Not Clinging to Ideas

Not Knowing What This Is

People desperately want to describe existence and, historically, they speak of matter, energy, consciousness, spirit, oneness, and mystery. But descriptions are merely limited interpretations. All of them. They can never tell us what life actually is.

— Darryl Bailey

We speak about “awareness” and “consciousness” as if we know exactly what we mean by these words. In one sense, words such as awareness, consciousness, experiencing and presence point to our most undoubtable and fundamental reality. We know directly, experientially, beyond all doubt that we are here and that something is happening. And by “we,” I simply mean this aware presence, prior to any second-hand learned ideas about what we are (a human being, a body, a person, a gender, a race, a name, Pure Awareness, a soul, or anything else). And by “something,” I mean the bare actuality of present experiencing—seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, sensing, feeling, thinking—before any of those labels. The simple undeniable fact of this present happening, not any ideas about what it is, but simply the experiencing itself. Being here now, present and aware, as this present experiencing, is absolutely undeniable and impossible to doubt. We’d have to be here to doubt or deny it!

But what is this whole undeniable happening?

Any ideas we have about what this is or why it is can all be doubted. THIS simply IS as it is. And really, we don’t need to label or explain it. But we seem compelled to try. Maybe we think that doing so will give us control or reassurance. But we aren’t really outside of this happening, this presence. We ARE it. How can we possibly grasp it?

Spirituality and religion all too often endeavor to explain this living actuality with beliefs and supposedly infallible doctrines that cannot be questioned. That kind of religion can provide comfort and false certainty, but it tends to give rise to fundamentalism, crusades, witch burnings, and lots of unhappiness.

The kind of spirituality or religion that interests me is not about beliefs, dogmas or infallible doctrines. The kind of spirituality that I’m drawn to is about looking directly, exploring from the inside—although one soon finds that there is no findable boundary between inside and outside. It is an approach that values open-minded curiosity, open listening, aware presence, and a willingness to look freshly and see something new and unexpected.

Nondual traditions such as Buddhism and Advaita conceptualize their findings in quite different ways. Advaita posits an Immutable Reality, an all-pervading Consciousness or Self (with a capital ‘S’) that is the unchanging, ever-present ground of being, in which the dream-like (and unreal) world of ever-changing experience happens. In this view, no world exists outside of Consciousness. Consciousness is all there is, and all there is, is Consciousness.

Buddhism, on the other hand, emerged as a radical deconstruction of this perspective. Buddhism speaks of impermanence, thorough-going flux, interdependence and the absence of any independent, fixed, persisting “things” or “selves.” Everything is made of, and only exists in relation to, everything it apparently is not. Nothing has an essential nature. Instead of the Immutable Self, Buddhism speaks of non-self.

Of course, within Buddhism, and probably within Advaita as well, there are many subdivisions and different schools, and some schools of Buddhism seem to be much closer to the philosophical idealism of Advaita than others. Some Buddhism speaks of everything as Mind, for example, while other Buddhist schools are critical of this view and speak instead of groundlessness. And the term emptiness has been used in many different ways.

I’m not a scholar of Buddhism, and certainly not of Advaita, and I’ve never taken a single course in philosophy. I’ve practiced in both traditions, read books from both traditions, resonated with aspects of both, as well as with aspects of other traditions (Taoism, Sufism, Christianity), and with the nontraditional approach of my main teacher Toni Packer. But I’m not really interested in philosophy or metaphysics as such, except to the degree that it colors and shapes our experience.

My interest is primarily with present moment experience, everyday life, how the rubber meets the road. I can enjoy the effects on experience of various philosophical ways of framing experience, but I endeavor not to turn any of these frameworks into Truth. I see them all as approximations or possibilities, not as Truth itself. If there is any such thing as Truth, it is simply the actuality of this present experiencing and this aware presence, which are not two separate “things,” but simply THIS that is right here, utterly obvious and unavoidable.

In my view, different maps are useful in different ways, and reality seems to me to have many facets or dimensions and can be seen and experienced in many different ways. Not landing or fixating anywhere seems like a wise approach—keeping an open mind, not sticking rigidly to any conclusions, remaining open to surprise.

