Dropping the Scaffolding

being this aliveness

The Imaginary Problem

Wind is whistling, light is dancing, words are emerging again, pouring out from I know not where. A single index finger is rapidly tapping the keys, and as it does, black squiggles miraculously appear on the empty white page, squiggles that can magically open up whole worlds in a reader’s mind. Wind, light, squiggles and words. What a wild dance! And we think this is just ordinary, everyday activity!

Many people tell me my writing is very clear, but inwardly, things sometimes feel quite murky. This bodymind organism called Joan can still feel confused and deficient and caught up at times in chasing some imaginary breakthrough or resolution, some final landing place. In spite of knowing better, Joan can still get tangled up in purely imaginary conceptual problems.

Of course, in many ways, Joan is more settled in simple presence than ever before in her life, and when Joan dissolves into that boundless aware presence, no trace of confusion remains. There is simply this open awake presence and present experiencing—one inseparable whole without borders or seams. And actually, that is always the case, even when it sometimes shows up as feeling like this character called Joan with her sometimes cloudy weather and compulsive behaviors.

As I mentioned in one of my last posts, I took this short break from writing because I felt a need to be silent with what was unfolding inwardly. I’d been once again, for the ten-millionth time, feeling pulled in what felt like irreconcilably different directions in my spiritual life, and this felt like one of those decisive points when something breaks open or turns a corner.

One day, before I announced my silent break, I was in a place of feeling the whole spiritual framework and endeavor completely falling away—all attempts to go deeper, to manipulate the mind, to control my experience, to direct my attention, to sort out gnawing metaphysical questions, to be more like somebody else on the spiritual scene—and yes, I confess, all those things can still show up at times—it all dropped away. I felt it go.

For several days, I stopped sitting on my meditation cushion in the morning. I imagined that there would be no more reading spiritual books or watching spiritual videos—just living life as an ordinary person, not trying to change or improve this present experiencing in any way.

This felt like a huge relief, as if an immense weight had dropped off and something tight and straining within me had let go at last and dissolved. I felt a joy and lightness that was delightful and freeing.

But it was confusing because, around this same time that I was feeling done with the whole spiritual whirlwind, I was also having these very deep transcendent experiences of dissolving into open spacious boundless no-thing-ness, so I was simultaneously feeling pulled in a very transcendent direction that seemed (in my mind) like the total antithesis of letting spirituality go and simply living an ordinary human life. And in what I knew to be an ill-advised attempt to go deeper into that transcendent dissolution, I was again rather compulsively dipping into books and watching videos, gnawing on my fingers, and desperately, it seemed, wanting something more to happen.

I was also joining a book group with John Astin and Dena Evans exploring Peter Brown’s last book, This That Is. I’d attended some of Peter’s zooms in the last couple years that he was alive. Peter talks a lot about the multi-dimensional nature of reality and how he is both “a neurotic and psychologically damaged imperfect human being” and also at the same time “literally the creator of the universe.” He also says, “Everything is real, but nothing is true.” That was all very helpful.

But still, the mind was whirling away: Can these seemingly opposite directions or dimensions be reconciled or must one eventually choose between them? What is this spiritual path really all about? What is it that I’m talking and writing about? I felt like I had no idea what I was doing, like I was a total fake. My fingerbiting was on steroids:

(That’s one of my many self-portrait doodles)

I knew that there isn’t really anyone who can choose to do or not do any of this. Mental agitation drops away when it drops away, and it returns when it returns, just like my fingerbiting compulsion, and all of it is really nothing personal.

Letting Go of the Scaffolding

What clarified in silence is that there is no actual problem. I knew that right from the start, of course—I write books about it, after all—but knowing it from past experience didn’t alter the experiential actuality of feeling unsettled and confused. In the silence, the problem dissolved.

The phrase that kept coming up in the silence was, “Let go of the scaffolding.” Let go of the conceptual scaffolding. In actual present experiencing, in aware presence Here-Now, there is no confusion, no seeking, no problem, no me, nothing lacking, no conflict between one dimension or perspective and another, no need to control which one appears or disappears.

The transcendent dimension that is often experienced here so deeply in no way invalidates ordinary life, or the beauty I find everywhere, or my life as a human being. The apparent problem arises only when thought turns any of these dimensions into concretized metaphysical abstractions and then gets tangled up trying to reconcile them. The apparent problem is always conceptual, not actual. It is real (as an experience), but never true (as what it purports to be).

