An Unfolding Process NOW

Belief doesn't free us; presence does

We hear that everything is the activity of one indivisible whole, and this nondual unicity is given many beautiful names: the Holy Reality, Consciousness, Radiant Presence, God, Buddha Nature, the Beloved, intelligence-energy—names that send the message that it’s all sacred, it’s all in some way okay. We’re invited to notice that what appears is unresolvable, ungraspable, unpindownable, nonsubstantial. It’s all a momentary play of consciousness that never actually forms into anything separate, solid or persisting. Nothing is really happening. Nothing is how it seems or how we think it is.

We may believe this, and we may have experiential glimpses and sometimes a deep realization. And yet, the apparently formed world continues to show up. We find ourselves still getting confused, still feeling lost, still seeking.

We hear that what we are seeking is what we most fundamentally always already are—boundless awareness or radiant presence. No matter what’s happening, it’s all this undeniable presence, like the water in every wave, and it’s all a fleeting, dream-like appearance in undisturbed unbound awareness, like the empty screen underneath the movie. And in any moment we stop and check, this can be confirmed.

But life can still be full of suffering—disabling depression, seemingly unstoppable addictions and compulsions, excruciating physical pain, frightening financial difficulties, homelessness and poverty, grief and despair, our wonderful neighbor being hauled away by masked ICE agents in the middle of the night, the madman in the presidency doing ever more outrageous things, children suffering in war zones, animals enduring a tortured existence on factory farms. In the face of all this, nondual teachings about “Radiant Presence” or “the Beloved” or “Nothing really happening” can sound hollow and meaningless, even disturbing and outrageous when heard conceptually and applied to genocides, war zones and other manifestations of human cruelty and insanity. And of the recognition that aware presence is the common factor in every different experience, thought may say, so what? The thinking mind quickly takes over again.

Belief doesn’t really cut it. Belief is always shadowed by doubt. To make a real difference in our lives, it has to be recognized, realized, seen directly, absorbed deeply. And that’s rarely a one-time occurrence. Why? Because the apparently formed world seems solid and real. The table seems solid, even though modern physics tells us that it really isn’t. And what’s going on in our lives and in the world also feels solid. We lose sight of the ubiquitous and subtle ways we’ve inadvertently confused the map with the territory, our conceptual constructions for the living actuality. We identify as the character in the story of our life. We think, feel and believe that we are a separate entity born into a fractured world of solid, substantial, separate and persisting things.

And no functioning person leaves this relative human perspective behind entirely, at least not for very long. Every nondual teacher I’ve known personally has had opinions about politics, often strong ones, just as I do, and every one of us deals with personal issues and feels emotions. Some of the most deeply awakened teachers have reported that in extreme pain or illness, they lost the nondual perspective and their spiritual grounding entirely. Even Jesus—betrayed, falsely accused, tortured and hanging on the cross—cried out to God, “Why have you forsaken me?”

We’re human (at least apparently), and as humans, we are vulnerable to pain and painful circumstances. And although the human world isn’t what we think it is, it’s still very real as what it appears to be. Its apparently substantial nature is a very convincing illusion if we don’t look too closely. And it’s real enough. Pain really does hurt. And the ego-based thinking mind is endlessly seductive and confusing.

This is why many teachers emphasize vigilance, keeping vigil at the flame of truth, re-turning, again and again, NOW, to the silence, the stillness, the aliveness of this moment. And this is why it’s so important to engage in direct contemplative exploration, whether that’s through meditation, inquiry, yoga or simply paying attention from moment to moment. Waking up from suffering and confusion involves immediate firsthand insight into how the thinking mind confuses and misleads us, discernment about how suffering is generated and where freedom is found, and abidance in what is simplest and most effortless. All of this can only happen now. And the key is always in nonconceptual presence-awareness, not in thought or belief.

