Longing, Seeking, Exploring

Self-improvement vs. genuine transformation

YOU are an expression of this radiance, exactly as you are, and yet the dance of this presence may pirouette in your heart as your longing to awaken, or to love more deeply, or to heal divisions that exist in yourself or in your world. What could possibly be excluded from this undivided wholeness moving as it does moment-to-moment?

—Dorothy Hunt

Listen to the story told by the reed,
of being separated.

“Since I was cut from the reedbed,
I have made this crying sound.

Anyone apart from someone he loves
understands what I say.

Anyone pulled from a source
longs to go back...

—Rumi, excerpted from The Song of the Reed

Student: I’m reaching for the light.

Zen Master Yunmen: Forget about the light, show me the reaching.

—Zen koan

You are perfect just as you are, and there’s room for improvement.

—Shunryu Suzuki

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

—Carl Rogers

We have a natural desire to heal what is broken, to balance what is out of kilter, to be free from the psychological suffering and confusion that so often plagues us. We have a deep longing for the home that is always right here but that can feel so far away.

And so, we have spiritual paths. These take many forms and go by many names. Some emphasize focused concentration, others emphasize open spacious aware presence, some emphasize present experiencing, just as it is. Some offer practices and methods, others offer nothing but the invitation to stop, look and listen—to be still, to open our eyes and ears and hearts, to allow this whole happening to unfold and reveal itself. Some simply insist that nothing is needed—that this is always already it, however it is showing up.

Some call what they offer mindfulness, some call it yoga, some call it meditation, some call it contemplative prayer, some call it life as it is, some call it nothing, some call it exploration and discovery. Some speak of intention, vigilance and practice, while others suggest abandoning all practices.

I always say, follow the practice or non-practice that works for you. And by that, I mean the one that brings you home to right here, right now, the one that frees you from suffering and opens your heart-mind, the one that makes it clear that you cannot be other than how you are in each moment, that you’re okay exactly as you are. That doesn’t mean you can’t change—in fact, you can’t not change. And yet, something is always immovably right here, right now: timeless, eternal, ever-present. This open aware presence isn’t an object that we can see, objectify or grasp. It is what we most fundamentally are.

Maybe those words don’t work for you. I say, use whatever words and formulations do work for you. Don’t waste time arguing over which words or practices are best. In the same way that there isn’t one diet that is the best for everyone, there is no one spiritual path or practice that is best for everyone. We must each find our own way, and that can change from one time to another. It requires a sensitivity to what is needed now, not sticking rigidly to what worked yesterday or to any idea we have about what is best.

Finding our own way doesn’t mean we can’t work with teachers, be in spiritual communities, read books or listen to talks. We can. We are all aspects of one indivisible whole, dancing and unfolding together, informing one another, like the jewels in Indra’s Net, each a reflection of all the others.

Our whole life is our path. Being a drunk was an essential part of my journey, as was sobering up. The light and the dark work together, the reaching and the settling, the clarity and the confusion, the peace and the agitation, the noise and the silence. The journey isn’t just about light, clarity and bliss. The stumbles and moments of feeling lost are all part of it. It all goes together.

My journey has included a multitude of teachers and approaches, while for some people, staying with one teacher, one path, or one tradition for a lifetime is the way. Others have no teacher other than life itself. We each have to find our own way. And our own way is the way that shows up—the path (or pathlessness) that we find ourselves walking on in each moment.

I often distinguish between longing and seeking, or between exploring and seeking. Seeking, in my lexicon, suggests a movement that comes from the me-identity and the thought-sense of being separate, incomplete, lost and deficient. It’s a grasping, future-oriented, result-oriented, addictive kind of movement, always looking elsewhere and elsewhen for something more, better, different. It begins with, and reinforces, the belief that “this isn’t it.”

Longing, on the other hand, comes from the heart. It is the heart calling us home, and home is always right here, right now. Being awake isn’t about acquiring anything new or eliminating anything that’s showing up. It’s about seeing through stories and beliefs, seeing through the illusion of separation and discovering the undivided wholeness of being. Likewise, exploration is about present moment contemplative inquiry—looking and listening to our own direct experience here and now, allowing it to reveal itself in ever-fresh ways.

Instead of settling into open presence, marinating in it, exploring it, being it, the mind loves to think. It thinks about future attainments, trying to figure out how to get to some imaginary “there” from here and evaluating how well I’m doing. Or it gets caught up in trying to make sense of all this intellectually, endlessly asking, “Yes, but…”. In all this thinking, we endlessly overlook the only place we ever actually are. Can we begin to see these movements of the thinking mind and perhaps not have to follow them around and around the hamster wheel in pursuit of the imaginary carrot? Can we shift our attention to the aliveness of this moment? This is where the juice is. This is the only actuality.

