Not Postponing Being Awake

Going Beyond Doom and Gloom

I am uncertain about many things that some spiritual teachers seem very certain about. But I do know that when the mind is silent and still, we can sense the spacious, open presence that we are, and that this presence is infinitely delicate and subtle and wondrous beyond measure. I know that love feels wholesome (in touch with, embodying, coming from wholeness), and that hate feels unwholesome (out of touch, reactive, coming from the delusion of separation). I know that we are always here in the immediacy and present-ness of Here-Now, this boundless awaring presence, and I know that what happens here is bearable even when it seems unbearable.

Although this presence is always here, we’re not always noticing it. Our focus is often elsewhere, and that’s part of being alive. Life has many dimensions. Creative thinking, imagination and fantasy are wonderful capacities that most certainly have their place. And because we are an evolving species with conditioned habits, sometimes our attention is captured and mesmerized by thoughts and stories that are simply forms of suffering and delusion. It happens. Consciousness falls for its own creations and becomes absorbed in its own movies.

And, of course, it’s easy when walking in the park in the morning sunlight, everything fresh and green and lush and sparkling with light, to see beauty everywhere, to love what is, and to sense the wonder and the magic that is everywhere. But as we know, life isn’t always a walk in the park.

I recently had a miserable flu with vomiting and a relentless migraine-level headache. At many moments, it brought to mind my mother’s final words, which were, “Get me out of here!” That’s how I felt, except unlike my mother, who was at that moment on her death bed and ready to go, I didn’t actually want to die. I just wanted the pain to be gone.

This is a very natural desire, to avoid pain and seek pleasure—it’s part of our biological survival system. But as we all know, life is an endless dance that includes joy and sorrow, birth and death, loss and gain, pleasure and pain. And life is not fair. No matter how much medicine advances, no matter how much social justice we have, we will never have equity, perfect health, or immortal always-youthful bodies. All of that is a utopian fantasy. We will always have problems and inequality in all sorts of ways. Some people will inevitably be more or less intelligent, more or less gifted, more or less physically able, more or less good-looking, more or less evolved, more or less healthy, more or less traumatized, and so on than others, and some will always be richer and others poorer in countless different ways. Some days will feel marvelous, some days will feel rather flat, and some days will be downright miserable. This is life. There’s no escape, not really. As I learned many decades ago, you can get dead drunk to numb the pain, but then you have the painful hangover and the mess you made the night before to deal with. There’s no actual escape. Even if we commit suicide, none of us knows for sure if that will be the end of consciousness.

In those times that are not a blissful walk in the park, all we can do is be the pain. Yes, we can also be the awareness beholding the pain, and we can perhaps see through and drop the thoughts and the resistance that only make it worse, but it still hurts. In a certain sense, the pain is simply sensations, essentially no different from the morning sunlight in the park, the fresh green leaves, the beautiful blossoms, the clear spring air—all of it the endless tumbling shapes that present experiencing is taking. As sensitive beings, we can’t not feel both the pain and the beauty—the bitter comes with the sweet—who would want to go through life numb to it all?

I’ve never had one of those dramatic mystical experiences some people describe, but I feel that every moment is a miracle when we’re awake to it, and I experience it that way many times every day. The love and the light and the wonder is everywhere. And even when I’m lying in bed moaning in pain and it doesn’t feel like a miracle, maybe that’s a miracle too. It’s all included.

Consciously cultivating gratitude and wonder, and being aware of the ways we habitually cultivate the opposite, is transformative.  I have become increasingly aware in recent years of my tendency toward apocalyptic and alarmist thinking, which is promoted all the time in the media and on social media as click bait. Politicians on all sides benefit from creating fear and then promising salvation. We humans seem to eat it up—we enjoy terrifying movies on and off the screen. So, I’m endeavoring these days not to get sucked into the endless doomsday scenarios and all the speculation about dreadful things that may or may not be coming. The world has been on the verge of ending all my life, and so far, it’s still here. I’m realizing that in whatever time I have left, I want to imbibe and offer something other than Doom and Gloom. I don’t want to deny or ignore the dark side of life, but I don’t want to focus on and contribute to it.

I’ve also been trying to listen to diverse perspectives, and I continue to notice how incredibly easy it is to close down around a position. I see through an old position and then find myself closing down around a new one, defending and identifying with that. I’m increasingly aware of my confirmation biases and all the ways that I am prone to demonizing “the other,” especially in the political realm. Who the “other” is can even change radically, but in this compelling movie of waking life, it seems there is almost always some person, group or viewpoint that is “other” than (and dangerous or threatening to) me. We humans seem to relish a certain amount of conflict and self-righteous outrage—it strengthens the sense of being a separate self. We are so easily outraged by what “the other side” is doing and how utterly terrible they are, while being completely oblivious to the flaws on our own side. We find it very hard if not impossible to actually listen to the “other side.” When we do, we realize that the world is much less neatly resolvable into good and bad, and much less clear-cut and simplistic than we would like to imagine.

With luck, we can realize that we really don’t know what the future or the next moment will bring, or who has the right answer, or how the universe or humanity “should” be. We don’t really know how it all works either—whether it’s all consciousness, or whether consciousness emerges from the material world, or even what any of those words really mean. We can notice that all we ever actually have is this one bottomless moment, here and now, just as it is—including our memories and accumulated information from the past and our visions and imaginations about the future, and most importantly, this open undivided presence that has room for everything to be just as it is. We so easily overlook this ever-present wholeness where we always actually are, this undefinable alive presence. But with luck, we wake up, at least occasionally, from our habitual trance of imagining that we have all the time in the world to get where we imagine we’re going, and we stop postponing the wonder and gratitude and happiness that can only be right now.

As Zen teacher Cheri Huber once said, if you think a new car will make you happy, skip the car and just be happy.

In other words, don’t miss the love, the light and the wonder right where you are.

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How Free Are We?

Stillness Speaks has recently published another excerpt, a chapter posing that question, from my book PAINTING THE SIDEWALK WITH WATER: Talks and Dialogues about Non-Duality:

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What Have I been Reading?

Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters by Steven E. Koonin

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie

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All for now. Thank you all for being here. Love to you all.