Most of us will be strongly pulled into the consensus view of reality at times, and into the thought-sense of being a separate person facing some disturbing situation. For me, it’s been an ongoing koan to reconcile my concern with suffering and injustice with the nondual understanding that none of it really resolves in the ways I think it does, and that ultimately, it’s all an ungraspable movement of the same intelligence-energy, the same boundless presence, the same aliveness that I sometimes call God. To see God in Gaza or factory farming or child abuse is pretty damn challenging, and there’s no way I want to paper any of that over with some feel-good comforting ideology. I need to see that unresolvability directly, for myself. And sometimes I see and feel from that absolute transcendent translucent perspective and sometimes I don’t. So when I don’t, I have to come back again and again to right here, right now. I have to come back to simple presence and to silence, stillness and spaciousness. Knowing nothing, simply being.

The pathless path through the gateless gate isn’t going somewhere bigger and better. It’s about waking up to where we are right now and to what we always already are, aware presence, boundlessness. It’s a recognition, not an attainment. And it rarely happens once and for all.

And there is certainly a clarifying, a stabilizing and a deepening over time, a process in which delusion is less and less compelling, less and less believable, and we are dissolved more and more completely in presence. And perhaps this awakening that many of us are undergoing is part of an evolutionary unfolding in which humanity (or consciousness) is waking up from a false and limited sense of identity and from being bamboozled by our thoughts. Of course, it takes thought and memory to conjure up any story of evolutionary development. All we ever really have is NOW, this one bottomless moment that is ever-changing and ever-present. And that’s the golden key: BE HERE NOW. Be what you cannot not be. Be the awaring presence that you are. Return to silence, to what is closest and most intimate.

Waking up is all about awareness, not just awareness as the ground of being, but awareness as the light behind open attention that can reveal and dissolve the smog of thought and emotion that gets overlaid on top of the inevitable pain and painful circumstances that life offers, thus generating unnecessary suffering. And in my experience, that’s a lifelong, moment to moment, always NOW discovery and realization. There’s no finish-line.

Meditation as I mean it isn’t just sitting on a cushion in silence, although that might be part of it (it is for me). But most importantly, it’s every moment of life. It’s driving on the freeway and using the bathroom, raising children and being at work. It’s seeing how we get upset as it happens, questioning on the spot what we’re defending when we get defensive. It’s tuning into the spaciousness of aware presence. It’s seeing the beauty in everything, seeing from wholeness, seeing from unconditional love, seeing that there is no other. It’s exploring the nature of suffering when it arises.

The gateless gate is Here-Now and nowhere else. Zen Master Dogen said practice isn’t about becoming enlightened; practice is enlightenment, or the expression of enlightenment.

I prefer words like exploration or resting and abiding to the word practice. But Dogen calls it practice, and for him, it was strict Zen practice. For you, it might be something else, maybe something totally unstructured and informal. It doesn’t matter what form it takes or what we call it. Dogen’s burning question was, if everything is Buddha Nature already, why do we need to practice? And that question led him to the realization that practice isn’t about becoming enlightened; practice is enlightenment, or the expression of enlightenment.

My last book was subtitled “The End of Self-Improvement.” But what exactly did I mean by that? There’s a chapter in it called “The Curious Paradox” where I draw a distinction between ego-driven self-improvement and genuine transformation or awakening. I’m sharing that whole chapter below, followed by quotes from a few folks I resonate with, and finally a link to a movie about awakening that I enjoyed.

---

from my book DEATH: The End of Self-Improvement:

The Curious Paradox

You are perfect just as you are, and there’s room for improvement.
—Shunryu Suzuki

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
—Carl Rogers

So, am I suggesting we should all sink into sloth and torpor, conclude that liberation is a pipe dream best abandoned, gorge on junk food for the rest of our lives, and allow such things as disabling depression, destructive addictions, racism, sexism, environmental devastation or animal cruelty to continue unchallenged? Is that the message of this book?