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The following is excerpted from a section called “The Curious Paradox” in Chapter Five of my book Death: The End of Self-Improvement. I distinguish in this chapter between obsessive self-improvement and genuine transformation:

How genuine transformation happens has been one of the main interests of my life. I’ve experienced and seen undeniable positive changes in myself and others through meditation, psychotherapy, somatic awareness work, spirituality and nonduality. I’ve seen positive changes in society as a result of political movements, some of which I’ve participated in..

An interest in how change happens and the total acceptance of what is may seem like two diametrically opposed movements, but in fact, I have come to see that true healing, transformation and liberation begin with the simple acceptance of this moment and this world, just as it is. As counterintuitive as it may seem, embracing imperfection, allowing everything to be as it is, loving what is—this is the gateless gate to a fresh start and the utterly new. Oddly enough, this is the secret of freedom.

My first Zen teacher, Mel Weitsman, said that “our suffering is believing there’s a way out.”  The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa famously said that enlightenment is not final victory, but rather, final defeat. Another one of my Zen teachers, Joko Beck, spoke of Zen as “having no hope.”  She also used to say, “What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.” None of these teachers were pointing to a state of despair, resignation or hopelessness, which is the flip side of hope, equally rooted in an imaginary future. Instead, they were pointing to how we can waste our lives in hopeful fantasies and “the pursuit of happiness” while missing the living reality that is Here-Now. We dream of the perfect location, the perfect house, the perfect career, the perfect partner, the perfect child, the perfect enlightenment experience, the perfect self, the perfect society, the perfect world, the perfect present moment—and all the while we are missing out on the actuality and perfection of life as it is.

That doesn’t mean we should all vegetate passively on the couch or be a doormat for abuse. In fact, we cannot suppress or deny our natural desire for exertion and movement, our urge to take action, to respond to life, to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to dance the particular dance that each of us is moved to dance. There is a natural impulse to pursue what attracts us, to heal what is broken, to clarify what is obscure, to explore new territory, to discover and develop and extend our capacities and capabilities, to envision different possibilities, to help others, to bring forth what is within us. Astronomy, quantum physics, going to the gym, learning a foreign language, practicing meditation, playing music, taking up yoga, exploring various forms of awareness work, working for social justice, writing books, making art, raising children, starting a business, planning a trip to Mars, performing brain surgery, climbing mountains, rescuing abandoned cats and dogs, developing new software programs—all of this is the natural movement of life, something the universe is doing, just as the seed flowering into a tree, or the ecosystem evolving in ever new ways are all the natural and spontaneous play of life. Everything is included…

But paradoxically, it is in some sense the very search for happiness that makes us miserable. That search is predicated on the belief in deficiency and lack, the belief that “this isn’t it.” It is all about a “me” that doesn’t actually exist and a future that never arrives. The end of self-improvement is the realization of what is always already whole and complete, the wholeness that includes the apparent brokenness…

There is a palpable shift that occurs when attention drops out of the thinking mind into stillness and presence. When that happens, in the light of awareness, there is an increase in responsibility (response-ability), the ability to respond rather than react, to move in a more wholesome—holistic, whole, intelligent—way. This is the beauty of meditation, psychotherapy, various forms of inquiry, and somatic practices such as Feldenkrais, Continuum or yoga. They bring awareness to where we are stuck and show us what else is possible. We become less ensnared in old conditioning, and a new range of possibilities opens up. The habitual me-system is no longer always running the show. We are no longer totally a slave to conditioned neurology. We (as awareness) have more choices, more possibilities, at least sometimes…

Life is a kind of balancing act in a way, between the recognition that everything is perfect just as it is, and the impulse or aspiration, which is part of this perfection, to grow and transform. If we pay attention, we can begin to feel the difference between misery-inducing self-improvement and what we might call healthy aspiration, genuine transformation or true happiness. There are no rules for precisely where one ends and the other begins. And in the absolute sense, everything is equally an expression of unicity, including misery-inducing self-improvement… But on a functional and relative level, just as we can distinguish apples from oranges, we can distinguish what we might call healthy aspiration or genuine transformation from the kind of misery-inducing self-improvement that is itself a manifestation of the very problem it is trying to solve.

Self-improvement is always focused on the future, while true happiness is only ever found Here-Now.  Self-improvement begins with the rejection of this-Here-Now, while healthy aspiration begins with the embrace of what is. Self-improvement is endless postponement. The finish line is never reached. Genuine transformation is the recognition that waking up only happens Here-Now. Self-improvement is rooted in a sense of lack and deficiency, whereas true happiness understands that the defect is an essential component of perfection. Self-improvement wants one polarity to triumph over its opposite, which is never going to happen, while genuine transformation recognizes the inseparability and collaborative necessity of both apparently opposing forces.