When the mind gets going on that kind of obsessive thinking, we can feel the tightness in the whole bodymind. We can notice how it all revolves around “me” and what “I” as the character in the story should think or believe or do in order to finally be okay or at peace. And trying to think our way out of this doesn’t work—it just tightens the knot tighter and tighter.

It’s so easy to get knotted up in mental quagmires trying to figure out the nature of reality, pin down Ultimate Truth, reconcile or choose between seemingly opposite teachings, formulate the inconceivable, and/or get control of the uncontrollable. “How do I drop into the Heart?” someone asked me recently. That’s the kind of question the mind comes up with. Should I feel into the body or transcend it completely? Does awareness exist? What IS it? Is it here prior to experience? What happens in deep sleep or after death? How can I be sure I’m on the right path? If there’s no self and no free will, how can I shift my attention from thinking to awaring and sensing? And if this is all a dream, does it even matter? What is the present moment anyway? What did so-and-so mean when he said bla-bla-bla, and how does that compare to what this other supposedly enlightened master said? Who has it right?

Many teachings seem to be all about transcending the bodymind person and the entire movie of waking life, while other teachings point to fully embracing our human beingness and present experiencing. Some say we are not the body, while some encourage us to explore the body in ever-more subtle ways. Some point to feeling into and being the open, spacious, unbound, aware presence that is always Here-Now, while others emphasize exploring the unresolvable and ungraspable nature of present experiencing, and others view all experience and even the subtlest sense of impersonal aware presence as part of the waking dream. Some use poetic and devotional language and speak of God or the Beloved, while others insist that all such language is deceptive and false. Some teachings emphasize epistemological humility and ungraspable groundlessness, while others exude absolute certainty.

Spirituality deals with the ineffable. The more we explore the body, or the mind, or the self, or the world, or present experiencing, or so-called material reality, whether with physics or with meditation, the less solid and substantial it seems and the more empty of any findable center or edge. We can’t find a self who is thinking our thoughts and directing our actions. We can’t find an actual boundary between inside and outside or between self and not-self. These discoveries can be either liberating or terrifying, depending on how deeply they are grokked.

Awareness is invisible and presence is ungraspable. Aware presence is our most intimate and familiar actuality, we are it, it is all there is—it is all-pervasive, and thus it’s not a “thing” outside of us that we can see or get hold of as an object. It can feel like nothing because it is not a thing we can grasp, and because there is nowhere and nothing it is not. This makes us uncomfortable. We tend to want something in particular, some-thing we can hold onto, some final certainty where we can land, secure in the knowledge that we have arrived at last. But everything keeps changing, and reality can’t be captured in words. The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. We identify with and argue over maps and concepts and abstract formulations and pointers. We mistake them for reality itself. The argument is always conceptual and any final landing place is always imaginary.

Belief offers a kind of certainty that seems to provide relief from our fundamental cluelessness, but belief is always shadowed by doubt and uncertainty. And the more filled with unwanted doubts we are, the more fundamentalist and dogmatic we sometimes become. Fundamentalist dogmatism doesn’t only show up in the worst forms of organized religion—it can show up in present day nonduality as well as in atheism and anti-spirituality. What is most liberating is to see the subtle, or not so subtle, versions of it in ourselves, not simply to point at it “out there” in others.

My friend and teacher Toni Packer embodied transcendence without metaphysics. She said that her work was in part about “coming upon an inner/outer silence—stillness—spaciousness in which there is no sense of separation or limitation, outside or inside.” But she never turned that spaciousness into an ideology, like “consciousness is all there is.” In her life and expression, that vast spacious presence was always grounded in everyday life and the natural world. It never left all of that behind.

Toni was half-Jewish and had come of age in Germany during the rise of Hitler, the holocaust and World War II. She understood the deep suffering that life can entail firsthand, and she never offered some escapist airy-fairy version of spirituality. Her feet were on the ground, her heart was wide open, and she embodied both unbound presence and vulnerable humanity. She wasn't interested in metaphysics. She was interested in life itself, as it is, from moment to moment. She avoided coming to conclusions, preferring to live with open questioning and wonderment.

Confusion and suffering, whenever it arises, is a kind of dharma bell alerting us to the fact that we are once again needlessly pinching ourselves. We are lost in thought. When we hear this inner bell, is it possible to wake up, to let the conceptual scaffolding go, to be here in the groundlessness of simply being this unfathomable happening, just as it is?

Why Call It God?