Clearly not. After all, how genuine transformation happens has been one of the main interests of my life. I’ve experienced and seen undeniable positive changes in myself and others through meditation, psychotherapy, somatic awareness work, spirituality and nonduality. I’ve seen positive changes in society as a result of political movements, some of which I’ve participated in. The women’s movement, the gay liberation movement and the disability rights movement have all made my life much easier and less painful. The changes I’ve experienced from inner work include sobering up from near-fatal alcohol and drug use, and leaving behind bouts of depression and such debilitating patterns of emotion-thought as self-doubt, self-hatred and shame. As someone who has spent much of the last four decades writing books and articles, putting on retreats, giving talks, answering emails, and meeting with people about waking up from false beliefs and exploring the possibility being liberated on the spot, it would certainly seem that the alchemy of transformation has been central to my life. Of course, all of what I’ve just described only exists in a story constructed by memory. But relatively speaking, I’m all for positive changes.

Paradoxically, though, every time I’ve gone through therapy or delved deeper into some spiritual path or non-path, what has always emerged front and center at the root of it all is the willingness to be as I am, to be, on the human level, in some sense imperfect, incomplete and unresolved, and to see that this very person, warts and all, is already whole and complete, that this bodymind and everything it thinks and wants and does is a movement of the whole universe. Rather than trying to reach some ultimate perfection of “me,” or some imagined supreme enlightenment, it turns out that true happiness is a matter of simply being Here-Now, which is actually unavoidable; but what can fall away or no longer be believed are the thoughts and stories about this present happening, the interpretations, judgments, and ideals.

Even when people take up meditation to reduce stress and improve well-being, as many people do nowadays, even then, they soon learn that the usual result-oriented, end-gaining approach of trying really hard to get somewhere else—seeking, resisting, evaluating, judging, and so on—doesn’t work. Meditation, even as a wellness practice, begins with allowing everything to be as it is. In a way, even to say “allowing” or “accepting” is saying too much. Everything already is allowed to be as it is—obviously!—because it is as it is. So it’s more like simply acknowledging how it is, being present experiencing, which we already are. It’s not a doing, in other words. It’s more like not doing anything extra. Relaxing. Being what you cannot not be. And as the pathless path unfolds, everything is discovered to be an expression of this radiant presence that we are. Nothing needs to be pushed away or kept out. Everything is spiritual.

An interest in how change happens and the total acceptance of what is may seem like two diametrically opposed movements, but in fact, I have come to see that true healing, transformation and liberation begin with the simple acceptance of this moment and this world, just as it is. As counterintuitive as it may seem, embracing imperfection, allowing everything to be as it is, loving what is—this is the gateless gate to a fresh start and the utterly new. Oddly enough, this is the secret of freedom.

My first Zen teacher, Mel Weitsman, said that “our suffering is believing there’s a way out.” The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa famously said that enlightenment is not final victory, but rather, final defeat. Another one of my Zen teachers, Joko Beck, spoke of Zen as “having no hope.” She also used to say, “What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.” None of these teachers were pointing to a state of despair, resignation or hopelessness, which is the flip side of hope, equally rooted in an imaginary future. Instead, they were pointing to how we can waste our lives in hopeful fantasies and “the pursuit of happiness” while missing the living reality that is Here-Now. We dream of the perfect location, the perfect house, the perfect career, the perfect partner, the perfect child, the perfect enlightenment experience, the perfect self, the perfect society, the perfect world, the perfect present moment—and all the while we are missing out on the actuality and perfection of life as it is.

That doesn’t mean we should all vegetate passively on the couch or be a doormat for abuse. In fact, we cannot suppress or deny our natural desire for exertion and movement, our urge to take action, to respond to life, to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to dance the particular dance that each of us is moved to dance. There is a natural impulse to pursue what attracts us, to heal what is broken, to clarify what is obscure, to explore new territory, to discover and develop and extend our capacities and capabilities, to envision different possibilities, to help others, to bring forth what is within us. Astronomy, quantum physics, going to the gym, learning a foreign language, practicing meditation, playing music, taking up yoga, exploring various forms of awareness work, working for social justice, writing books, making art, raising children, starting a business, planning a trip to Mars, performing brain surgery, climbing mountains, rescuing abandoned cats and dogs, developing new software programs—all of this is the natural movement of life, something the universe is doing, just as the seed flowering into a tree, or the ecosystem evolving in ever new ways are all the natural and spontaneous play of life. Everything is included.

