Effortless Simplicity

Being just this moment, exactly as it is

Rue des Blanc Manteaux, Paris 1988, photograph by David Williams

Is This Substack About Improvement and “Awakening”?

Obviously, a great deal of spirituality is about improvement and “awakening,” and awakening gets defined in many different ways. I’ve certainly done my share of all that. But I find that I’m tired of endlessly trying, tired of making subtle efforts to be some way other than how I am in each moment. And I’m tired of all the different conceptual spins on what this is—that it’s Consciousness or Radiant Presence or God or Unconditional Love or The One Self—tired of feeling as if I need to be sure and to know. Maybe we don’t need to know. I’m tired of the way these kinds of words, with Capital Letters, seem to offer some kind of magical consolation and certainty. I’m tired of curative fantasies.

That’s a favorite term of Zen teacher Barry Magid, who describes Zen as non-dualistic, anti-essentialist and anti-transcendent. For him, it’s all about being just this moment, right here, right now. Instead of positing a ground of being, Zen prefers groundlessness, non-clinging and the openness of not knowing. My friend Robert Saltzman speaks of epistemological humility, acknowledging that we are actually clueless about how the whole universe works.

Of course, we don’t like being groundless and clueless. We don’t like the idea that “this is it, just as it is.” This can’t be it, we think! We want more and better and different. We want to be perpetually “awake,” free from suffering and confusion, confident that we’ve got this whole thing nailed down and figured out. We want to feel secure. We want certainty. We don’t like to see ourselves as waves in the ocean. We want to believe in our powers of agency and choice, our individual autonomy, our “self” as the solid main character in our story—not our powerlessness and nonsubstantial evanescence.

And yet, there is something immensely freeing and relieving about groundlessness and powerlessness and the utter simplicity of being just as we are.

This doesn’t mean we can’t get an education, go into a recovery program, see a therapist, treat our cancer, or march for peace and justice if we are so moved. It means that these things, if they happen—if we are moved and able to do them—are a choiceless happening of the whole universe. We don’t create our interests, our urges, our abilities, our thoughts, or our so-called choices. It all happens, choicelessly.

“Awakening” has become a buzz word, a merit badge. To me, it points to recognizing a bigger picture, the wholeness of being, seeing that we are not separate, that nothing is separate, that every person, every action and every thought are like wavings of the ocean, that nothing can be pulled apart from everything else. This moment can’t be other than exactly how it is, and how it is has already changed and moved on. Nothing stays the same. That includes any experience or any sense we have of wholeness and non-separation. Sometimes we feel separate. That’s part of being human. We’re not always “awake.” And we don’t need to be. None of it is really personal in the way we think it is.

What Gives Our Life Meaning and Purpose? What Do We Really Need?

We think we need so many things: a meaningful career, a beautiful and long-lasting intimate relationship, successful children, a nice house, a more silent mind, better concentration, some incredible lightning-bolt enlightenment experience, a big awakening, another cup of coffee, a love affair, a healthier body, a good night’s sleep, whatever it might be. And there’s nothing wrong with any of these things or with wanting them. But wanting what isn’t here now, and not wanting what is here now, are recipes for dissatisfaction and suffering.

What do we really need? Where is meaning most deeply found? What is our purpose?

I find that when we search for meaning, we inevitably feel meaningless. They go together. When we try to pin down some purpose for our being here, we grasp at straws, and the one who seems to need a purpose is a kind of mirage. When we relax into the utter purposelessness and meaninglessness of this moment, it turns out to be a huge relief. This is enough—just being here. Just hearing birds singing, enjoying a cup of tea, laughing with a friend, sitting quietly doing nothing. What extra purpose or meaning does any of it need?

Incurable Suffering

Much of spirituality trades in curative fantasies, suggesting and promising that we can leave suffering behind. And indeed, it is possible (when it is) to see through habitual thought patterns and stories, to recover from addictions, to heal illnesses, to alleviate many forms of pain. But ultimately, life includes a great deal of pain and suffering that won’t magically go away. Two of my favorite quotes, the first from Leonard Cohen and the second from Darryl Bailey:

We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself.

But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you’re stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.

– Leonard Cohen, from a 1994 Shambhala Sun interview

Spiritual liberation frees you from the misery-inducing fantasy of perfecting yourself. In this moment, I am what I am; you are what you are; we’re both the dance of the cosmos. Liberation isn’t the act of breaking free of this. Liberation is knowing it can’t be otherwise.

– Darryl Bailey

Effortless non-meditation

Meditation is often experienced as something we do in order to improve ourselves—and this view of it is typically accompanied by evaluations and judgments about how well we’re doing at it, and often by thinking that we’re not very good at it because our mind is quite busy and we think the goal is to have a silent mind. Often we’re trying very hard to “do it right,” to be mindful, to concentrate, to keep the mind empty and still. Or we’re trying to identify as pure awareness and not as a person, or we’re trying to recapture an experience of spacious openness that we’ve had before, or a marvelously peaceful state of mind that we’re read about, and it’s not working. Even if we have a moment of spacious openness, it never lasts.

I don’t deny that there can be a place for formal meditation. Had I not done it for many years, I suspect there are many things I would never have seen about my own delusions. My capacity to endure discomfort without trying to run from it in ways that only make it worse might not be as developed as it is. I might not have discovered the wonderful stillness of deep listening presence. But clearly, many people find all this in other ways, not through meditation. And a pitfall with deliberate, formal meditation is that it can inadvertently feed the sense of being a deficient separate self with free will who could and should be doing better. Trying, trying, trying. Never good enough.

So maybe we can enjoy being here in a very simple unstructured way whenever it invites us—sitting in our armchair or on a park bench or on a bus, taking a walk, drinking a cup of tea, and maybe simply that, without doing anything else—not simultaneously listening to music or a talk, not reading or writing, not scrolling on our phone, but simply being present and alive to whatever is showing up. Hearing the birds and the traffic. Seeing whatever we’re seeing. Breathing. Sensing. Letting thinking happen when it happens, not fighting it. Not trying to do this all the time, or trying to “do it right,” because there is no right or wrong way. But simply letting this simple effortless presence happen if and when it invites us. You might find it deeply enjoyable, as I do. And, of course, sometimes it isn’t enjoyable at all. Sometimes dark feelings and troubling thoughts rise up to the surface. Sometimes we’re in physical pain. Sometimes we seem mired in agitation and confusion. And that, too, is what is.

Everything passes away. Nothing is really solid or persisting in the ways we imagine. And when we’re not desperately chasing certainty, meaning, purpose or improvement, we may discover that simply being here, just as we are, is enough. When all the ideas about how it is and how it should be fall away, if only for a moment, simplicity itself remains, perfectly as it is.

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David Williams, whose photograph is at the beginning of this article, is a Scottish photographer whose work often explores nonduality. David expresses, through his images, the paradoxical mystery of not one, not two – difference and sameness, permanence and change, form and emptiness, stillness and occurrence. He notes in his writing that all the words about nonduality (oneness, not two, unicity, wholeness) are ultimately pointing to love. And he writes, "My hope is that my work can at least aspire to somehow celebrating the breadth and depth of its mystery.” That he does, exquisitely, in my opinion. Thank you, David!

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Love to all….