them.”

“You have to find the thing you really want to do,” Mel said, “the thing you enjoy most. The thing you can’t not do. And then you have to stick with it. And not give up, no matter what. You have to let go of the paths not taken, and really allow yourself to deeply penetrate the one you’ve chosen. Otherwise, you’re just skimming the surface, window-shopping, always avoiding what’s in front of you, imagining there’s some way out.”

“But how do I know which path to pick?” I asked him.

“It’s usually the one that’s easiest, most obvious, right in front of you,” he said.

Writing or sitting zazen came instantly to mind. “Maybe I should become a therapist,” I said aloud. “I keep thinking I need a career. Something substantial.”

“You have to make a choice and then commit yourself,” Mel said. “You have to burn all your bridges, so you can’t go back. Nirvana is seeing one thing through to completion. Otherwise, life just becomes a lot of mental ideas about an imaginary future. You need to come back again and again to your breath, to the day you are actually having. Not the day you wish you were having, or the day you think you should be having, or the day you know you could be having somewhere else tomorrow, but this day that you are actually having right now.”

“Jesus,” I thought. “This can’t be it.”

“Are you still holding out the hope that you’ll get there someday?” Mel asked. “That you’ll find your ideal life?”

“I know it’s impossible,” I replied, “but I’m still holding out the hope,” I admitted.

“Your meditation practice will teach you the impossibility,” he smiled. “Some people spend their whole lives looking for it, but never doing it,” he said. “What is it?” he asked.

I wondered.

“That’s your natural koan,” Mel told me later. “What is it? Keep asking that question, all the time. Don’t try to answer it. Just keep asking. What is it?”

What is it? …

All my life I’ve been waiting for something to happen.

“When thoughts come, you can invite them in,” Mel told us in one of his lectures, “but don’t serve them tea.” He smiled. “Zen teaches you how you think,” he said. “It’s about watching the movie that’s going on inside your head, the one you’re acting in, and beginning to see it for the first time. Be aware of your physical sensations, your breath, your thoughts. Don’t try to change anything. Just see it.”

He looked at us and paused for a long time. I heard the raindrops on the roof and the birds singing in the courtyard. I heard car tires on the wet street.

When you just sit there doing nothing, you discover that there is a tremendous amount happening: plans, memories, physical sensations, emotions, impulses, desires, likes and dislikes, fears, fantasies, judgments.

“In Zen,” Mel says, “we just watch. Just be aware.”

“Enlightenment isn’t about getting something,” he told us. “With any great Zen master, it’s not what they have, it’s what they don’t have.”

I loved the sense of freedom, the relief of finally just sitting down and doing nothing at all. Listening quietly for the first time. Simply being alive. Hearing the rain.

“You are perfect just the way you are,” Mel said to me, “but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for improvement. Each moment is perfect, but you don’t have to hold onto it.”

“I want you to be my teacher,” I told him.

“Thank you,” he said.

— from Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

This is an except from the next chapter, Chapter 11:

I signed up for my first seven-day sesshin. A Zen sesshin is a kind of mind-washing, Mel told me. A whole week of meditation. The days are spent sitting zazen, doing walking meditation, bowing and chanting, working together in silence, eating formal meals in the zendo in an elaborate ceremonial fashion, and having private meetings with the teacher. Aside from these meetings, the ceremonies, and a daily lecture, there is complete silence for the entire week and no eye contact between participants. The schedule is compulsory and rigorous. You must sit, and you sit through pain or whatever arises, without moving.

So much communion exists without words or eye contact. I am struck by the intimacy I feel with these people, with the person who sits next to me for seven days.

In sesshin, we sit with our pain and do not move away from it. We sit with our desires and do not move toward them. We eliminate all the outward escapes from our suffering. We really get to know it. What is it? We watch the obsessive loops of our thinking. We eat in silence. Servers bring us food, bow to us, and bring hot water afterwards with which we wash our bowls. The smallest tasks become sacred. Washing our eating bowls. Folding our napkins. Form is not sacred, Mel says, but form allows the sacred to emerge.

It gets painful. My legs hurt, my back aches, my feet are cold, my eye itches. I don’t move when the pain comes. If I resist the pain, seeing it as something outside of myself that is attacking me, something I want to get away from, then it begins to frighten and overwhelm me. The only way through it is to be very still and open to it.

“It’s important to reach the point where you think that you can’t continue for another second,” Mel says, “and then it’s important to continue.”

“I’m having a crisis of faith in Zen,” I told him at one point. I had cramps and a headache, my back was killing me, and I didn’t feel like sitting in a freezing cold room at 4:30 in the morning trying not to move.

“There is no Zen,” Mel replied. “It’s what’s inside of you. Where’s your spirit?”

“I’m in pain,” I told him. “This feels like nothing but a crazy macho endurance contest.”

“Endurance is everything,” he told me. “It’s your ability to see things through to completion. We always want to go somewhere else or get something we don’t have. We think that if only we move to a new house or find a new job or a new girlfriend, or get enlightened, then we’ll finally be happy. But the trouble is, no matter where we go or what we do, we take ourselves along. And that’s the real problem. Here in sesshin we face that. We don’t move at all. The whole point of sesshin is to have no way out. Because if there’s a way out, we take it. This is where the buck stops. This is the last place. Here, we just have to settle in exactly where we are. Because really, this moment is all we ever have.”

“I can see the benefits of that kind of practice,” I began, “but—”

Mel cut me off. “Benefits, benefits,” he repeated with irritation. “No! Just do it! This isn’t about benefits. It isn’t about getting something or becoming somebody. It’s just this. Nothing else!”

I can’t imagine living without the idea of getting somewhere, or becoming somebody. I feel as if my mind will crack any second. But somehow I keep going. Days and nights go by. Watching for the thoughts to come up. And then noticing that they have already come and swept me away.

“What about the world situation?” I asked Mel.

“This practice will help us know what to do to save the world,” he told me. “We are the world.”

Mel says that small mind sees the enemy as outside of ourselves and conceives the answer as bigger and bigger guns. Big Mind sees the enemy in myself and myself in the enemy….