I went into therapy to sober up from near-fatal drinking back in 1973. I went into therapy several more times over the years, and it’s quite natural to want to find a solution to certain painful situations such as depression, anxiety, self-hatred, or addictive and compulsive behaviors that are hurting ourselves and others around us. And if we have glimpsed the possibility of living without self-doubt, shame, worry and self-concern, we naturally long to return to that place of freedom and happiness that we have tasted. People go into therapy, take up meditation, go to satsangs, and listen to radical nondualists out of just such a longing.

But paradoxically, it is in some sense the very search for happiness that makes us miserable. That search is predicated on the belief in deficiency and lack, the belief that “this isn’t it.” It is all about a “me” that doesn’t actually exist and a future that never arrives. The end of self-improvement is the realization of what is always already whole and complete, the wholeness that includes the apparent brokenness.

The character we take ourselves to be, which is a mental construction made up of ever-shifting images, memories, thoughts, stories and sensations, has no independent will or volition in the way we imagine it does. That image we see in the mirror is just an image. It has no power to do anything. If we watch closely, we can see that all our urges, interests, abilities, feelings, and thoughts—including this watching and the interest and ability to carry it out—all arise from an unfindable source. The “we” who seemingly does all this is merely a grammatical convention.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have what feels like volition and choice. Obviously, we do. One neuroscientist calls the sense of being a self with agency a neurological sensation. But if we watch closely as choices and decisions unfold, we can see that it is all happening by itself. There is no little helmsman, no self, no “me” inside our head sitting at some giant control panel pulling levers or authoring our thoughts. Our desire to get drunk or sober up, go into therapy, take an aspirin or march for civil rights is all an expression of the totality, as are the outcomes of all such actions. Our emotional reactions and ruminations, our thinking, our apparent successes and failures—this is all happening by itself. The little “me” who seems to be authoring my thoughts and making my choices is not actually doing any of that because that “me” is nothing but a mental image, an idea, a thought-form.

That “me-thought” arises spontaneously either before an action or after an action, taking credit or blame. “I should do that,” or “I did that.” In any moment when that thought-sense of being a separate and vulnerable “me” is absent, nothing is taken personally. We are no longer concerned about outcomes in the same way. We are no longer plagued by guilt, shame, blaming others, or the anxiety of thinking we might “get it wrong” and “ruin our life.” We are simply doing what life moves us to do, as is everyone else, which has actually always been the case. We naturally have compassion for ourselves and others being just as we are in each moment. And the “we” in all these sentences is only a grammatical convention. The sense of separation is absent, and even when it shows up, it is only an appearance. No wave can ever go off in a direction other than the one in which the whole ocean is moving. We are all a movement of the whole, not isolated agents capable of going the wrong way.

But this gets very subtle. It doesn’t mean becoming passive, or picking up the belief that “I” have no free will, that “I” am a helpless robot being pushed around by the universe. That belief is still centered around the idea of a separate entity, a self, now believed to be powerless. That is delusion. Our urges, interests, actions—and our sense of choice—are all part of how life functions and moves. And we are not separate from, or other than, life itself.

The capacity to make better choices can obviously be developed through education, athletic training, psychotherapy, meditation, yoga, and in all kinds of ways—all of which happen choicelessly, even as it appears that “I” am choosing them.

