Being True to Something that Calls to You

Faith, direct realization, and the paradoxical discipline of effortless effort

This one bottomless moment includes all of space and time, past and future. It is ever-changing but always right here, right now in the timeless immediacy of aware presence. There is infinite variation and diversity, but it all goes together as one indivisible whole that cannot be pulled apart. Each totally unique, one-of-a-kind person, animal, plant, place, object, or anything else that can seemingly be singled out, is like a hologram—it contains the whole universe. As Rumi put it, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”

We can conceptualize this indivisible holographic unicity as the unbroken, all-inclusive Self of Vedanta, or as the emptiness (the thoroughgoing impermanence and interdependence) of Buddhism, or as the Tao of Taoism, or as the Idealist philosophy that everything is Consciousness and there is only Consciousness, or as panpsychism, or in many other ways.

But really, it doesn’t matter all that much how we conceptualize it. What matters is the felt sense of wholeness, the experiential recognition that there is no inside and outside and no center, and living from this realization. And in my experience, that felt sense comes primarily from spending time in silence, in stillness, giving open attention to the simplicity of what’s here now, and discovering what reveals itself. Reading and hearing about it can certainly help, but for it to be anything other than a comforting belief, we each need to explore, discover and confirm all this for ourselves.

In Zen, or at least the form of Zen which I have practiced, the emphasis is on zazen, silent sitting—just sitting, simply being here now, being just this moment. Present, aware, open and embodied—rooted in breath, belly, posture and ground. Feeling the breathing, hearing sounds, noticing thoughts, allowing everything to be just as it is, not trying to control it, not resisting it, not grasping it, not trying to get anywhere or get rid of anything or become anything different. Simply being.

I describe it here in this excerpt from my book Death: The End of Self-Improvement:

Zen teachers like to emphasize that Zen is useless. It’s not about getting anywhere. It’s about waking up to the naked actuality of this moment, before we think about it or try to understand or explain it, or get something out of it, or figure out what we think it means. It’s about discovering the absolute right here in the naked actuality of Whack! (if the Zen Master hits you, as in the old stories), or caw-caw-caw (if a bunch of crows happen to be flying over), or whoosh-whoosh-whoosh (if you’re listening to traffic). No gap. No “me” hearing a “sound” or feeling a blow. Just Whack! Immediate. Not two. No question of “what does it mean?” No explanation possible. Just this!

In my first book, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life, I described how my first Zen teacher, Mel Weitsman, told me that the whole point of a Zen sesshin, a long silent meditation retreat, is to have no way out. When I told him I could see the benefits of that kind of practice, he 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!” It took me decades to really hear that.

Just this! No separation! If you’re analyzing it, trying to make sense of it, trying to do it, or trying to get something out of it, you’re missing the utter simplicity of this.

Mel once described a Zen sesshin as “a deep soak in reality.” On a sesshin, you sit in silence, often for a whole week, hour after hour, day after day, night after night. If you are able to do so, you sit cross-legged on a cushion, otherwise you sit upright in a chair. Either way, you don’t move at all during the timed sittings, which are interspersed with short periods of very slow, silent walking meditation. Meals are eaten in silence, in a ritualized way, typically while still sitting on your cushion. All your usual distractions and occupations are removed, so it is an intimate encounter with the bare actuality of this endlessly changing present moment.

You encounter many different states of mind: boredom, restlessness, fear, anger, grief, frustration, love, joy, wonder, gratitude for the simplest things. There is upset and tranquility, peace and turmoil, the sounds of rain, the screech of tires, the barking dog next door. Sitting cross-legged for hours on end, or even sitting for hours in a chair, you encounter physical pain, at times excruciating. You discover the relativity of time—how a second can be an eternity and an hour can pass in an instant. You encounter resistance and the desire to escape, and you discover the possibility of letting go and dissolving into the very heart of pain and suffering, which, to your great surprise, opens into the unbound vastness that you come to find is present in every breath, every sip of tea, every bird song, and every moment of life, however dark and unbearable it may seem. You find freedom and spaciousness in the midst of limitation, and you discover the transcendent in being just this moment, exactly as it is. You discover the space in which everything is happening, the openness of presence, the ungraspable fluidity of everything. Your usual obsessions and concerns are gradually washed away and dissolved. Everything becomes simpler and simpler.

Whether you are sitting for seven days or ten minutes, in this form of meditation, instead of avoiding the actuality of life and endlessly racing toward a future that never arrives, you are fully experiencing life as it is, waking up to the naked actuality of just this. And the more deeply you enter into just this, the more you find that it isn’t what you thought it was, or what it seems to be. And you begin to notice the endless ways we mentally separate ourselves from this naked actuality by labeling it, thinking about it, judging it, dividing it into categories, turning it into stories with a plotline and a main character (“me”), and adding things to it that don’t exist, such as victims and perpetrators, and what if’s and if only’s. In silent stillness, listening openly with the whole bodymind, you find there is no division anywhere, no center, no solidity, no body in any sense—only this vast, infinitely spacious, listening presence that you are.

— from Death: The End of Self-Improvement

I go on to say:

Of course, you don’t need to sit motionlessly through excruciating pain for days on end in order to discover all this. Nor do you need to sit in any special posture or wear special robes or anything like that. I left formal Zen behind. I prefer an approach that is open, explorative, playful and enjoyable rather than one that is rigid, grueling and painful. Meditation as I mean it is simply about exploring and enjoying the actuality Here-Now, and that can happen while sitting quietly in an armchair, riding to work on the bus, sitting in a waiting room before a medical appointment, even during a medical or dental procedure or during a storm of upsetting emotion-thought, in a prison cell, or on your deathbed. In short, anywhere and anytime. Silent retreats and daily meditation can be helpful, I recommend both if you’re drawn to them, but true meditation is nothing more or less than simply being awake here and now.