In a recent Substack, my dear friend Robert Saltzman wondered why anyone like me would use the word God. And I’ve been wondering about that. I resonate with the word God. Having been raised outside of any religion, I don’t have the baggage about the word that so many people have. As a child, I briefly once put up a tent in our backyard and offered classes to the Catholic children next door on how God did not exist, until my mother told me I couldn’t do this.

But I was hardly the budding young atheist either. I spent my nap time inventing religions in my bedroom and was deeply drawn to religion. Spirituality seems to be in my blood and bones from very early on. And I never had the childish idea of God as some old white guy up in heaven who created and then judged us. God was more like electricity or light or germinal darkness or radiance or the life force.

These days, for me, God is not an idea or a belief, but a palpable dimension of experiencing, a felt-sense of something ineffable but very real. I might call it aware presence, unconditional love, wholeness. God refers to a dimension that is open, free, unconditioned, awake, boundless. God is the intelligence-energy manifesting as this miraculous universe, the pure potentiality or germinal darkness out of which everything emerges, the very core of our being, the timeless eternal unicity, the freedom of groundlessness. God is a way of seeing, seeing the sacred everywhere, seeing the light in everything. God is the empty mirror that accepts everything and holds on to nothing, the zero on which all other numbers depend. The late Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk, described God as “emptiness containing infinite possibilities” or “absolute Nothingness.”

Robert Saltzman and Toni Packer would both ask, why not just use all those other words and not call it God, since God is such a loaded and potentially triggering or confusing word that people can hear in so many different ways?

I suppose it’s because the word expresses or touches or evokes something in me that none of those other words quite do. The image of the empty mirror, for example, is kind of cold, and those other words can all sound rather abstract and impersonal, whereas there’s something warm and personal about the word God—it involves a relationship. Not that I see God as a guy in the sky—I do not. It’s a dimension of my own being and of all being. God is my own heart, and yet God is also something other, something greater, something incomprehensible. Again, I’m talking about a felt-sense, something experiential, not an idea or a belief.

God embodies the paradoxical dance of duality and nonduality, a “duet of one” as Balsekar so beautifully put it in one of his book titles. Relationship, lover and beloved, is the mystery of two dissolving into one, the way this all shows up as both form and emptiness, unicity and multiplicity, no-thing and everything, sameness and difference, relative and absolute, yin and yang, birth and death, independence and interdependence, particularity and wholeness, darkness and light. God is the whole thing, the totality, the infinite eternal ever-present Here-Now being and beholding it all. Prayer is opening to God, abiding in God, dissolving into God and into the mystery of that relationship, that “duet of one” that is the very nature of life. When I open to God, immediately there is no me and no God—there is only this vast openness, this aliveness.

In a book by the Sufi teacher Elias Amidon, I encountered the phrase, God is not something already made. My friend Tim Freke describes God as an emergent evolutionary dimension of human consciousness. I would say it is the dimension centered in awareness, the dimension that recognizes wholeness, interdependence, nonsubstantiality, fluidity, evanescence, transparency, aliveness—the dimension that sees the sacred everywhere.

But, enough on God. I may have gotten a bit carried away there in my devotional ecstasies. And of course, all words, the word God included, are just sounds, vibrations, squiggles on a page, lines on a map. They can be useful and evocative, but they are never the thing they point to. Peter Brown called them children’s toys. They are real, but never true. The map is not the territory, even though mapping is something the territory is doing.

Conclusion

So, to wrap it up, in this silent week, has there been a breakthrough, the turning of a corner, a decisive shift? I honestly don’t know. I feel a deep sense of peace, but as I know, what comes will go. I haven’t arrived in any extraordinary new place except in the sense that every moment is new and extraordinary. It appears that I still resonate with the word God and will probably use it at times, and at the same time, I still love Robert Saltzman and resonate deeply with his iconoclastic pointing to unvarnished, unadorned, no-nonsense, bare-bones actuality free from all spiritual ideas and beliefs. I still enjoy an ever-changing mix of transcendent and ordinary experiences, and at the moment, I feel at peace with all of it and with being exactly as I am.

My fingerbiting compulsion has largely subsided, but there’s a good chance it will flare up again, although I can’t know that for sure and maybe it never will. There is a growing peace and acceptance here of everything being exactly as it is both inwardly and outwardly—and of course, there is no actual separation between the inner and the outer. It is one whole unfathomable happening. As a momentary waving of this great shoreless ocean, I’m very happy and grateful to be alive on this very beautiful spring day, rolling merrily along toward my eventual disappearance into that infinite sea from which I have never actually, even for one instant, ever been apart.

Thank you all for being here.

Love to all…