There is a palpable shift that occurs when attention drops out of the thinking mind into stillness and presence. When that happens, in the light of awareness, there is an increase in responsibility (response-ability), the ability to respond rather than react, to move in a more wholesome—holistic, whole, intelligent—way. This is the beauty of meditation, psychotherapy, various forms of inquiry, and somatic practices such as Feldenkrais, Continuum or yoga. They bring awareness to where we are stuck and show us what else is possible. We become less ensnared in old conditioning, and a new range of possibilities opens up. The habitual me-system is no longer always running the show. We are no longer totally a slave to conditioned neurology. We (as awareness) have more choices, more possibilities, at least sometimes.

Of course, this shift out of thinking and into aware presence happens choicelessly, in that there is no “me” who can bring it about by an act of independent will. But this shift may indeed require an apparently intentional move that we call a choice, a movement that itself arises choicelessly. The possibility of taking a time-out when we’re angry, of not lighting up a cigarette when the urge arises, of choosing to meditate when we feel upset, is only there when it is. Whatever happens is always a movement of the whole. But our functional sense of agency is part of that larger movement, part of how the universe, or consciousness, functions. In a sense, we have no choice but to act as if we have choice.

We can’t land on either free will or no free will because both are conceptual abstractions of a living reality that cannot be captured in any conceptual formulation. The map is not the territory; the word is not the thing. Therefore, it’s so important not to get fixated on one side of a conceptual divide between two abstract ideas, such as choice or choicelessness, self or no self, practice or no practice, effort or effortlessness, because neither side is totally true. It’s very easy to turn what begins as a genuine insight into a limiting or oppressive belief, a new fundamentalist dogma that we then cling to and defend.

Liberation is never about getting the right ideas or the right beliefs. It’s always about direct insight. Believing that there is “no self” is useless, and as a concept, this is a very easy one to totally misunderstand. But if we simply pay attention, we can begin to notice that there are many moments in any ordinary day where we’re not thinking about ourselves and feeling like a separate person. We’re just driving the car, making love, dancing, washing the dishes, changing a diaper, calculating a bunch of numbers, folding the laundry. There’s no “me” in the picture until a thought arises, such as, “Why do I always have to be the one who changes the baby’s diapers?” or “I’m a bad dancer,” or “I wonder if she likes me.” Instantly, with that thought, the mirage of “me” appears on the scene. And we can notice that this mirage is just another passing experience, another weather event in this vast open space of awareness. The awaring presence being and beholding it all is unbound. Present experiencing is without a center or a periphery. It has no inside or outside.

Of course, for most, if not all of us, the me-system does not permanently disappear never to show up again. In moments of inattention and stress, old conditioning tends to return, and for a moment, whether that moment is a few seconds, a few hours or a few weeks, we again feel angry, hurt, defensive, entitled, guilty, or whatever we feel. But more and more, this can be seen. Sometimes we don’t see it. And sometimes we only see it hours or years or decades later. But through practices such as meditation and psychotherapy, we can begin to catch it more quickly, to see it as it is happening, and sometimes even as it is just about to happen, that first tiny seed. We begin to notice how our lip quivers, how our throat constricts, how blood rushes to the head, how our gut tightens, how we are holding our breath or barely breathing—these first tiny signals of upset. In the absolute sense, everything is already perfect, while in the relative sense, there’s always room for improvement—and that’s part of the perfection!

Life is a kind of balancing act in a way, between the recognition that everything is perfect just as it is, and the impulse or aspiration, which is part of this perfection, to grow and transform. If we pay attention, we can begin to feel the difference between misery-inducing self-improvement and what we might call healthy aspiration, genuine transformation or true happiness. There are no rules for precisely where one ends and the other begins. And in the absolute sense, everything is equally an expression of unicity, including misery-inducing self-improvement and the illusion of personal will. But on a functional and relative level, just as we can distinguish apples from oranges, we can distinguish what we might call healthy aspiration or genuine transformation from the kind of misery-inducing self-improvement that is itself a manifestation of the very problem it is trying to solve.

