Abiding Nowhere

Enjoying Ordinary Life

“Abiding nowhere, the heart-mind comes forth” is one translation of a famous line from the Diamond Sutra. It’s a pointer beyond belief, fixation and dogmatism. And importantly, it is meant to apply to right NOW.

Abiding nowhere, depending on no-thing, the truth of this moment reveals itself. Try to grab hold of this living truth, concretize it, pin it down, or turn it into a belief, and you’re in the realm of delusion, suffering and confusion. This moment has never been here before and it will never be here again. It can’t be grasped.

And yet here it is, not hidden in any way. Ultimate reality is right here—these little squiggles on a screen unfolding magically into meaning, the sounds of traffic, the ache in the knee, the smell of rain-drenched air, the spring breeze, the exhaust fumes from the city bus, the tumor, the chemotherapy drip, the cars on the freeway, the barking dog, the listening presence. THIS is the holy reality, all of it. Nothing is lacking, nothing needs to be other than exactly how it is.

On the Home page of my website, I say: “We habitually search for special experiences, for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is an immense openness and freedom—the freedom for everything to be just as it is. What is offered here invites firsthand exploration and direct discovery, not belief or dogma. There is no finish-line, no formula, no method, only this inexplicable aliveness, just as it is.” 

Of course, belief can creep in, and none of us are immune from this. Many spiritual teachers have an entire metaphysics that neatly resolves all questions with the closure of authority: this is how it is—and they seem to be 100% certain. I’m always relieved when I find other author/speakers besides myself in the spiritual world who seem willing to change their minds or admit uncertainty, or say that some of what they’ve said before was wrong.

I’ve always liked Zen because it doesn’t land anywhere. It won’t say it is, and it won’t say it isn’t. I appreciate that the Buddha refused to answer metaphysical questions. I’m much more interested in noticing what brings forth happiness and what creates unnecessary suffering than I am in trying to imagine or nail down how the whole universe works. I view the latter endeavor as being above my pay grade. I’m not concerned about life after death either. I’m concerned with being alive now. I have always been adverse to belief-based spirituality. For me, what I mean by spirituality is experiential and alive. And it’s not about transcending this messy human life and ascending up up and away into some pure unstained consciousness. I have a great appreciation for how Zen teacher Barry Magid in NYC is always railing against transcendent spirituality, capital letters (Awareness, Truth, etc) and curative fantasies. Like him, my focus tends to be down to earth, although I’m probably slightly more open to the transcendent than Barry is. After all, I have a soft spot for Mooji.

But I’ve long questioned the notion that some unchanging background is what’s Real, and that what changes is unreal, or that we are pure consciousness and not the body. Again, I’m more aligned with Zen in this regard than I am with Advaita. I do have a deep sense of the wholeness and the no-thing-ness of everything, and I don’t feel that I am encapsulated inside the body, or that we are all separate bubbles of consciousness walled off from one another. And I certainly can in any moment tune into the felt-sense of being open spacious unbound presence-awareness, or even the germinal darkness prior to consciousness, but in spite of all such experiential realizations, I recognize my epistemological limits as a human being.

“It is quite possible," Sam Harris writes, "to lose one’s sense of being a separate self and to experience a kind of boundless, open awareness—to feel, in other words, at one with the cosmos.” To which he adds, “This says a lot about the possibilities of human consciousness, but it says nothing about the universe at large.” Yes! Very important insight! In my opinion, too many spiritual teachers take a huge metaphysical leap from very real and palpable experiences to a certainty about how the whole universe operates. The experiences are undeniable, but the conclusions drawn (e.g., that consciousness is all there is) are questionable. The same with near death experiences—they are undeniably real and transformative experiences, but the certainty about how and when they happen and what they mean is very questionable.

I’ve never been entirely comfortable as a spiritual teacher, albeit I don’t call myself that, but still, I write books and meet with people, and the whole enterprise often makes me uneasy—usually not when I’m actually meeting with someone, but often when I think about it. I’m aware of how organized spirituality can become something very dead and oppressive, and I continue to notice what my iconoclastic friends Robert Saltzman and Shiv Sengupta call the “spiritual industry” and the “spiritual culture” that arises as genuine, fresh experiences and insights get codified and marketed, especially in a materialistic, profit-driven society. What starts out as alive and true morphs into something else entirely. That’s one of the things discussed by Shiv and Robert in their recent YouTube video that I’ve linked to below. My encounters with spiritual culture have been different from theirs, and having been with some truly wonderful teachers with real integrity, and having lived in a very open-minded and non-authoritarian spiritual community, I’m not as down on the whole scene as Robert and Shiv are. But I do see the ways that organized spirituality can be dysfunctional, even at times in the best cases, and downright abusive in the worst cases.