“Thank you all for making this great effort,” Mel said to us at the end of the sesshin. “It would be very hard to sit a sesshin alone.” His ears seemed extraordinarily large. There was a long silence. At last Mel spoke: “Life is one long sesshin from which there is no escape.”

— from Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

A little bit about Mel

I was eventually, briefly, a resident at BZC. I moved on to other teachers, but stayed in touch with Mel. He died of cancer in 2021 at age ninety-one. His book, Seeing One Thing Through: The Zen Life and Teachings of Sojun Mel Weitsman, was published posthumously a few years later. It begins with a series of autobiographical memories and reflections going back to Mel's working-class boyhood in Los Angeles, his coming of age as an artist in 1950’s San Francisco, and his discovery of Zen through Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who became Mel’s teacher. The larger portion of the book is a collection of Mel's wonderful dharma talks and his down-to-earth expression of "ordinary mind."

What Do We Really Want?

“What Do We Really Want” is the final subsection in Chapter 4, “The Long Road Home,” from my most recent book, Death: the End of Self-Improvement. It’s about what happened on another Zen sesshin back in the 1980s with another Zen teacher, Maurine Stuart. Maurine was a concert pianist before she became a Zen teacher. She taught at the Cambridge Buddhist Association in Massachusetts, but this sesshin took place at Green Gulch Zen farm in California. She knew she was dying of cancer at the time, but she was full of energy. Here it is:

What really matters? What do I most deeply want? These are wonderful questions to live with and explore. Many decades ago, probably in 1989, I attended a seven-day Zen sesshin, or meditation retreat, with the late Maurine Stuart, who was dying at the time from cancer. She gave me that question, what do you really want, as a koan—a question to work with on the retreat.

I spent many days obsessively thinking about the question, twisting and turning in mental anguish, trying to figure out what it was I really wanted. Did I want to stay with Zen or go back to the nontraditional approach I had been pursuing? Did I want to stay in California or move back to New York? Did I want to live in a big city or in the country? Round and round the mind went. What finally became crystal clear, in one of those magical moments of total clarity when the mind stops and the clouds part and you’re simply completely awake to the obvious, what finally became crystal clear is that what really matters, what I most deeply want, is to be fully present and awake right here in this moment, right now, just as it is.

And today, decades later, if I had to give one single key to awakening, it would be that it’s all about Now—not yesterday or tomorrow or forever after—but right here, right now. It’s not about some better or different experience, but rather, it’s here in the immediacy of this experience. And this experience is ever-changing, impossible to capture in any concept, label or storyline. It doesn’t hold still. We never step into the same river twice, and we’re never the same person from one instant to the next. Presence is alive and moving, yet always Here-Now.

When the attention isn’t lost in thought-stories, it doesn’t matter if I’m in the city or the country, if I’m working in an office or living at a Zen Center, if my bank account is big or small, if I’m partnered up or single, rich or poor, writing a book or taking out the garbage. The joy, the love, the freedom is in the presence, the aliveness, not in the particular circumstances or momentary forms that life is taking. All forms are beautiful! All forms are equally an expression of this aliveness, this seamless energy. And all of them are gone in an instant.

We humans spend so much precious time and energy trying to escape the Now. We think we want better weather, a nicer living situation, a different partner, more money, less fatigue, more sex, fewer wrinkles, a different job, more cooperative or successful children, whatever it is we think will make us happy. But every job, partner, location, living situation, and spiritual path has its upside and its downside. The weather is always changing and nothing stays the same. Trying to find happiness in a passing form is inevitably disappointing. That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the passing forms or that we shouldn’t try a different job. But if we think that any of this is what will truly, deeply satisfy the longing of the heart, we are always in for a disillusionment.

— from Death: the End of Self-Improvement

Maurine died in 1990 at the age of sixty-seven. Subtle Sound: The Zen Teachings of Maurine Stuart is a collection of her talks published posthumously.

A few words from another Zen teacher:

We do not see that our life right here, right now, is nirvana. Maybe we think nirvana is a place where there are no problems, no more delusions. Maybe we think nirvana is something very beautiful, something unattainable. We always think nirvana is something very different from our own life. But we must really understand that nirvana is right here, right now.

How is that possible? We can say that our practice is to close the gap between what we think our life is and our actual life… Or more to the point, how can we realize that there is really no gap to begin with?

In zazen [Zen meditation] we do not expect anything. Zazen is not a technique to achieve anything…

Thinking is an abstraction… And since we are born and die seven thousand times in one second, the conditions we think about are already gone. We are thinking about shadows…

— Taizan Maezumi Roshi, from Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice

from my website:

Perhaps what we most deeply want is to simply be here as we are, hearing the birds or the traffic sounds, enjoying a cup of coffee, thinking whatever thoughts are passing through, seeing whatever is being seen, being this breathing, sensing, awaring aliveness, just as it is—not needing anything more or less. Just this. Simple, simple, simple.

What seems to get in the way? Believing that "This isn’t it," that "I’m not okay," that "Something better needs to happen." Thinking that we are separate from the whole and in control, mistaking our conceptual maps for the living reality, resisting what is, seeking happiness somewhere else. But even all of this is nothing more than momentary thoughts and sensations. Nothing is ever really in the way of here-now-being.

We are like waves in the ocean—ever-changing, inseparable movements of a seamless whole that has no center and no periphery. When we imagine that we are separate, feelings of deficiency, dissatisfaction and uneasiness inevitably follow. We search for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense freedom.

— from www.joantollifson.com

Closing Words

Although I had a significant lightbulb moment of insight on that sesshin with Maurine Stuart back in 1989, old habits die hard. It took me many decades for this simple truth to fully sink in, that all we have is right here, right now. I spent many more years still seeking a big awakening event until it got clearer and clearer that this search was all about “me,” the illusory separate self who always feels deficient, and an imagined future event that never arrives. It was a distraction from the only life I actually had, which is always NOW. Thankfully, that search fell away, and I’m no longer spending huge amounts of time daydreaming about a better future.