Self-improvement is always focused on the future, while true happiness is only ever found Here-Now. Self-improvement begins with the rejection of this-Here-Now, while healthy aspiration begins with the embrace of what is. Self-improvement is endless postponement. The finish line is never reached. Genuine transformation is the recognition that waking up only happens Here-Now. Self-improvement is rooted in a sense of lack and deficiency, whereas true happiness understands that the defect is an essential component of perfection. Self-improvement wants one polarity to triumph over its opposite, which is never going to happen, while genuine transformation recognizes the inseparability and collaborative necessity of both apparently opposing forces.

Self-improvement is oppositional and violent. It thinks in terms of fighting cancer, waging a war on drugs or a war on terror, killing the ego, vanquishing thought. Genuine transformation comes from unconditional love. It has no enemies. It recognizes everything as the Beloved. It sees only God everywhere. It embraces everything, recognizing everything as itself. What we resist tends to persist because by resisting it, we are validating its reality and giving it power. The more we oppose and vilify something, the stronger, more defensive and aggressive it seems to become. Not resisting doesn’t mean staying in an abusive relationship, being a doormat or not taking action to correct an injustice. It is pointing to something much more immediate, a way of being in this very moment that allows intelligent action to emerge. You can treat cancer without fighting it, and it is only the ego that wants to kill the ego.

Self-improvement is rooted in the illusion of an imaginary self with free will and choice trying to control and fix a separate and enduring “thing” that doesn’t actually exist, whether that imaginary “thing” is “me” or “you” or “the world.” Genuine transformation moves from wholeness and recognizes that whatever is appearing Here-Now is the Only Possible in this moment.

Happiness arises from a fundamental trust or faith in the Way It Is (the Tao), while self-improvement moves from fear and insecurity. When I speak of trust, I don’t mean trusting that things will go my way, but trusting that whatever happens, all is well in the deepest sense. This isn’t a belief—it’s a faith that emerges from presence.

Self-improvement inevitably ends in disappointment, because it is the nature of form to break down and fall apart. Genuine transformation begins from the recognition of what is beyond any particular form and yet completely present as every form. It points to a freedom and joy that isn’t dependent on outcomes.

Self-improvement is rigid and perfectionistic, driven by beliefs, expectations and old answers, while genuine transformation is flexible, open to new discoveries and rooted in not-knowing. Genuine transformation listens for what life itself wants, while self-improvement imagines that “I” know how everything “should” be. Self-improvement is judgmental, self-righteous and narrow-minded, while happiness and real change are the release of all that.

Self-improvement is primarily thought-based, while genuine transformation emerges from aware presence. Thought divides; awareness joins. Thought is dualistic; awareness is nondual. Of course, there is a place for intelligent thinking—reason, intellect and analysis are marvelous tools. I’m not in any way disparaging thinking. I have great appreciation for the scientific method and for human reason. But awareness is upstream from thought. And in many situations, thought is the wrong instrument.

There is a place for healthy aspiration and intention, for creative imagination and visualization. Social change work of any kind obviously relies to some degree on our ability to identify what causes suffering and to imagine a different possibility. There is no exact or fixed line where that healthy and functional use of memory, imagination and thinking crosses over into a painful obsession. But we can become more and more sensitive to where we are coming from when we envision or work toward a change in ourselves or in the world. We can begin to feel the difference between perfectionistic self-improvement and genuine transformation, between self-righteousness and love. And we can recognize that the best place to begin any kind of change is always with simply being aware of how it is right now.

Otherwise, it’s easy to wind up recreating and reinforcing the very problems we are trying to solve. When we fail to go all the way to the root of our problems, we often end up reproducing the original problem in a new form. We’ve seen this in many political revolutions, in various technological developments that have had unintended consequences, and in spiritual practices that end up reinforcing the root illusions. We easily end up digging ourselves into deeper and deeper holes. Humanity is now on the verge of wiping itself off the face of the earth, all because we have made one well-intended “improvement” after another.

How would it be to not know how we or the universe or this moment “should” be?

