In this article, I want to look at the unpindownable and indivisible nature of reality, the tendency to turn undeniable experiences into beliefs, the question of free will and responsibility, and the liberating possibility of simply being awake to present experiencing, exactly as it is.
The presence of present experiencing is effortlessly and undeniably here. Anything we say about it is an interpretation based either on our own subjective experience and/or on second-hand information and knowledge. Thus, any conclusions or formulations are inevitably speculative, uncertain and at best only abstract representations, a static map of the living territory. The territory itself is the ever-changing, unresolvable, ungraspable, infinitely complex and utterly unpindownable aliveness here and now that no words (including these) can capture.
We can’t actually stand apart from this here-now-reality to observe it objectively because we are this reality. It is not outside of us. Reality (or totality) is all there is; and all there is, is reality. Everything we see (the apparent forms that appear in everyday life, as well as what we see in dreams, mystical experiences, on 5-MeO-DMT, LSD, Psilocybin, MDMA or Ayahuasca, or anything we think or imagine) is all reality.
The notion of finding “The True Reality,” as if it were some particular “thing” that could be discovered and grasped at last, or the notion of stabilizing permanently in any particular state of consciousness that we think is “The Good or Enlightened State” is a kind of fantasy. Experiences and states are by nature impermanent, and the one who would stabilize is a kind of mirage. Life includes the whole enchilada.
Whatever THIS is (let’s call it reality), it is ungraspable and constantly changing, and yet it never departs from the present-ness and immediacy of Here-Now. It is always Just This, however it may appear. Our worst moments of confusion, upset, and so-called entanglement in delusion are no less reality than our most profound mystical experiences or moments of apparent clarity. And ultimately, we can’t know what any of it is or why it’s here. It simply IS. Present experiencing is at once vividly present and yet astonishingly evanescent. If we try to get hold of it, it is like trying to grasp smoke or air.
In the spiritual world, there is a strong tendency to turn undeniable experiences into conclusive metaphysical certainties and beliefs about the True Nature of Reality, and it is always wise to recognize our epistemological limits. For example, I can easily experience being the open boundless aware space in which everything is appearing and disappearing, including all the sensations, thoughts, images, memories and stories that I call “me” or “my bodymind.” And I can see that everything I experience is an appearance in and of consciousness, including any brain that any neurosurgeon has ever operated on. Experientially, it is all an appearance in and of consciousness. And I have a very deep intuitive sense of the unbroken wholeness or unicity of everything, the way it all goes together as an indivisible and seamless whole. I literally cannot imagine how it could possibly be any other way! But does any of this prove conclusively that Ultimate Reality (the substance of everything) is, in fact, boundless awareness, that I am fundamentally awareness and not a person, that everything is only Consciousness, that consciousness precedes the brain, that the so-called world (including the brain) is literally a dream, or that everything actually is an indivisible whole? Could what seems undeniable in my experience simply reflect the nature and limits of human perception? How would I know for sure?
In the end, everything we say about reality is a tentative map that must be held lightly and provisionally. It is only a description or a pointer, something to use or explore, not something to believe. That may sound very scary, like having no ground to stand on and nothing to hold onto, and yet in my experience, when we hold onto nothing at all, there is an immense freedom and wonder in groundlessness, in simply being this ungraspable aliveness.
Although it cannot be captured by any formulation, the presence of this moment is impossible to doubt. It is obvious and undeniable. The interpretations are what can always be doubted. For example, I can doubt whether the shape I see in your hand is a gun, a banana, a floater on my eyeball, or an hallucination, but I cannot doubt the bare experiencing (the seeing or appearing) of that shape. That raw experience, prior to any interpretation, is obvious and undoubtable. But everything else I say about it is subject to doubt and is at best only a frozen one-dimensional sketch of an infinitely complex, multi-dimensional moving picture. Even if I “correctly” identify the shape as “a banana,” that word-category doesn’t begin to capture the living, morphing, reality of THIS particular unique banana at this unique and already vanishing moment.