While Zen practice (or any spiritual path) has many potential benefits, if we’re doing it in a result-oriented way in order to attain benefits, we’re missing the mark. As Mel told me many decades ago, “This isn’t about benefits. It isn’t about getting something or becoming somebody. It’s just this. Nothing else!”

Paradoxically, because we humans can become so confused by our complex dualistic thinking, it often requires a long pathless path and an immense effortless effort and much exploration to undo the knots of confusion, to relax and open the bodymind, and to realize (make real in our own life) the reality of no separation, nowhere to go, and nothing to accomplish. And although this can take many decades, it can only ever happen in the timeless immediacy of NOW. And there is no permanent end, at least in my experience, to delusion. We wake up again and again, and always only NOW.

Enlightenment or freedom or liberation is simply being awake NOW. Not yesterday, tomorrow, or forever after, but NOW. And there is no owner in enlightenment. It’s not a possession, an attainment, a personal accomplishment, a merit badge or anything of the sort. There is no separate “me” who is enlightened, and the very notion of a “permanently enlightened person” is an oxymoron, a delusion from which enlightenment awakens (NOW).

As long as we are looking for enlightenment or nirvana or liberation, we are over-looking it.

Everything is one undivided whole, and nirvana is not other than samsara, but at the same time, there is an immense difference between enlightenment and delusion, or between the freedom and peace of nirvana and the suffering and confusion of being lost in samsara. So, yes, there is a path and a journey of transformation, but it’s not taking us somewhere else. It’s about waking up to what is, right here, right now. Being here now. Being present. Being this open awake presence that has no inside or outside, in which the body-mind-world is one whole undivided happening. Being here with whatever shows up, samsara or nirvana.

There is no end to this awakening journey, just as there is no end to here and now.

There are so many seeming paradoxes when we try to express all of this, but they are only paradoxical to the thinking mind. Presence itself couldn’t be simpler.

Sometimes we use the image of breaking out of a shell: really there is no shell to break out of, and yet we create and seem to be in a shell. Being in this shell is being in hell, so we speak of breaking out of the shell. Of course, while we are in hell, living in hell is our practice. In fact, being present in hell is breaking out of hell.

—Zen teacher Elihu Genmyo Smith

Finally, I just watched this very beautiful video of a Mother’s Day talk by Jiryu Rutschman-Byler, the current abbot of Green Gulch Zen Farm, someone I very deeply love whose talks I’ve shared several times before. This one is a gem:

My books in the order they were written:

Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is

Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues about Nonduality

Nothing to Grasp

Death: The End of Self-Improvement

People often ask me which book I'd recommend first, and I can’t say. They’re all quite different. Nothing to Grasp is a concise articulation of my essential message. Painting the Sidewalk with Water is mainly a collection of talks and dialogs transcribed from my public meetings in the early 2000s. My first book, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life, is a spiritual memoir that focuses largely on my work with Toni Packer, but also includes working with my first Zen teachers, Mel Weitsman and Charlotte Joko Beck, and later discovering Advaita through Nisargadatta, Jean Klein and Gangaji. Awake in the Heartland and Death: The End of Self-Improvement both combine personal stories with expository and poetic prose about nonduality. Death: The End of Self-Improvement, in addition to being about nonduality, is also about aging, dying, and going through cancer.

All my books come from a nondual spiritual perspective, and they all explore questions of identity, free will, addiction, suffering, transformation, awareness and the nature of experience. All my books point to the simplicity and immediacy of right here, right now, just as it is, and they all invite a kind of meditative exploration that is direct, non-methodical, awareness-based and not result-oriented. I write from my own direct experience and insight, but my perspective has been informed by my engagement with Buddhism, Advaita, Christianity, Sufism, radical nonduality and nontraditional inquiry.

Love to all…

“Be still and know that I am God.”

–Psalm 46

Be still and feel what is most subtle, most intimate.

Be still, empty yourself, and discover the ungraspable openness that you are.

In silence and stillness, we may come in touch with an energetic reality that feels spacious, open, boundless, limitless, vast, uncontained, shapeless, empty, ineffable and immensely alive. It has been called formless presence, pure consciousness, primordial awareness, groundlessness, no-thing-ness, but no words can capture it.

Out of this germinal no-thing-ness, the apparently formed world appears, a gift from the formless, a perfume of formless energy or spirit, a waving of the great formless ocean. Go deep into any form—a sound, something seen, a tactile or somatic sensation, a taste, a fragrance—and you find this aliveness, this radiant no-thing-ness. If you see deeply enough, you may find the whole universe in each breath, each sound, each sensation, each momentary appearance, just as if you go deep into any wave, you find the entire ocean and nothing you can grasp.

“Be still and know that I am God.”

I love the word God. But I know that not everyone does.

God, as I mean it, is not some gendered deity up in the sky directing the show, punishing and rewarding us. God is not a thing at all. God is this presence that is infinitely subtle, closer than close, and yet also infinite and boundless—that sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. God is the light of awareness, beholding everything with unconditional love. The late Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk, described God as “emptiness containing infinite possibilities” or “absolute Nothingness.” Another Catholic monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast, calls God the Great Mystery, that which evokes beauty, gratitude and awe. My mother said simply that God is love.

God is a way of seeing, seeing the sacred everywhere, seeing the light in everything, beholding it all from love, from wholeness rather than fragmentation. To awaken is to dissolve into God. When I open to God, immediately there is no me and no God; there is no body in any sense, there is only this ungraspable openness, in which there is no inside or outside.

God is at once my most intimate self, this aware presence here and now, and at the same time, God is transcendent, beyond everything imaginable. God is both indivisible unicity and also a relationship, a dance of lover and beloved, ocean and wave, oneness and multiplicity, form and emptiness, personal and impersonal, human and divine, embodied and uncontained—the inseparable polarities that are not one, not two. Prayer or meditation is a kind of dialog, a way of listening to myself and the whole universe. It has been said that the apparently formed universe is God speaking, or God listening to God, but this that we call God is truly impossible to define or pin down.

“Be still and know that I am God.”

Be still and know that there is only God.