Patterns of thought are deeply conditioned and, as we grow up, we begin to think that we actually are the voice in our heads, the thought-stream, and we come to believe that whatever this voice says is reliable and true, and that we are somehow authoring our thoughts as well. We even begin to think that there is nothing outside of thought, that thinking is the primary reality. “I think, therefore I am.” We are easily hypnotized and entranced by our thoughts. One of the reasons I feel insight meditation is helpful, or a process such as The Work of Byron Katie, or many intelligent forms of psychotherapy, is that recognizing thoughts as thoughts is not always as easy as it sounds, and realizing that there is so much here other than thought—as obvious as that seems once it’s obvious—can be surprisingly elusive. It is, as they say, the open secret, hidden in plain sight, the elusive obvious.

We can argue over whether thought is causative of emotions and behaviors or whether it is simply an after effect of what originates below the level of conscious awareness. I suspect both perspectives are true, each perhaps more so in some instances than others. Clearly, waking up isn’t only a matter of questioning our thoughts and beliefs but, in my experience, that’s an important element.

Bringing awareness to the body, feeling sensations, tuning into aware presence in a way that is non-conceptual and not thought-based is the other part of the equation—opening up to the non-conceptual immediacy of the sensory-energetic actuality Here-Now and recognizing the boundless awaring presence that we are and that everything is. And that can happen in many different ways.

We don’t ever reach any ideal perfection that we can imagine, or if we do, it doesn’t last. So any true aspiration must be balanced by the realization that life is in charge, not me. We must discover the willingness to allow life to unfold at its own pace, in its own way, the willingness to fail again and again, without taking that personally and turning it into a story of personal lack or a reason for self-hatred. Shunryu Suzuki said, “The life of a Zen Master is one continuous mistake.” Or Zen teacher Elihu Genmyo Smith: “Mistake after mistake is the perfect way.” Our failures, disappointments, mistakes, and even humanity’s most horrific actions, are all part of this whole fabric in some essential way. We know from our own experience that our most difficult and challenging experiences are often the ones that open us up and teach us the most.

It’s not uncommon for people who take up some form of nonduality to get stuck in the absolute for a while—and in some cases, forever. They get the mistaken idea that they aren’t supposed to have goals or preferences of any kind, that they shouldn’t want anything to change. They keep asserting over and over that there is no self, no choice, nothing to do—that everything is perfect as it is, that nothing is even happening. But it’s quite natural to want to change what hurts. And it’s quite useful to be able to see when we are making a mistake or missing the mark. Of course, we are never out of integrity in the absolute sense, and in that larger sense, every mistake is perfectly placed, but in the relative world of everyday life, the ability to identify mistakes and correct them is vital to our survival as individuals and as a species. It’s part of how life is functioning and evolving. Perfection isn’t a matter of not making any mistakes. It’s about the ability to learn from them, to get up and keep going, to not take mistakes personally or get lost in shame, guilt and self-hatred, to start fresh Here-Now.

Sometimes when we have an idea that “everything is perfect as it is,” we forget that working to improve things is part of what is. We leave ourselves and our own abilities, inclinations and actions out of the picture in some way. So, nonduality doesn’t mean we shouldn’t meditate or pray or take vows or see a therapist. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go to the gym and exercise, or that we leave a flat tire flat forever because we are “allowing everything to be as it is,” or because “we are powerless and have no choice.” That is a misunderstanding. And waking up from our entrancement in thought, from our habitual tendency to mistake the map for the territory, doesn’t in any way mean that we can’t, or shouldn’t, think or conceptualize or use maps. It simply points to how all these activities come from life itself, not from the phantom self. All our ideas of success and failure are just that, ideas.

The peace and freedom we long for is found in one place only: Here-Now. Of course, we can’t make ourselves stop seeking and resisting on command, and any attempt to do so is only another form of seeking and resisting. All that can happen is to see this habitual pattern of seeking and resisting whenever it arises. We can’t even make that happen—but it does happen, when it does.

It’s fine to have practical goals, such as getting a college degree. But we don’t need to get hooked on the fantasy that we will be happy only if and when we get that degree, or that we need that degree to be happy. Our attention can be on the present moment even as we move toward the goal.