— from Death: The End of Self-Improvement

Our path need not be formal meditation, but something is required if we really want to realize our deepest potential, be free of suffering and delusion and able to fully enjoy life as it actually is. And by suffering, I don’t mean pain and painful circumstances, which are part of life. I mean what gets added to those by how we think about and resist them, as well as the many other forms of psychological suffering that can potentially fall away, if not forever after, maybe in this moment of presence here and now.

Nisargadatta spoke of earnestness, Gangaji talks about vigilance, John Butler speaks of daily meditation, Jiddu Krishnamurti spoke of discipline and the need for total open attention, Toni Packer left formal Zen behind but kept the silent retreats, Peter Brown offered what he called the yoga of Radiant Presence, Michael Pollan’s recent book on consciousness, A World Appears, ends with his visit to Zen teacher Joan Halifax, who sends him off to a meditation cave to explore the subject more directly. As Pollan writes, “It took me awhile to realize that for Halifax, practice was everything and theories of little use or consequence.”

I recently read two things on Substack by Damien Echols that I liked, and they both challenged me to question some of my own ideas, something I always appreciate. And for those who don’t know, Damien was one of the West Memphis Three, three innocent teenagers who were falsely convicted back in 1994 of a horrific triple murder which they didn’t commit. Damien was sentenced to death and spent almost twenty years on death row, where he was beaten and tortured by the guards. Finally, after growing public support, a documentary about the case, and better evidence, the three were released in 2011. During his years in prison, Damien practiced meditation in a very disciplined way in order to survive and grow into who he is today—an ordained Buddhist, a black belt in martial arts, a sword master, an author of several books, a public speaker and a guide to others. Damien writes:

All serious traditions have understood the importance of discipline. Without it, we are ruled by whatever impulse happens to be strongest in the moment. We eat because we’re bored, and avoid difficult things because comfort feels better. We reach for distraction whenever we’re uncomfortable, and still think we are free. This isn’t freedom. Freedom is being able to decide what matters more: what feels good for the next five minutes, or the person you are trying to become over the next five years.

This is why we need a mission. It doesn’t have to be grand. Raise a family. Master an art. Build something. Train your body. Understand your mind. But have something that requires you to become more than you currently are. Without that, the vacuum gets filled by comfort, entertainment, consumption, and distraction. Discipline isn’t punishment, and it isn’t about becoming rigid or joyless. It’s being able to self-govern. A person who cannot govern themselves will always be governed by their appetites, their fears, or eventually by someone else.

– Damien Echols

And as he wrote elsewhere:

I believe one of the most important things a person can do is find something to pour themselves into completely. Something that never allows you to become “finished.” Something that keeps showing you where you are weak, where you have become comfortable, and where there is still room for growth. It doesn’t have to make you money or earn you recognition. Its value is in what the pursuit itself does to you. You need something that keeps you learning, changing, failing, adjusting, and beginning again… something deep enough that you can never reach the bottom of it. We begin by thinking we are trying to master this thing, only to eventually realize the thing has been shaping us.

– Damien Echols

I never related much to the concept of having a mission. But I realized as I sat with this that I actually do have one. I’d say it’s the bodhisattva vow from Buddhism, the aspiration to see through delusion, to bring light into the world and not more suffering, and to be “enlightened” or “awake” in this moment here and now, seeing deeply the beauty, wholeness and sacredness of life. I’ve definitely poured myself into this, and it is without a doubt bottomless and never finished, and it is most certainly shaping me and not the other way around. As Leonard Cohen put it, “You abandon your masterpiece and you sink into the real Masterpiece.”

Of course, I fail at this mission again and again, but perfection is not the point. It’s about my best effort, which paradoxically isn’t the kind of result-oriented effort of the small self, but rather a spontaneous letting go and waking up that happens effortlessly when the heart relaxes and opens. And when failure happens, it’s about getting up and starting again.

And that, I find, requires faith.

Faith in what? In the fundamental okayness, wholeness and sacredness of life, in the Heart that is both personal and transpersonal, in an ungraspable spirit that is at once transcendent and immanent, boundless and unlimited as well as most intimate, closer than close. I could call it God or awareness or presence or life.

In this regard, I was recently listening to a wonderful conversation between the materialist and agnostic-leaning neuroscientist Anil Seth and the Christian psychiatrist, philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist said he sees God as being in everything, and everything existing in God, and he said he mistrusts people who are certain that God doesn’t exist, and he also mistrusts people who are absolutely certain that God does exist. Faith, he said, isn’t a matter of certainty. It’s a matter of being true to something that calls to you.

That really struck me—being true to something that calls to you. I think of myself as a child and what I sensed in nature and religious places, something sacred, by which I mean a deep open vast presence that is infinitely full of unresolvable mysteries, beauty, wonder and love. I think of the attraction I felt as a child to both Buddhism and Christianity, and in particular to the way of life they both seemed to espouse, a life of love and compassion. I think of the people in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind being called by something they couldn’t understand or make sense of, a pull that they were mysteriously compelled to follow.

Entering into silence is a way of listening for what is calling. It may not be logical or reasonable. It may not make sense. We may not be able to put it into words. And yet, it calls to us.

It’s easy to lose faith, to be swept under by despair, hopelessness, depression, cynicism, disappointment, sorrow and grief, especially in the face of so much human cruelty and ignorance in the world, not to mention the particular challenges and difficulties in each of our own lives, even under the best of conditions. Brother David Steindl-Rast, the Benedictine monk and founder of Grateful Living who recently turned 100, says that faith is like walking on water.

How do we walk on water? That’s a koan to live with, especially when the going gets rough. But I know from experience that there is a buoyancy available to us right in the eye of the storm.

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Love to all….