Experientially, many things are possible, including what I described in my last newsletter about shifting from entanglement in the content of thought to the open spacious aware presence beholding it all. That possibility can be a beautiful and liberating discovery that frees us from a great deal of unnecessary confusion and suffering. But because of that, it’s easy to get caught up in chasing such experiences in a result-oriented way, evaluating how well we’re doing, thinking that one experience is “spiritually correct” and the other is not. Ultimately, it’s all reality, both the contracted entanglement and the expansive openness. It’s all here. It all shows up. It’s all an undeniable aspect of what is, and it can’t really be pulled apart.
There’s no problem with having relative goals or aspirations, such as getting a college degree, improving our tennis game, or shifting from painful entanglement in habitual thinking to open aware presence whenever we can, but we suffer when we think our happiness depends on getting the degree, improving our game, or successfully controlling the movement of attention. When that happens, our life becomes result-oriented. We are more focused on the goal than we are on the life we are actually living here and now. This goal-oriented approach to life creates the experience of running on a hamster wheel chasing a carrot that is forever just out of reach.
And when we look for the “me” who seems to be doing all this—authoring my thoughts, making my choices, having these different experiences—the “me” who is supposedly in command, who (we believe) should be able to shift attention and snap out of destructive habits at will, this “me” can’t really be found. When we look for it, all we find are sensations, thoughts, images, memories, beliefs, and the sense of being this aware presence that seemingly makes choices. But the more closely and carefully we watch as choices emerge, the clearer it becomes that it is all happening by itself, including the thought-sense (or neurological sensation, as one neuroscientist calls it) of initiating actions, having intentions, making decisions and exerting effort. Neuroscience seems to be confirming that thought doesn’t initiate action; it arises after action is already in motion at a level below conscious awareness.
Of course, as I often point out, if we’re raising a child or training an athlete, we will certainly talk to them as if they have free will. In fact, we have no choice but to act as if we have free will in countless everyday situations. Truly grokking the illusory nature of free will doesn’t mean we become, as many people fear, a passive disempowered slacker who sits on the couch all day unable to move waiting for food to magically appear, nor does it mean that we will suddenly go out and start killing people, as if it is only our free will that is currently restraining us from doing this. It simply means that our desires, urges, interests, abilities, motivations, impulses, and so on are all a movement of the whole, a result of infinite causes and conditions.
Life will (almost certainly) move us to get up from the couch, use the bathroom, go to work, do the laundry, prepare meals, care for our children, “decide” what movie to watch, and so on. But if we observe closely, all of this happens in a very ungraspable way. The author-decider-doer is unfindable. We don’t actually create our preferences and desires, or choose what sources of information feel trustworthy to us. Why one person can apparently “decide” to stop smoking while another is seemingly compelled to keep lighting up until the day they die of emphysema or lung cancer is beyond our ability to completely figure out. Why the desire to stop smoking overrides the desire to smoke in one moment but not in another, or what turns one person into a saint and another into a serial killer, is altogether mysterious. We may think it’s because one person is “good” or “industrious” or “trying hard” while the other person is “just a no-good slacker,” but what forces make each of us the way we are in each moment?
There are many things, such as education, athletic training, yoga, meditation, and so on that may give us greater control and a larger range of choices, but whether we are drawn to do any of these things, whether we have the ability or the discipline to persist in them, and what results from them is not really in our control. We suffer when we believe that we and everyone else are all separate, autonomous agents with free will and choice who could and should be doing much better than we actually are doing. This belief gives rise to guilt, blame, judgment, desire for punishment and revenge, feelings of failure or false pride, and so many other forms of suffering.
When we see that all of this—the things we do or don’t do, along with the results—are all movements of a larger whole, it is enormously freeing and relaxing. It doesn’t mean we can’t or won’t make our best effort. But we see that the effort we do or don’t make and the results are not in our hands. That owner-operator is a mirage. This gives us compassion for all of us when we fail to live up to our ideas and ideals of how we and everyone else “should” be.