Self-improvement is oppositional and violent. It thinks in terms of fighting cancer, waging a war on drugs or a war on terror, killing the ego, vanquishing thought. Genuine transformation comes from unconditional love. It has no enemies. It recognizes everything as the Beloved. It sees only God everywhere. It embraces everything, recognizing everything as itself. What we resist tends to persist because by resisting it, we are validating its reality and giving it power. The more we oppose and vilify something, the stronger, more defensive and aggressive it seems to become. Not resisting doesn’t mean staying in an abusive relationship, being a doormat or not taking action to correct an injustice. It is pointing to something much more immediate, a way of being in this very moment that allows intelligent action to emerge. You can treat cancer without fighting it, and it is only the ego that wants to kill the ego.

Self-improvement is rooted in the illusion of an imaginary self with free will and choice trying to control and fix a separate and enduring “thing” that doesn’t actually exist, whether that imaginary “thing” is “me” or “you” or “the world.” Genuine transformation moves from wholeness and recognizes that whatever is appearing Here-Now is the Only Possible in this moment.

Happiness arises from a fundamental trust or faith in the Way It Is (the Tao), while self-improvement moves from fear and insecurity. When I speak of trust, I don’t mean trusting that things will go my way, but trusting that whatever happens, all is well in the deepest sense. This isn’t a belief—it’s a faith that emerges from presence.

Self-improvement inevitably ends in disappointment, because it is the nature of form to break down and fall apart. Genuine transformation begins from the recognition of what is beyond any particular form and yet completely present as every form. It points to a freedom and joy that isn’t dependent on outcomes.

Self-improvement is rigid and perfectionistic, driven by beliefs, expectations and old answers, while genuine transformation is flexible, open to new discoveries and rooted in not-knowing. Genuine transformation listens for what life itself wants, while self-improvement imagines that “I” know how everything “should” be. Self-improvement is judgmental, self-righteous and narrow-minded, while happiness and real change are the release of all that.

Self-improvement is primarily thought-based, while genuine transformation emerges from aware presence. Thought divides; awareness joins. Thought is dualistic; awareness is nondual. Of course, there is a place for intelligent thinking—reason, intellect and analysis are marvelous tools. I’m not in any way disparaging thinking. I have great appreciation for the scientific method and for human reason. But awareness is upstream from thought. And in many situations, thought is the wrong instrument.

There is a place for healthy aspiration and intention, for creative imagination and visualization. Social change work of any kind obviously relies to some degree on our ability to identify what causes suffering and to imagine a different possibility. There is no exact or fixed line where that healthy and functional use of memory, imagination and thinking crosses over into a painful obsession. But we can become more and more sensitive to where we are coming from when we envision or work toward a change in ourselves or in the world. We can begin to feel the difference between perfectionistic self-improvement and genuine transformation, between self-righteousness and love. And we can recognize that the best place to begin any kind of change is always with simply being aware of how it is right now.

Otherwise, it’s easy to wind up recreating and reinforcing the very problems we are trying to solve. When we fail to go all the way to the root of our problems, we often end up reproducing the original problem in a new form. We’ve seen this in many political revolutions, in various technological developments that have had unintended consequences, and in spiritual practices that end up reinforcing the root illusions. We easily end up digging ourselves into deeper and deeper holes. Humanity is now on the verge of wiping itself off the face of the earth, all because we have made one well-intended “improvement” after another.

How would it be to not know how we or the universe or this moment “should” be?

Patterns of thought are deeply conditioned and, as we grow up, we begin to think that we actually are the voice in our heads, the thought-stream, and we come to believe that whatever this voice says is reliable and true, and that we are somehow authoring our thoughts as well. We even begin to think that there is nothing outside of thought, that thinking is the primary reality. “I think, therefore I am.” We are easily hypnotized and entranced by our thoughts. One of the reasons I feel insight meditation is helpful, or a process such as The Work of Byron Katie, or many intelligent forms of psychotherapy, is that recognizing thoughts as thoughts is not always as easy as it sounds, and realizing that there is so much here other than thought—as obvious as that seems once it’s obvious—can be surprisingly elusive. It is, as they say, the open secret, hidden in plain sight, the elusive obvious.

We can argue over whether thought is causative of emotions and behaviors or whether it is simply an aftereffect of what originates below the level of conscious awareness. I suspect both perspectives are true, each perhaps more so in some instances than others. Clearly, waking up isn’t only a matter of questioning our thoughts and beliefs but, in my experience, that’s an important element.

Bringing awareness to the body, feeling sensations, tuning into aware presence in a way that is non-conceptual and not thought-based is the other part of the equation—opening up to the non-conceptual immediacy of the sensory-energetic actuality Here-Now and recognizing the boundless awaring presence that we are and that everything is. And that can happen in many different ways.

