No Way Out

You Can't Get It Wrong

Perhaps the most liberating of all realizations is the recognition that there is always simply what is, just as it is. All our ideas about it are the stuff of dreams. The actuality itself never resolves into the tidy boxes and bounded categories of conceptual thought. The living reality is seamless, boundless, indivisible, unresolvable, ungraspable, infinitely varied, utterly immediate, always right here, right now, completely obvious and utterly unavoidable. Nothing stands apart from Here-Now (unicity). There is no way out, and thus, no need of a way in. We can’t ever get it wrong. Everything belongs. In this moment, nothing could be other than exactly how it is. Each of our urges, desires, fears, inclinations, interests, abilities, beliefs, perspectives and so-called shortcomings or mistakes are the result of infinite causes and conditions, an impersonal movement of the whole, wavings of a seamless ocean, dreamed events in the dreaming consciousness, along with the mirage-like individual author supposedly in control.

This living reality is multi-dimensional—a fractal, holographic, kaleidoscopic, Rorschach blot that can appear, be seen, and be interpreted in infinitely different ways. Our ordinary everyday perspective is as valid as our subtlest and most transcendent one, as I tried to express in this excerpt from my book DEATH: The End of Self-Improvement:

On the relative level of ordinary reality, the starving child really does need food to survive, and the hunger pains really do hurt, and the mother’s grief really is agonizing, and each of us will do whatever life moves us to do when faced with this reality. But from the cosmic perspective, whether the child survives or not, whether being hungry hurts or doesn’t, whether we join an aid organization or turn away, is all simply another momentary appearance in the seamless totality that includes everything. In that larger sense, it is one undivided energy, endlessly reshaping itself. It only appears to be a child or a famine or a sensation we call hunger or a feeling we call compassion.

One moment our life drama and the world drama seem totally real and important, and in another moment, they seem no more substantial than last night’s dream. Children love to build sandcastles and then smoosh them. We love to go to the movies and then come out again after it ends. Tibetan monks sometimes spend days creating intricate mandalas with grains of colored sand, and then when they’ve finished, they enjoy it for a moment, and then they wreck it. Maybe the entire universe as we know it is like one of those mandalas, a beautiful painting in emptiness. Perhaps all these examples are microcosms of how consciousness likes to create things and then gleefully destroy them. Maybe every moment is a painting in emptiness. Maybe the whole history of planet Earth and human development is like one of those sand castles on the beach, and at some moment, consciousness or God or the universe will wipe it out with climate change or a nuclear holocaust or an asteroid. Maybe a lifetime is a mandala, and at death, it is gleefully wiped out.

Maybe this whole manifestation that we call “the world” or “the movie of waking life” is a neverending look into the mirror.  Everything I see “out there” is myself.  One moment Buddha, the next moment Hitler. The One Self—aka, no self at all—is playing all the parts, dreaming all the dreams, exploring every possibility.

But rather than getting tied up in knots trying to figure out how the whole universe works, or trying to nail down the right metaphysical formulation or the best philosophy, or trying to figure out once and for all what happens after death, I find it much more helpful to drop all our ideas, concepts and beliefs and return again and again to the openness of not knowing and the immediacy and simplicity of this moment, this living presence Here-Now.

--from my book DEATH: The End of Self-Improvement

You might think, if it all just is as it is, then why take up a spiritual practice of any kind (as if we had a choice one way or the other)? What would be the point? Perhaps pointlessness is the radical point. And perhaps it can’t be otherwise. Obviously there’s a place for spiritual practices because they’re here. They show up. And in my experience with them, they can be helpful in seeing the false as false and discovering the myriad ways this happening is not what we think it is.

As open attention is given in ever more subtle and inclusive ways to the bare actuality itself, we find that the apparent body-mind-world that initially seemed so solid and definable is much less substantial and way more fluid, amorphous and evanescent than it first seemed. We find that the apparent boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, subject and object are not actually findable. We get less obsessed with figuring out how the universe works and nailing it all down, and more open to simply being here as this ungraspable but undeniable aware presence or present happening.

At first, it usually seems as if some states of consciousness are “it” and some are not—that some behaviors are “spiritual” and others most definitely are not—that sometimes “I” (the apparently separate, encapsulated little “me”) “get it,” while at other times “I” seem to “lose it.” We imagine ourselves separate from “it,” on a journey toward attaining this imaginary “it,” while also working to get rid of the things we believe are obstacles to this attainment, such as the self, our busy mind, turbulent emotions, and all our so-called “distractions” from “it.”