And yet, turning “no free will” into a doctrine misses something vital. We can feel the difference between so-called voluntary actions and so-called involuntary ones, and we have a felt sense of what it means to exert effort and will or to relax and open, and there seems to be an ability right here to do such things, at least sometimes, albeit we can’t find an author or a doer. So although in one sense there is no choice—it’s all simply happening, including the so-called voluntary actions—at the same time, in everyday life, it can sometimes be important to feel that we have a choice and to take responsibility for our actions. And we may find that response-ability (the ability to respond) is not what we think it is.
We may notice that some actions seem to emerge quite robotically from habit and conditioning, while other actions seem to flow from a very different source. Eckhart Tolle calls the latter “the power of now,” or the power of presence, the power of awareness. It’s not a personal power. It’s not thought-generated. The imaginary “me” isn’t in control of this power; indeed, that “me” (which is just a thought-image-sensation) is utterly powerless. But when there is open alert relaxed spacious presence (“being here now”), there is greater sensitivity and illumination. Misery-inducing and disabling beliefs are seen through, old conditioned habits lose their grip, more possibilities come online, and there is an ability to respond intelligently and holistically, from wholeness (and wholesomeness) rather than from separation and delusion. The chain of conditioning is broken. In Twelve-Step work, they speak of recognizing our powerlessness (as the little “me,” the ego, the thinking mind), and turning our lives over to a higher power. In my view, that higher power is synonymous with presence-awareness. And this is not something outside of us. It is, indeed, most intimate, closer than close. Awareness is like unconditional love—it illuminates and accepts everything, clings to nothing, and has space for new possibilities to emerge.
So is there choice or no choice? Neither formulation is quite right. I’ve come to see that different (seemingly contradictory and apparently irreconcilable) maps can be helpful in different moments, and that they can all be both useful and potentially misleading. We simply need to remember that all of them are maps. When we forget that, all of them can become a source of suffering, and we can easily end up in heated arguments over which one is The Truth.
Everything I’ve said in this article is based on what has become clear and obvious to me through watching closely how things happen, but as I said earlier, I cannot know with absolute certainty that any of it is “The Truth.” I can only offer it as my experience, how I see it. And any conceptual formulation such as free will or no free will, self or no self, effort or effortlessness, is inevitably incomplete because the map is never the territory. We can’t actually put THIS (the living reality) into words and concepts.
Where does that leave us? Right here, being just exactly as we are, which is effortlessly and unavoidably always already the case. Present experiencing is at once undeniably obvious in its bare presence, and at the same time, utterly ungraspable through any interpretive formulation. That doesn’t mean we should strive to maintain some permanent state of thought-free sensing or pure awareness, which would be impossible anyway. Nor does it mean imagining that we can (or should) return to the state of a newborn who presumably sees only colors, shapes, textures and movements, but has not yet learned to see tables and chairs, mothers and fathers, teachers and students, awareness and content, meaning and purpose, good and evil. There’s no going back, and no need to go back. Mapping is something the territory is doing, and as a movement of reality, it’s as real as anything else. Just don’t mistake the map of New York City for the living vibrant unpindownable aliveness of the city itself. And don’t imagine that you can ever step out of this indivisible here-now-reality, no matter how it appears.
One of the many ways that this here-now-reality shows up is as the exploration and enjoyment of direct experiencing, the yoga or practice of “being here now,” exploring this ever-changing body-mind-world with awareness, being awake to present experiencing, being presence, being just this, and discovering how everything is included. As one of my Zen teachers, Charlotte Joko Beck, said to me many years ago, “It’s the best game in town.” It’s helpful to keep that playful spirit. Spirituality, like politics, is prone to taking itself way too seriously. I like the idea that the universe is playing.
What Have I Been Reading?
A Complicated Kindness, another novel by Miriam Toews
How Minds Change, by David McRaney
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Thank you Joan.
You are reminding me of the koan: Two monks are arguing about a flag. One says, “The flag is moving.” The other, “The wind is moving.” A third walks by and says, “Not the wind, not the flag; the mind is moving.”