Awakening is not about denying relative reality. What happens in the world both matters and doesn’t matter. As a human being in the play of life, it breaks my heart to see someone torturing an animal or abusing a child. It breaks my heart to remember some of the insensitive, abusive or hurtful things I have done in my life. Having the bigger view, the absolute perspective, helps me to see all of this in a bigger context, to hold it more lightly, more compassionately, more gently, to be more flexible, open-minded and open-hearted—to see beyond the story that the world is going to hell and I have to fix it, or that I am a terrible person who should crawl into a hole and die. To recognize how ephemeral and insubstantial, how subjective and dreamlike it all is, is very liberating. But it doesn’t mean I don’t care, that my heart doesn’t break sometimes, or that I may not be moved to act.

In Zen, there are a bunch of precepts, and they say that from the absolute perspective, it is impossible to break them, and from the relative perspective, it is impossible not to break them. Just by being alive, we break them. Not killing, the first precept, is broken every time we eat, every time we take a step, every time we wipe our forehead, every time we inhale. Life feeds on life. But in the absolute sense, no-thing is born and no-thing dies; so we can never actually kill anything. From the absolute view, there are no mistakes. From the relative view, there are many mistakes, and it’s important to recognize them, correct them, learn from them, apologize for them, or whatever is appropriate in the situation. We cannot land on either side of the equation—both perspectives are important.

Seeing this, we begin to love the imperfections in life, the mistakes, the defects, the things that don’t go our way, the upsets. We begin to see the Beloved everywhere, even in our disappointments and disturbances, maybe even especially there, where we would least expect to find it.

I’ve heard that when Katagiri Roshi was dying, he said, “Enlightenment is not dying a good death. Enlightenment is not needing to die a good death.” Even if you are screaming in pain, or yelling in anger, or having the thought, “How am I doing? Is this a good death? Am I impressing my students?”—even that is simply what is. It’s not personal. When it is seen as impersonal weather, a whole new moment opens up. There is no trace from the past, and there is no one here to take delivery. The universe begins anew.

— from DEATH: The End of Self-Improvement

---

The problem and the solution, as expressed by 4 different voices:

There is only one mind, but there are two states of mind, the conditioned mind and the unconditioned mind. We live in our conditioned mind most of the time. Meditation practice is a tool for becoming aware of the luminous mind, which is the unconditioned mind. One of the purposes of meditation is to become aware of the fact that we are living in our conditioned mind most of the time. Then we need to know how to get from there to the realm of our unconditioned mind. That’s what meditation practice is all about.

— Anam Thubten, from The Magic of Awareness

The essence [of this work] is to come upon a profound kind of listening and openness that reveals the intense power and momentum of our human conditioning, how we are caught up and attached to ideas about ourselves and each other, how violently we defend these ideas—not just individually but collectively—and how this defense keeps us isolated from each other and from ourselves. The other aspect of this listening is to come upon an inner/outer silence—stillness—spaciousness in which there is no sense of separation or limitation, outside or inside.

– Toni Packer, from The Light of Discovery

Every atrocity in human history was committed by someone who believed their thoughts were truth. The solution is not to annihilate the mind. You need it. It’s useful…essential, even…for functioning in the world. The problem is not the mind. The problem is the ownership of the mind. When you become present, truly present, you discover something radical: Thoughts arise by themselves. Emotions arise by themselves. Reactions arise by themselves. None of it is “you.” You are the awareness in which all of this appears. This recognition is the beginning of freedom. Not because thoughts vanish, but because the identification dissolves. Thoughts lose their grip. Emotions lose their dominance. The narrative collapses. What remains is clarity. This is what traditions call awakening. Not mystical fireworks. Not supernatural insight. Just the clean separation between awareness and thought.

— Damien Echols, from his Substack

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… 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

---

A beautiful movie on awakening:

The first in a 3 part series:

---

Love to all…