Be still. Step out of the thought-realm. Stop trying to figure it all out or argue this way or that. Return to what is simple and obvious. Breathe. Feel what is most intimate. Empty yourself and know that all there is, is this ungraspable openness. Feel how this all-inclusive unicity or no-thing-ness is what you are and what everything is. It’s all God. There is only God.

Which means, everything is sacred, everything is the Holy Reality. Devotion to God is devotion to the wind, the rain, the chair across the room, the refrigerator, the wall, the beloved dog or cat, all the plants and animals, lizards and insects, the stars, the planets, the toilet paper, the garbage can, the ostomy bag, the sidewalk, the cup of coffee, the light everywhere, the moments of ecstasy and joy, the moments of sorrow and grief, the moments of restlessness and agitation, the moments of darkness and distress, the weapons of mass destruction, all the cruelty and ignorance that is most in need of love, the whole universe, and the silent presence, the stillness, the spirit, the wholeness at the core of our being, boundless and beholding it all, subtler than anything perceivable or conceivable, the sacred mystery that we are and that everything is.

And if the word ‘God’ doesn’t work for you—and I understand that for many people it doesn’t—substitute a word that does. The word isn’t important, although certain words seem to open a door in our hearts, and for me, God is such a word, which is why I use it sometimes. But if it does the opposite for you, let it go and find a word or a pointer that opens your heart. That’s what matters.

“The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.”

— Julian of Norwich

(Julian was a medieval Christian mystic whose writings are the earliest surviving English-language works attributed to a woman. She is also known for saying, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," and "God is nearer to us than our own soul.")

David Williams, whose photograph begins this post, is a Scottish photographer whose work often explores nonduality. David notes in his writing that all the words about nonduality (oneness, not two, non-separation, unicity, wholeness) are ultimately pointing to love.

I almost used a different photograph of David’s at the beginning of this post, a photograph of an empty monastery chapel that to me evokes stillness, simplicity, silence, beauty, love, devotion, light, radiance, the sacred, God and the mystery of lover and beloved. That photograph, like the chapel it depicts, invites silence, stillness and contemplation. I’ll leave you with that one:

Love to all…

Freedom can only happen NOW, but paradoxically, it may take time

Many people, hearing that “This is it,” and “Nothing needs to happen,” and “Everything is perfect just as it is,” are understandably frustrated, especially if they are suffering from such things as depression, anxiety, panic attacks or addiction, or if they’ve been seeking some kind of awakening for decades that apparently hasn’t happened. It’s also not uncommon to have thoughts such as, “How can all the wars and injustices in the world be perfect?” or “In the face of environmental devastation, how can it be true that nothing needs to happen?”

What’s happening in this kind of frustration and confusion is a mixing up of relative and absolute perspectives, and also a deeply rooted habitual tendency to postpone what can only happen or be recognized right now in this very instant.

The freedom I’m pointing to isn’t about arriving at a permanent experience of feeling good all the time, nor is it fundamentally about ending any of those things that feel problematic or troubling. It’s ultimately about waking up to being the wholeness, the openness, that includes every experience. It is the end of needing life to be other than how it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t still address relative problems such as depression or addiction, but it’s the realization that everything is included in this ungraspable openness of being. In that sense, everything is perfect just as it is, even the relative imperfections. In the absolute sense, this freedom is never absent, even if it is unrecognized. But in the relative sense, it can certainly feel absent.

The only time waking up from a painful delusion can happen, and the only time an addiction or a compulsion can stop, is NOW. But when a delusion or an addiction stops NOW, that doesn’t mean it won’t pop back up again. And that’s why, paradoxically, although liberation can only happen NOW, it may also take time.

Deeply ingrained habits have a way of reappearing. And by habits, I especially mean the deep-seated beliefs that "This isn't it," and "I'm not okay," and "Something needs to happen," along with resisting and grasping and seeking a future breakthrough, and thinking and feeling that this is all happening “to me,” and that “I” am the author of my thoughts and actions and should be doing a much better job.

Of course, we naturally want to end suffering, and we feel the suffering in what we think of as “my body” or “my mind,” so it is interpreted as being personal. In the words of Nisargadatta Maharaj, we “take delivery” of what is actually an impersonal movement of the whole universe.

And, of course, the myriad forms of human pain are not always resolved simply by “waking up” from delusional, dualistic thought patterns and beliefs. In many cases, all kinds of other factors are involved that need to be addressed. In everyday relative reality, there is certainly a place for psychotherapy, medicine, social reform, addiction recovery and other healing modalities. I’ve benefited from all of these, and they are all included in the perfection of this moment.

I find it helpful to distinguish between the pain and painful circumstances that are an inevitable part of life and the unnecessary suffering that comes from how we think about and respond to them.

In THIS very instant, suffering can completely end. But it rarely ends permanently. And so, thought projects an imagined future when it might end permanently, and that imaginary future becomes a distraction from the only time and place when it can ACTUALLY end, which is HERE-NOW, in this very instant.

Thought is very seductive, convincing and persistent. It will continue to pull the attention out of the actual and into the conceptual and the imaginary. Waking up involves a growing sensitivity to how this happens. Over time, and always only NOW, an ability gradually develops to catch these thoughts as they arise, before they completely hypnotize and mesmerize us, to see through the stories they tell and the conclusions they assert, to let them go, to relax and open and simply be, right here, right now. And as we begin to taste the freedom of simple presence, of simply being here, just as we are, it becomes easier and easier to return to this openness.

This requires patience, because consciousness gets seduced again and again by its own creations. And any thoughts about wanting this to stop forever are simply more hypnotic seductions pointing to a fantasized future that never arrives.

It’s important to notice that consciousness is being hypnotized by its own creations, and that the “me” who seems to be the one being hypnotized is really only a mirage-like creation that consciousness is dreaming up, a spontaneous thought posing as “me” and “taking delivery” after the fact. In everyday speech, and even in this article, personal pronouns may still be used for grammatical convenience, but it’s important to realize that the apparently separate, encapsulated “me” is an activity of consciousness, much like the main character in a dream, or we could say, it is an ever-changing relationship of infinite interdependent causes and conditions, “a net of jewels in which each is only the reflection of all the others in a fantastic interrelated harmony without end,” as Ramesh Balsekar put it in his variation on Indra’s Net. The “self” who seems to be at the center cannot be found and has no actual independent or persisting existence. None of this is personal in the way thought tells us it is.