It’s an occupational hazard as a spiritual teacher to secretly get off on being “the one in the know” sitting at the front of the room answering everyone’s questions while pretending to no longer have an ego—it’s a seductive role. And on the flip side, students and seekers are often in search of a divine parent or an infallible authority who can tell them what’s going on and what they need to do. I’ve played both those parts at different moments. It’s very easy for both teachers and students to be seduced and hypnotized by second-hand beliefs, metaphysical conclusions, spiritual hoopla, charismatic people and grandiose claims of enlightenment. When we imagine ourselves separate and encapsulated, we inevitably feel incomplete, vulnerable, deficient and lacking, and that makes us notoriously vulnerable to magical thinking, hypnotic suggestion, group-think, confirmation-bias, comforting beliefs and the promise of having control over our lives. We long for some final resolution to all the messiness, uncertainty and pain of life.

We imagine spiritual enlightenment as a state of unbroken happiness and doubtless certainty. But as Chogyam Trungpa famously said, "Enlightenment is the ultimate and final disappointment," because it turns out to be the recognition that everything is included in this wholeness, even unhappiness and uncertainty—and furthermore, that there is no such thing as an enlightened person. Words like enlightenment point to the dissolution (not yesterday or tomorrow or forever after, but NOW) of that thought-sense of separation and encapsulation, and a waking up to this unbound, all-inclusive, seamless presence that is always already here.

Without the me-story, there is simply this one bottomless moment just as it is, this aliveness, this presence here and now. This presence is not a thing or an object, but rather the no-thing-ness or wholeness of everything—the undeniable is-ness of being. This ungraspable aliveness includes every possible experience and every imaginable state of consciousness. It is a multi-dimensional magic show, continuously changing shape while never departing from the timeless immediacy of here and now. It even includes the me-story.

The “me” (the apparent thinker of my thoughts and maker of my choices, the self-image, the main character in the Story of My Life) is a mirage, but the person (the bodymind organism) is real enough—no need to vanquish or deny it. But it is never actually a solid, separate, persisting thing. It is a flow of experiencing, like a wave or a whirlpool, inseparable from everything it apparently is not. It appears and disappears moment by moment. The flow of experiencing is like a kaleidoscopic Rorschach blot in which the conditioned, pattern-seeking mind “sees” people and trees and dogs and cats. But the actuality is an ungraspable, ever-changing, seamless whole.

Like the changing weather, none of what shows up is personal. Stormy weather doesn’t mean anything about the mirage-like “me,” nor does sunny weather. Just as different cities have different weather patterns, so different individuals have different weather patterns. Our emotional weather is no more personal than the weather in nature—in fact, both are a manifestation of nature. The search for some special grand mystical experience or some abiding state of perpetual clarity and unending happiness dissolves in the recognition that all experiences and states pass, and that what is includes every polarity and possibility, not just the stuff we like.

The thought-sense of being a person comes and goes—sometimes it is a functional necessity in the dynamic play of life, sometimes it is a delusion that brings forth suffering and confusion—but either way, it no longer matters whether it appears or disappears—whatever shows up in this movie of waking life is simply one possible passing shape that this wholeness is momentarily taking. Contracted experiences happen; expanded experiences happen. Moments of joy and moments of anger. It’s all simply passing weather—impersonal and without meaning, even when it seems otherwise.

There is truly nothing to attain and no one to attain it. There is nothing that needs to be (or that can be) removed. There is no one who is bound or lacking. The problem is imaginary. All there is, is THIS here-now that cannot be captured by words, concepts or thoughts.

How is it? What is it? Where did it come from? Where is it going? Why is it here? Anything we say in answer to such questions is make-believe. We are truly clueless, and that’s not bad news. Abiding nowhere, depending on no-thing, the truth of this moment reveals itself. Try to grab hold of it, concretize it, nail it down, reify it, hold onto it, or turn it into a belief, and you’re in the realm of suffering and confusion. THIS can’t be grasped. And yet, even that grasping activity is itself nothing other than this undivided wholeness showing up as that passing appearance, that impersonal weather, happening to no one, meaning nothing.

This realization is freedom. This is “the peace that passeth all understanding,” the peace that includes not feeling peaceful, the peace that includes war and conflict. This is the end of the search for a way out (not forever after, but right NOW). And even if seeking pops up again, no problem—it's simply another passing movement in an endless dance without a dancer.

When we stop trying to answer unanswerable questions, when we stop trying to save or fix the mirage-like “me,” when we let all our beliefs and certainties fall away, when we open to the wonder of what is, there is simply THIS, the ungraspable aliveness of this very moment, just as it is—the no-thing-ness or wholeness that we are and that everything is, endlessly unfolding, revealing, and dissolving back into itself. And even when letting go and opening doesn’t happen, even when there is tension and confusion, that too is simply THIS. Everything is included. Obviously, because it’s all here!

What a relief.

Here’s the YouTube I mentioned, a wide-ranging conversation between Shiv Sengupta and Robert Saltzman on Shiv’s Spiritually Incorrect podcast:

All for now. Love to you all…