But gradually, with luck, this dualistic picture gets thinner and thinner until it’s clear that there are no mistakes and that everything is included. Everything is it, and there really is no “it,” only this ungraspable it-less-ness. Life doesn’t always feel nondual and wonderful, of course, and there can be flare-ups of resistance, discontent, irritation, anger, blame, defensiveness, seeking something better, old storylines momentarily seeming believable, and all manner of bad behavior. But it becomes clear that even all of that is included. Even the natural desire to wake up from such delusions is included, as are all the helpful or clarifying practices we are drawn to in any moment. Everything is included. There is nothing to do or not do. There is simply what shows up, exactly as it is. And none of it is personal.

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How Does Politics Fit with Nondual Spirituality?

Outside, the freezing desert night.
This other night inside grows warm, kindling.
Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
We have a soft garden in here.
The continents blasted,
cities and little towns, everything
become a scorched, blackened ball.

The news we hear is full of grief for that future,
but the real news inside here
is there's no news at all.

--Rumi

Politics is often a dirty word implying corruption, but actually the word itself simply means how we live and work together and make decisions in groups. This is obviously an important part of life, and because it deals with issues we care deeply about, often ones upon which our very survival depends, it easily involves conflict, division, and strong emotions—even wars.

I was once a political activist, but then, many decades ago, I turned to Zen and other forms of nondual spirituality. My interest in politics remained and still does, but my focus on it and my upsets over it have gotten weaker and weaker over the years—with occasional flare-ups when a particular issue or situation pushes my buttons.

I do at times feel a sense of responsibility to speak out when my perspective feels important and perhaps under-represented. And I am definitely a political junky in the sense that I find many of these issues and dramas fascinating and compelling—it’s like great theater. Although actually, it often isn’t that great, especially since the advent of social media and 24-hour cable news.

Often it is just an addictive cacophony of profit-driven clickbait sound-bites designed to capture attention and trigger storms of emotion-thought. Suddenly whatever issue is at hand seems very, very important, my view of it seems unquestionably right, and the fact that others see it differently feels horribly wrong, leading me to feel alienated and isolated, often angry, with other more vulnerable feelings under that—in short, it strengthens the egoic sense of being separate and encapsulated and drowns out the bigger picture and the awake presence from which, I feel, intelligent action (or non-action) best emerges.

I’ve certainly lived long enough and know enough history to see that the basic elements in the world drama are nothing new—empires rise and fall, tyrants come and go, plagues and famines sweep through, society swings left and then right, change is followed by backlash and then by more change. In some ways, things seem to be gradually getting better, while in other ways they seem to be getting worse. And no one agrees completely on which is which. As Charles Dickens wrote back in 1859 of an even earlier epoch: 

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

—Charles Dickens, from A Tale of Two Cities

Nowadays, whenever I do speak out on a political topic, I inevitably alienate, trigger or disappoint some of my readers who disagree, while perhaps inciting and riling up others who do agree. And in that, my spiritual message and nondual perspective, which is where my heart and my work seems to be, may get easily overshadowed.

So, I often think, I should let politics go. But alas, I’ve had this thought many times. And still, politics grabs me by the throat and next thing I know, I’ve written or shared something of a political nature on a hot button topic. Yes, nonduality includes everything—even political conflict and storms of emotion-thought. But is that what I truly want to give my time and energy to, especially when I’m getting ever-closer to the end?

Well….who knows? It’s not like there’s actually a “me” here who is steering the Joan ship down the watercourse of life. There’s only the all-inclusive streaming watercourse, of which Joan-ing is but one swirling aspect. So, my friends, we’ll just have to see what happens. 

But whatever happens, it’s all included. Even the crazy world of political conflict, the wars, the partisan divides, the whole catastrophe as Zorba famously said. And if you take up meditation and see what’s in your own mind, you just might be amazed, as I was, that we haven’t blown ourselves up yet, that we’re still here. And although the news likes to emphasize all the conflicts and disasters, it’s good to remember that there’s a lot of love and kindness and generosity here as well, and that ultimately, as Rumi said, there’s no news at all. Just this amazing and utterly inconceivable no-thing-ness appearing as everything and then disappearing every night back into the germinal darkness, blinking on and off like the fireflies on a summer night, dying and being born, ever-changing, ever-present, always just this. What a ride, eh?

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Thank you all for being here. May we all find the beauty, the love and the truth right where we are.