Another thing dualistic thought does is to regard “openness” as the desirable, spiritually correct condition and “lost in thought” as the undesirable, spiritually backward condition. Once it has conceptually split reality in two, it then fabricates the story of “me” who is going back and forth between these two conditions, alternately “getting it” and then “losing it.” Thought projects a goal of “me” stabilizing permanently in the “open, free, happy, enlightened state,” never again being seduced into “delusion.” A new and improved, permanently awakened “me” (a “me” free of “me”) is the ideal we strive to attain. And then there is endless frustration and disappointment as this fails to materialize, and more stories about “me” the failure, or “me” who will never get it, or “me” who is very close, but not quite all the way “there” yet. And, of course, all of this is just more and more layers of the same old habitual hamster wheel. It’s all thought and imagination.

Right NOW, in this instant, there is simply the caw-caw-caw of the crow, the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the traffic, the woof-woof of a dog, the colors and shapes, tastes and smells of this moment, the bodily sensations, the felt-sense of breathing, the cool breeze on the skin—not those words, but the bare experiencing of this, in which there is no division into subject and object, seer and seen, here and there, inside and outside. It is one undivided immediacy.

Of course, we can’t stop the interpretive, pattern-seeking functioning that is part of this whole happening, and that functioning instantly in-forms us that the caw-caw-caw is “a crow,” and that the crow is “up in the sky,” and the yellow shape passing by is “a school bus,” and the tingling is “neuropathy in my left foot,” and the woof-woof is coming from “the dog who lives across the street,” and so on. We don’t need to resist or stop any of that, and in fact we can’t, but we don’t need to cling to it either. It has its obvious usefulness and necessity in everyday functioning. But it’s possible to feel the sensations and listen to the sounds as pure sensation and pure sound, even as the labels “crow” or “dog” pass through the mind.

We can also notice both the uniqueness of everything that appears and also the wholeness in which everything is included as one whole seamless picture, a moving picture, a seamless movie with ever-unfolding kaleidoscopic variations that never depart from the presence or immediacy of the immovable screen of here-now awareness, one whole consciousness dreaming endlessly varied dreams, one undivided ocean waving in infinitely unique ways while never departing from itself.

In the movie of waking life, I’ve been at this exploration for many decades. I first read Alan Watts, sat zazen (Zen meditation), took a class on Vedanta and Zen, read the Bhagavad Gita and various Zen texts, and took lots of really pure LSD back in college in the Sixties. I’m now closing in on my 78th birthday. In the decades in between I spent time with many teachers in many different traditions, did countless silent retreats, attended many satsangs, read many books, watched many videos, and even became a sort of non-teacher teacher myself, albeit I don’t use the word teacher to describe myself, nor do I regard anyone I meet with as students.

I see us all as inseparable, choiceless movements of this inconceivable, indivisible, seamless, boundless presence, exploring and discovering together as one whole happening. Each of us is a unique expression in my view, and no one knows what anyone else needs, but we can look and listen together and see what emerges.

In many ways, I still consider myself a beginner. But at the same time, a lot has fallen away, a lot has clarified. There is a deep and abiding sense of this open, vast spaciousness that has no center and no periphery. At times this recedes into the background, and attention seems to narrow and fall momentarily into the hypnotic trance of being “me,” the separate self who perhaps at that moment feels slighted, mistreated, frustrated, misunderstood or otherwise threatened, the “me” who needs to be right and win an argument, the “me” who defends itself and maybe speaks harshly in anger, and sometimes the body feels contracted and uneasy. But the meta story that all of that shouldn’t be happening anymore doesn’t seem to arise. It’s simply cloudy or stormy weather moving through.

Things have gotten simpler and simpler, more and more ordinary, although the ordinary endlessly reveals itself as extraordinary. I’m no longer seeking final enlightenment, or imagining that I either have it or don’t have it. But I’m still exploring, still discovering new nuances, still refining, still sometimes being surprised, still sometimes getting confused. And although my various forms of neurosis and imperfection have not all disappeared forever, I’m at peace with being as I am.

And maybe that’s what we most deeply want, to simply be here as we are, free from the illusion of separation, solidity and encapsulation—hearing the birds or the traffic sounds, enjoying a cup of coffee, thinking whatever thoughts are passing through, seeing whatever is being seen, being this breathing, sensing, awaring aliveness—not needing anything more or less. Just this. Simple, simple, simple.

A message I loved from Wayne Liquorman:

This is the “Message from Wayne” in the April 30 Advaita Fellowship Newsletter :

Hello my loves,

This Living Teaching of Advaita is fundamentally about space.

Not space as an idea, but space as reality—the unresisting openness in which everything appears. The space to be exactly as you are, without the need for correction, without the need for improvement. And equally, the space for others to be as they are, without the burden of your expectations laid upon them.
In that space, something relaxes. What once felt contracted—tightened around the sense of being a separate, independent entity—begins to loosen.

As it softens, the world opens.
This is sometimes called expansion, though nothing is actually expanding. It is simply the absence of contraction. And in that absence, there can be the experience of freedom.

This is not the freedom the mind imagined. Not the freedom to get what you want, or to arrange life according to your desires. Not the marketed promise of manifesting outcomes and bending reality to your will.

This is a quieter freedom.
The freedom to be as you are.

Nothing has to be added. Nothing has to be removed. Nothing has to be controlled.

What is here is This—unbound and unburdened.

May it find you now.