We don’t ever reach any ideal perfection that we can imagine, or if we do, it doesn’t last. So any true aspiration must be balanced by the realization that life is in charge, not me. We must discover the willingness to allow life to unfold at its own pace, in its own way, the willingness to fail again and again, without taking that personally and turning it into a story of personal lack or a reason for self-hatred. Shunryu Suzuki said, “The life of a Zen Master is one continuous mistake.” Or Zen teacher Elihu Genmyo Smith: “Mistake after mistake is the perfect way.” Our failures, disappointments, mistakes, and even humanity’s most horrific actions, are all part of this whole fabric in some essential way. We know from our own experience that our most difficult and challenging experiences are often the ones that open us up and teach us the most.

It’s not uncommon for people who take up some form of nonduality to get stuck in the absolute for a while—and in some cases, forever. They get the mistaken idea that they aren’t supposed to have goals or preferences of any kind, that they shouldn’t want anything to change. They keep asserting over and over that there is no self, no choice, nothing to do—that everything is perfect as it is, that nothing is even happening. But it’s quite natural to want to change what hurts. And it’s quite useful to be able to see when we are making a mistake or missing the mark. Of course, we are never out of integrity in the absolute sense, and in that larger sense, every mistake is perfectly placed, but in the relative world of everyday life, the ability to identify mistakes and correct them is vital to our survival as individuals and as a species. It’s part of how life is functioning and evolving. Perfection isn’t a matter of not making any mistakes. It’s about the ability to learn from them, to get up and keep going, to not take mistakes personally or get lost in shame, guilt and self-hatred, to start fresh Here-Now. 

Sometimes when we have an idea that “everything is perfect as it is,” we forget that working to improve things is part of what is. We leave ourselves and our own abilities, inclinations and actions out of the picture in some way. So, nonduality doesn’t mean we shouldn’t meditate or pray or take vows or see a therapist. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go to the gym and exercise, or that we leave a flat tire flat forever because we are “allowing everything to be as it is,” or because “we are powerless and have no choice.” That is a misunderstanding. And waking up from our entrancement in thought, from our habitual tendency to mistake the map for the territory, doesn’t in any way mean that we can’t, or shouldn’t, think or conceptualize or use maps. It simply points to how all these activities come from life itself, not from the phantom self. All our ideas of success and failure are just that, ideas.

The peace and freedom we long for is found in one place only: Here-Now. Of course, we can’t make ourselves stop seeking and resisting on command, and any attempt to do so is only another form of seeking and resisting. All that can happen is to see this habitual pattern of seeking and resisting whenever it arises. We can’t even make that happen—but it does happen, when it does.

It’s fine to have practical goals, such as getting a college degree. But we don’t need to get hooked on the fantasy that we will be happy only if and when we get that degree, or that we need that degree to be happy. Our attention can be on the present moment even as we move toward the goal.

Awakening is not about denying relative reality. What happens in the world both matters and doesn’t matter. As a human being in the play of life, it breaks my heart to see someone torturing an animal or abusing a child. It breaks my heart to remember some of the insensitive, abusive or hurtful things I have done in my life. Having the bigger view, the absolute perspective, helps me to see all of this in a bigger context, to hold it more lightly, more compassionately, more gently, to be more flexible, open-minded and open-hearted—to see beyond the story that the world is going to hell and I have to fix it, or that I am a terrible person who should crawl into a hole and die. To recognize how ephemeral and insubstantial, how subjective and dreamlike it all is, is very liberating. But it doesn’t mean I don’t care, that my heart doesn’t break sometimes, or that I may not be moved to act.

In Zen, there are a bunch of precepts, and they say that from the absolute perspective, it is impossible to break them, and from the relative perspective, it is impossible not to break them. Just by being alive, we break them. Not killing, the first precept, is broken every time we eat, every time we take a step, every time we wipe our forehead, every time we inhale. Life feeds on life. But in the absolute sense, no-thing is born and no-thing dies; so we can never actually kill anything. From the absolute view, there are no mistakes. From the relative view, there are many mistakes, and it’s important to recognize them, correct them, learn from them, apologize for them, or whatever is appropriate in the situation. We cannot land on either side of the equation—both perspectives are important.

Seeing this, we begin to love the imperfections in life, the mistakes, the defects, the things that don’t go our way, the upsets. We begin to see the Beloved everywhere, even in our disappointments and disturbances, maybe even especially there, where we would least expect to find it.

I’ve heard that when Katagiri Roshi was dying, he said, “Enlightenment is not dying a good death. Enlightenment is not needing to die a good death.”  Even if you are screaming in pain, or yelling in anger, or having the thought, “How am I doing? Is this a good death? Am I impressing my students?”—even that is simply what is. It’s not personal. When it is seen as impersonal weather, a whole new moment opens up. There is no trace from the past, and there is no one here to take delivery. The universe begins anew.

—from Death: The End of Self-Improvement

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Love to all…