Flowing Wholeness

ever fresh

We’re like whirlpools and music, hurricanes and icicles. Once formed – that is, conceived – we’re seemingly particular things, yet in each moment, all is fresh and new.

—Steve Hagen

Life is an unpindownable, ungraspable flow that never stays the same for even a split second, and yet this flow never departs from the immediacy of here and now, this ever-present aliveness that we are and that everything is.

Thought is endlessly drawing boundary lines, freezing the flow into apparently static and persisting things, turning verbs into nouns, and then labeling and interpreting the conceptual abstractions it has created. This activity of thinking, conceptualizing and languaging is part of this flowing whole, inseparable from nonverbal sensory-energetic experiencing. We can’t pull them apart. It’s one whole happening.

But it can be seen that the map is not the territory. This sounds obvious, but it gets subtler and subtler, because the map world is quite ubiquitous. Suffering and confusion are the result of mistaking conceptual absractions for life itself, trying to find nourishment by reading the menu rather than eating the meal. And yet, it can also be discovered that mapping is something the territory is doing, and in that sense, the map is the territory—they are not two. The map of New York is not New York, and yet, it is not other than New York.

What exactly is New York? Or the kitchen table? Or Joan Tollifson? Or anybody or anything else? The more closely we look at any one or any thing, the more we find ungraspable, unpindownable flux inseparable from everything that “thing” supposedly is not. Where are the boundaries?

Is anyone in control of this flux? Me? You? God? Zeus? Apparently not, or at least, I haven’t found anyone. This present experiencing, and this whole universe, seems to be happening spontaneously without anyone apart from it who is generating or controlling it. The seer and the seen are imaginary ideas imposed by thought onto the actuality of seeing. This seeing-hearing-breathing-awaring-moving-thinking-being is not really divided up into separate parts. It’s one flowing whole in which everything that appears is like whirlpools and waves.

Each moment is fresh and new. And yet thought can endlessly reincarnate the past: who I think I am, what I think you are, what I think is happening, what I think has happened in the past, what I imagine will happen next. And in each moment—this one bottomless moment—there is the possibility of waking up to the aliveness, the freshness, the wonder that is right here now.

I’m not pointing to some mysterious state of consciousness we must locate and maintain. It’s just this: the taste of tea, the sounds of rain, the warmth of sunlight, the red leaves blowing off the tree, the sensations of breathing, the joy of seeing a friend, the spacious awaring presence being and beholding it all, the simple joy (and sometimes the excruciating pain) of being alive. Never the same way twice. Always fresh. Never pindownable. Always just this.

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From a chapter called "The Art of Going Nowhere," in my book Nothing to Grasp:

The word "meditation" gets used to mean so many different things, and people take up meditation for so many different reasons, that I tend to avoid the word altogether. What I invite people to explore is simply being awake Here / Now, being aware, giving open attention to actual direct experience, without looking upon anything that happens as a distraction or an interruption, without trying to change or modify it in any way.

This can happen while sitting quietly in an armchair, or it can happen on the city bus while riding to work, or it can happen in a waiting room before a medical appointment, or on an airplane, or on a bench in the park. It can happen while walking through nature or while walking through the city.  It can happen in your kitchen or in a prison cell, in a hospital bed or at the office. For one moment (whether that moment lasts for a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days), as an experiment, put down the magazines, the books, the iPod, the smart phone. Turn off the computer, the radio, the TV. Put down your knitting and your prayer beads. And simply be present, empty-handed. See what reveals itself. 

The whooshing of traffic, the song of a bird, the faint sound of a television in another room. Rain drops hanging on a green leaf, a cigarette butt in the gutter, clouds drifting across the blue sky. The fragrance of flowers, the smell of exhaust fumes from the city bus, the sweetness of rain-drenched air. Breathing, tightness in the chest, queasiness in the belly, an ache in the shoulder, a sensation of heat or cold. The spaciousness that permeates it all.

This kind of exploration brings you out of the mental realm of thoughts and into the nonconceptual realm of sensory awareness. It gives you a direct, felt-experience of fluidity, impermanence and spaciousness. Breath, sounds and sensations cannot be grasped or held onto – they are a movement without borders or seams. Actually, thinking and conceptualizing are also a movement without borders or seams, but it’s much easier to notice that with sense perceptions than it is with thoughts and ideas. So by simply being here as thoughtless awareness, you experience directly that everything is changing and that all of life is seamless, undivided movement or presence. There is no distance between you and this present happening. It is utterly immediate. You are this.

—from Nothing to Grasp (published in 2012)

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Love to all…