With much love,
Wayne

— Wayne Liquorman

Barry Magid is on Substack Now

Barry Magid, a Zen teacher and psychoanalyst in NYC whom I’ve mentioned and quoted many times now has a Substack: https://substack.com/@ordinarymindzendo. There are already many great articles posted there, transcribed from Barry’s talks. I very much appreciate and resonate with his perspective and his work, and I highly recommend this Substack. Barry and I were both students of (Charlotte) Joko Beck, and Barry is one of her dharma successors. He is one of my favorite contemporary Zen teachers. For him, Zen is not about detaching from life, purifying oneself, or being some kind of unchanging awareness impervious to the vulnerability and messiness of life. He speaks of Zen as “fundamentally nondualistic, anti-essentialist, and anti-transcendent.” He sees it as a religious practice, and to him, religious means “moment to moment reverence and awe, and the kind of attention that treats ordinary things as extraordinary and worthy of that kind of attention.” Instead of trying to fix ourselves or transcend our humanity, Barry invites us to be just as we are. He has some great books as well, such as Nothing Is Hidden, which I also very highly recommend. (I suppose the Substack might include material by other teachers at Ordinary Mind Zendo as well, I don’t know, but what I’ve seen so far is from Barry.)

Update on Zooms

I’ve taken the last two months off from holding individual Zoom meetings because of the ostomy repair surgery I had in March and the recovery from it. I was imagining that I’d be back to holding Zooms by May, but I’ve decided to take this month off as well in order to devote myself more fully to getting this body back in shape now that I’m finally cleared to resume my core-strengthening and full physical fitness and stretching routines. I’ll be working with a physical therapist several times a week as well.

I do seem to be writing quite a lot, and that may continue—I never know because I do it only when it wants to happen. Since it doesn’t follow any set schedule, writing is much less constraining than Zoom meetings, which involve scheduling appointments and showing up at set times. Right now I’m enjoying being free from those constraints, and that freedom is definitely helping my recovery. So, no Zoom meetings until at least June. Please wait until then to contact me about scheduling them.

Donations Welcome:

I’ve chosen not to monetize my Substack so that it is free to everyone, but donations are very much appreciated if you are so moved. There is a “donate” link on my Substack home page and a donate button at the bottom of my website home page.

Deep gratitude to all of you who have donated and supported my work in so many ways. Thank you! 🙏

My books, listed in the order they were written, earliest on top:

Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is

Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues about Nonduality

Nothing to Grasp

Death: The End of Self-Improvement

Read more about them all HERE.

Love to all…

Freedom from the illusion of separation, solidity, encapsulation and personal free will

Perhaps what we most deeply want is simply to be here, free from these powerful illusions that generate so much suffering—simply hearing the birds or the traffic sounds, enjoying a cup of coffee, breathing, thinking whatever thoughts are arising, seeing whatever is being seen—at ease with life as it is, knowing that nothing can be other than how it is in this moment, not needing anything more or less.

We are like waves in the ocean—ever-changing, inseparable movements of a seamless indivisible whole, and every wave includes the whole ocean. This one bottomless moment is ever-changing in appearance while never departing from the ever-present immediacy of here-now. The appearances vanish automatically as soon as they appear—they self-liberate as some traditions say—and there is peace in the simple immediacy of being alive, just as we are.

Thought poses as “me” and claims to be the thinker-chooser-doer, but no such entity can actually be found. Our thoughts, behaviors and apparent choices arise as movements of the whole. When we take it all personally and believe that we are small and separate and in control of our lives, feelings of deficiency, anxiety, guilt, blame, confusion and dissatisfaction inevitably follow.

Liberation from this kind of suffering can never happen in the future. It can only happen now, in the simple recognition that absolutely nothing needs to happen or not happen. Both the apparent suffering and the one who longs to be free are ephemeral appearances with no actual substance. All there is in every passing wave of experience, however it may appear, is the seamless indivisible ocean.

This "indivisible ocean" has been called by many names—consciousness, presence, awareness, intelligence-energy, God, unicity, the universe, the ground, the Tao, emptiness, groundlessness, no-thing-ness, one-without-a-second—but no name can capture the ungraspable openness of being. It is not a thing at all.

Recognizing the non-substantial, evanescent, impersonal nature of every passing experience and the absence of any separate, persisting, independent “me” at the center of the whole show is profoundly liberating.

It is profoundly liberating to recognize that all our urges, desires, impulses, intentions, interests, preferences, abilities, choices, decisions, thoughts and actions are impersonal movements of the whole, that the “me” who seems to be the thinker-decider-observer-chooser-doer is a kind of mirage that vanishes when we look closely.

By giving open attention to the actual experiential unfolding of thoughts, actions, choices and decisions, it is discovered that they all happen choicelessly, even the ones that involve carefully weighing options or extensive planning—each step in the weighing and planning process arises from an unfindable source.

None of this means that apparent decisions, intentions, choices and plans won’t continue to happen. They will! And conventionally speaking, in everyday life, we will still say that, “I decided to have lasagna for dinner,” or “You need to do your homework,” or “I realized that I had a serious addiction to alcohol, so I decided to go into a recovery program, and I stopped drinking, and now I maintain a discipline that supports my recovery.”

But if we truly see how reality is, it will be clear that this “I” who seems to be initiating and planning and doing all of this is not what we think it is. “I” is only a figure of speech, a grammatical convention, an idea, a mental image. No “me” can actually be found at the center of our experience. There is no separate, independent entity with free will running the show. That would be as absurd as imagining that a wave in the ocean can go whichever way it decides to go, independently of the ocean.

This mirage of “me” is generated by an ever-changing mix of thoughts, sensations, memories, ideas and mental images combined with aware presence. In fact, the whole universe or the dreaming consciousness is doing (or imagining) all of it: planning dinner, discipling our children, recognizing a problem, thinking about a solution, taking action, succeeding or failing to achieve the desired outcome. It’s all happening choicelessly by itself, even the apparent choosing.

Realizing the choiceless and impersonal nature of everything that happens frees us from guilt, blame, false pride, and many other painful and destructive feelings that arise when we believe that we are separate and in control of our lives, and that everyone else is in control of their lives, and that we all could and should be doing a much better job. Recognizing the impersonal nature of everything gives us compassion for ourselves and everyone else when we fall short of our ideals.