As I write on the home page of my website: “We habitually search for special experiences, for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense openness and freedom… What is offered here invites firsthand exploration and direct discovery, not belief or dogma. It points to the simplicity of being what we cannot not be, this one bottomless moment, right here, right now, just as it is. There is no finish-line, no formula, no method, nowhere to go, only this ever-fresh aliveness.”

A Few Related Things to Share with You 

I recently heard a talk by Zen teacher Barry Magid and read two Substack articles, one by Robert Saltzman and the other by John Astin, all three of which I think might be of interest to many of my readers, so I will share all three of them here.

The first is from my friend John Astin:

Next, this roughly 30 minute audio is Zen teacher (and psychoanalyst) Barry Magid talking recently on the Heart Sutra and the meaning of the word emptiness in Buddhism. In Barry's view, Buddhism sees emptiness as non-essentialism, impermanence, and interconnectedness—not as some Empty Aware Ground that contains everything. Barry often speaks of his campaign against capital letters, i.e., all those terms like Awareness, Consciousness, Reality, God, Truth, and so on that seem to reify and concretize what cannot actually be concretized or pulled out of the whole—making things out of no-thing-ness. Listen here:

Along similar lines to Barry, my friend Robert Saltzman recently published this article on Substack:

Robert and I had an exchange in the comments to this article, and I mentioned that I can tune into an experience that might be called pure consciousness, boundless awareness or God, but that I endeavor to avoid turning any such experience into a metaphysical certainty or belief about the nature of reality. I don’t claim to know the Truth about how the universe works.

In my own direct experience, I can observe certain things about how it seems to be, and I often share these observations in my writing, but ultimately, I’m clueless about what this whole happening is, why it’s here or how it all works. And it doesn’t seem like I need to know any of that. What matters most to me is simply being alive, finding the beauty in ordinary life, enjoying what is, and beholding it all (when possible) from the perspective of wholeness or unconditional love, seeing that it all belongs, that it all goes together, that it cannot be otherwise in each moment from how it is.

As anyone knows who has perused the recommended books list on my website, I love a wide variety of expressions. On the surface, they often seem to contradict each other, and I used to be intent on figuring out which expression had it right, which one was most true or highest or best. But now I don’t seem to worry about that anymore. I enjoy them all. They each seem to offer a different facet of the jewel, a different way to see and experience this life, a different flavor of experience. They’ve all given me something different, something I treasure. And in each case, what I treasure is experiential, not metaphysical.

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What Have I Been Up To These Days?

Aside from writing Substacks, meeting folks on Zoom, sitting quietly doing nothing, dipping into podcasts and readings like those I’ve shared today, working out at the fitness center here, walking and enjoying the cooler early fall weather, I’ve also been getting physical therapy for this new back fracture and some related medical tests and procedures as well. I recently finished Glenn Loury’s fascinating and ruthlessly honest and courageous memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, and I’m now reading another memoir called The Sun Does Shine, by Anthony Ray Hinton, a black man from Alabama who spent thirty years in solitary confinement on death row for a crime he did not commit. Next, I’ll be digging into Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Nexus. In the evening, I sometimes watch things on Netflix and Apple TV. Recently I enjoyed The Perfect Couple on Netflix, and I’m now enjoying the new season of Slow Horses on Apple TV.

My friend Darryl Bailey turned me on to Slow Horses, and I know some of my good friends at Springwater Center are hooked on it as well. It’s a dramatic British spy thriller with a dark sense of humor and a lot of truly great and wonderfully flawed characters who work at Slough House, an imaginary branch of MI5 that is for MI5 “rejects” who have done something wrong but haven’t been sacked. (A slough being a place of deep mud or mire, a swamp, a mental state of sadness and no hope, or an act of discarding something). These “losers” or “slow horses” are led by Jackson Lamb, an older fellow who drinks heavily, smokes, always appears disheveled, has holes in his socks, stringy unwashed hair, keeps his office in a total mess, farts frequently, and usually appears to be half asleep and out of it, but he is actually brilliant and always manages to stop the bad guys. Great cast includes Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden and many more. Great show. I highly recommend it.

I’m also hoping to block out some time soon to work on a new book, which will include many of these Substack articles along with other material.

So, that’s my story.

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Love to all…