We could say that the whole movie of waking life, including the central character we identify as “me,” is very much like a nighttime dream, and in a dream, the dream character is not writing or directing the show. The dream character doesn’t even really exist. The entire dream world is a movement of the dreaming consciousness, and none of the apparent objects or events exist outside of the dream. Or, alternatively, we could say that everything that happens is the result of infinite, interdependent causes and conditions. But any way we describe, map or formulate the living actuality is only a map or a description.

The living reality itself is ungraspable, unpindownable and unresolvable into any kind of static “thing” that can objectified, labeled and filed away in the knowledge bank. It is what we are and all there is. Just as the eye cannot see itself, there is no way to step outside of unicity and observe it as an object. It is all-inclusive and nondual. There is no inside or outside, no self or not-self, no other.

Unicity is eternal, which means timeless, ever-present, NOW. It is infinite, which means all-inclusive, boundless, limitless, HERE. This NOW-HERE is all there is. Have you noticed? There is no way to step outside of this. It cannot be objectified, although any words we use to point to it do seem to do just that, so we have to use words lightly. We habitually want something to grasp, something to hold onto, but in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense freedom.

At first, we may take all this in as an interesting idea, a possibility. Maybe we find it comforting and turn it into a belief and cling to it, and then eventually we begin to doubt it, because doubt is always the shadow side of belief. Maybe we immediately find it threatening and disagree with it, building a case against it. But maybe we are moved to live with this possibility, to try it out, to investigate our actual experiencing, to feel into it, to look and see.

And of course, all such possibilities (believing, doubting, disagreeing, agreeing, investigating, exploring) are impersonal movements of that great shoreless ocean that goes by so many names: unicity, the universe, the Tao, consciousness, awareness, presence, intelligence-energy, God, the ground of being, emptiness, groundlessness, no-thing-ness, one-without-a-second, the unnamable. Many words pointing to this aliveness, right here, right now, utterly immediate. Before the words, during the words, as the words, after the words—EVERYTHING is included. There is nothing that is not THIS—this unfathomable wholeness. It is both ungraspable and inescapable.

There are no mistakes. There is no way to fail. This can’t be lost (or found). Of course, in everyday relative reality, in the dream-like movie of waking life, there are many apparent mistakes needing correction. The character in the movie can still see a therapist, treat a cancer, practice yoga or meditation, recover from an addiction, march for peace and justice, apologize for a hurtful remark, or change a flat tire.

And I’m never suggesting that we can or should ignore or dismiss the everyday relative dimension of reality. It’s real enough. But when we know it for what it is, it can be experienced in a different way, with much less suffering and more ease. And in the bigger picture, every mistake and every apparent imperfection is perfectly placed. There’s no way to get it wrong. There’s no “me” separate from the whole.

And this is never what we think it is, because thought conceptually divides, abstracts and freezes what is actually indivisible, immediate, and never the same way for even an instant. And yet, even thinking, conceptualizing, abstracting and dividing are also nothing other than unicity showing up as apparent thinking, conceptualizing, abstracting and dividing. The map is not the territory it represents, and yet, mapping is something the territory is doing. All there is in every passing wave of experience, however it may appear, is the seamless indivisible ocean.

What a huge relief!

A word about repetition

The same words and phrases appear again and again in my writing, the same essential messages are expressed over and over, and yet, as with the variations on a theme in music, they may be worded slightly differently each time, or the context may be different. My teacher and friend Toni Packer gave essentially the same six talks over and over on every retreat, at least in terms of subject matter, and yet, each time it was fresh and new because the listening presence and the speaking presence are alive here-now. As an old friend recently said, how can there be repetition or “I've heard all this before,” when one is hearing it right now?

Love to all…

My last post highlighted radical nonduality, and now I want to highlight a seemingly very different perspective, with which I also deeply resonate. We might imagine that one of these must be right and the other wrong, but my path has again and again involved keeping an open mind and not landing on either side of apparent opposites.

So is there a path leading to liberation or is liberation simply what is, just as it is? Is liberation from imaginary bondage effortless or does it require effort and discipline? Is there any kind of free will? Or is everything a choiceless movement of an indivisible whole? Rather than holding tight to whatever we already believe, is it possible to look freshly starting from the openness of not knowing and not being certain? Is it possible that seemingly contradictory pointers or formulations might both be true, that we might perhaps need different approaches or perspectives at different moments in our lives?

In my work, meditation, exploration and inquiry have always been included. And I do see a place for structure and discipline—as I have experienced through meditation, Zen and martial arts. Yes, I deeply appreciated the relief I found in radical nonduality and letting some (or sometimes all) of that go. For me, that letting go was profoundly liberating. But it wasn’t the end of the road.

As I said in my previous article, I’ve seen how that radical perspective in which nothing is needed can be adopted conceptually as a new kind of facile fundamentalist dogma. When people are approaching all this exclusively through the intellect or the thinking mind, when they are filled with old ideas they don’t even realize they have, when they perhaps haven’t worked with a good teacher or spent time sitting quietly and attending to the moment-to-moment actuality of this ever-changing body-mind-world in a nonconceptual way, then the message of radical nonduality can easily be picked up as simply a new ideology or belief system. It can all too easily become a form of spiritual by-passing, avoidance, self-justification, simplistic thinking, etc. So I do see a place for structure, discipline, practice and teachers, although I’m not saying that everyone needs all these things just because I did. And I also see a place for letting all that go! There isn’t just One Right Way.

When effort is needed, effort will appear. When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself. You need not push life about. Just flow with it and give yourself completely to the task of the present moment.

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

My life was profoundly changed in so many positive ways by the many long silent meditation retreats I did in Zen, and with Toni Packer, and later with other Buddhist teachers, and with Advaita teachers such as Jean Klein and Francis Lucille—and also by the years spent practicing martial arts—all of which involved structure and discipline. And today, in order to keep my body as mobile as possible and in the least amount of pain possible, I need to be very disciplined about going to the fitness center, stretching every day, working out, walking, etc. Sitting in formal meditation every day, as I usually do, makes a significant difference in my state of mind throughout the day, and not doing so has a different, less desirable, effect. I’ve experienced in many ways throughout my life how the absence of structure and discipline can bring forth suffering.

Sitting in silence, attending to present moment experiencing, watching how suffering is created and what releases it, it became very clear that there is no separate self and that most of our thinking and behavior occurs automatically with no choice involved at all. But there was also a deep realization of the transformative power of awareness and how attention (or mindfulness) can illuminate and interrupt the mechanistic chain reaction of conditioned thought and behavior, dissolving habitual suffering and confusion and allowing something fresh and new to emerge. Open attention is not about using will power or fighting negative habits. It begins with the total nonjudgmental acceptance of what is, seeing it clearly, and allowing conditioned habits to release naturally in the light of awareness. It also opens us to a bigger context, the vast spaciousness and unconditional love beholding it all.

I want to share two things with you by two other teachers whom I greatly respect. The first is some excerpts from a Substack article written by Damien Echols and published on the same day I published my article on radical nonduality. The other is a video of a talk by Brother Phap Linh, a monk in the lineage of Thich Nhat Hanh, that came to my attention right after publishing that article on radical nonduality.

Damien Echols is a writer, public speaker, ordained Zen Buddhist, black belt in Tang Soo Do/Korean Karate, and a man who has been to hell and back. He was one of three teenagers known as the West Memphis Three who were falsely convicted of a horrific triple murder back in 1994. Damien spent 18 years on death row in solitary confinement before finally being released in 2011. While in there, he was subjected to torture by the guards. There are two excellent documentaries about the case, West of Memphis and Paradise Lost. During the years he was in prison, Damien practiced Buddhist mediation and high magick (the kind involving deep transformation, not the kind that pulls rabbits out of hats). He writes in a way that I find very grounded, real and powerful. He has written and published several books, and a new one is coming out in September, The Alchemy of the Broken Blade: Forging Inner Transformation from the Fire of Experience. He writes a wonderful Substack to which I subscribe and which I very highly recommend.

This article was for paid subscribers, but with his permission, I’m excerpting some of the main points:

The Five Most Important Lessons in Life

by Damien Echols

The Five Most Important Lessons in Life: (1) Presence, (2) Discipline Is Liberation, Not Restriction, (3) Transformation Requires Fire, (4) The Divine Is Found in the Ordinary, (5) The Enemy Is Always the Self —

On death row, when I had nothing left to cling to, I discovered that presence was the only refuge. My mind wanted to drag me into memories of what was taken from me, or into fears of what would come next. But when I focused on a single breath, or the sensation of my body on the bunk, or the sound of distant footsteps echoing down the tier, something changed. The prison disappeared, if only for a moment. I wasn’t bound by the story of my life. I was infinite.

This is the core of all real alchemy: to transform your perception until the ordinary becomes sacred. Not through rituals, not through exotic tools, but through radical presence.

The ego… wants the freedom to indulge every distraction, every craving, every whim. But what most people call freedom is really slavery - enslavement to impulses, to habits, to conditioning. True freedom only comes through discipline.

In Zen, you sit every day, whether you feel like it or not. In Tang Soo Do, you show up to train, even when your muscles ache or your spirit feels broken… Discipline removes the tyranny of chaos… Paradoxically, structure opens the gates to liberation. The cage was never discipline. The cage was your undisciplined mind.

Most people flee fire. They cling to comfort. They want spirituality to be soothing, not searing. But without fire, nothing transforms…

My life has been one long encounter with fire: wrongfully condemned to die, beaten, starved, deprived, abandoned. For years I thought this was punishment, meaningless cruelty. But eventually I saw it differently. Fire was the forge. It stripped me down, shattered illusions, and forced me to decide: would I collapse into bitterness, or would I allow the fire to refine me?… Every time you endure suffering without fleeing, every time you lean into pain with awareness instead of numbing it, you feed the fire of transformation. What feels unbearable now becomes the fuel that purifies you. There is no other way.

In martial arts, the hardest opponent is not the person across from you… it’s the part of yourself that wants to quit. In alchemy, the shadow is your real adversary - laziness, fear, excuses, self-deception. In Zen, the restless monkey-mind is the battlefield. In magick, the demons you face are projections of your own untransformed self.

We love to project our struggles outward. We blame systems, enemies, fate. However, most people are defeated not by the world, but by their own inertia. They quit when things get uncomfortable. They make excuses. They sabotage their own progress.

– Excerpted from The Five Most Important Lessons in Life by Damien Echols

Something else he wrote that I love:

People think of Zen as a path that leads somewhere… to some distant state of consciousness called “enlightenment” that they’ll reach if they practice long enough, read enough, or understand enough. Zen is not a path to enlightenment. It is the practice of it. It begins the moment you stop trying to become something else. Enlightenment isn’t rare or exotic. It isn’t reached through rituals or found inside sacred texts or holy books. It’s just being here, fully, without reaching for anything beyond what’s already present.

Over and over, Zen brings us back to direct experience. No reliance on doctrine, no dependence on ceremony… just attention. Just presence. The moment you stop searching for something more, you realize there was never anything missing.

— Damien Echols

“Mindfulness Is Free Will”

Those are the words of the late Thich Nhat Hanh, the revered Vietnamese Buddhist monk who founded Plum Village in France. I first heard these words just the other day in this talk by Br. Phap Linh, a monk at Plum Village who is also a musician. Before ordaining, Br. Phap Linh studied mathematics at Cambridge and worked professionally as a composer. He is passionate about exploring how meditators and scientists can learn from each other and open new paths of healing and discovery, and this talk was part of a retreat with scientists at Plum Village. Br. Phap Linh stresses having an open mind and not being certain. His talk covers some basic Buddhism in a way I found illuminating and beautiful, it questions whether we are entirely conditioned biological machines or whether there is any kind of free will, and it reminded me that “no free will” is one side of the coin, and the transformative power of awareness is the other side. It’s a lovely talk, just over an hour.

And finally, some closing words from another person whose expression I love:

Choice implies consciousness – a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind… Presence is the key. The Now is the key.

—Eckhart Tolle

Love to all…