One Bottomless Moment

Being Nothing / Going Nowhere

Our craving for experiences is a resistance to simply being here, now. It’s the hum of the airplane. The fog. The wind blowing gently, the rain dripping, breathing, humming, pulsating, opening, closing, nothing at all… It’s such a relief to realize we don’t have to be anything… Somebody asked earlier about dropping the self. There is no such thing as someone dropping the self. Who would be dropping what?

—Toni Packer

We suffer so much from believing we need to be Somebody. We need to be better than we are, more accomplished, more enlightened, less neurotic, less deluded. We can’t believe we’re okay just as we are and that “this is it, just as it is.”

Of course, we have a natural urge to learn and grow and heal, a natural longing to be free from suffering and to be awake to the beauty here and now that we know in our hearts is here. But we keep looking “out there” for what is right here, and we keep believing that “this isn’t it,” because we think that “this,” right now, is not perfect enough, not the way we’d like it to be, not the way we believe it “should” be. It’s too messy, too painful, not blissful or spectacular enough. Something is lacking, we think. Something needs to be either acquired or eliminated. “This isn’t it. I’m not okay. I’m not there yet.”

But “there” doesn’t exist. It’s a future fantasy, a thought, an idea. The only reality is here-now. And in this moment right now, before we start thinking about it, is there any problem or any “me” to be either okay or not okay? There may be physical or emotional pain or difficult circumstances. But in this very instant, before thought arises, is any of this actually a problem in the way it seems to be once we start thinking about it?

We often put someone like Ramana Maharshi up on a pedestal in our minds and imagine that they have something we don’t. But what Ramana and all the great teachers and sages were and are sharing and pointing out is the same aware presence, the same undivided aliveness that's right here, right now. Ramana wasn’t telling people to get to some better place or to imagine that he had something they didn’t. He was pointing them to right here, right now. In this open listening presence, there is no division between Ramana and you or me.

Can we begin to notice how there’s no me in the picture until we start thinking about ourselves: “I’m not good enough, I’m lost, I’m a hopeless failure, I’ll never get it, Why did I do that stupid thing?, Why can’t I stop eating too much, what’s wrong with me?” Me, me, me, me. Can we see that these are all just thoughts—old, habitual, conditioned thoughts, not objective reports on reality? Thoughts such as these are typically accompanied by bodily sensations—maybe a sinking feeling in the chest, a queasy sensation in the belly, an ache in the heart. The sensations then seem to confirm the story of not being okay. But they are just sensations. They don’t really mean anything. Go right into the very core of any one of them and what do you find? Nothing solid or substantial. No-thing at all!

This “me” who seems to be living “my life” is a kind of mental image, a character in a story. Without thinking about it, in just being present right now, isn’t there simply open aware presence and present experiencing? Sounds of rain or traffic, breathing in and out, colors and shapes, tastes and smells—hearing, seeing, breathing, sensing—just this!

In the “Headless Way” originated by Douglas Harding, they distinguish between two ways of seeing ourselves: the first-person subjective view and the third-person objective view. Suzuki Roshi called these Big Mind and small mind. We might call them impersonal boundless awareness and the person. Both of these dimensions or perspectives co-exist in our human lives. Being awake isn’t about eliminating all sense of being a person or always being in some fantastic state of expanded consciousness far above human problems. But it is about not being lost in our problems, oblivious to the awareness beholding them, and stuck in only seeing the third person view.

The third-person view is what we see in the mirror and in photographs—an apparently separate body with seemingly clearly delineated borders. This is “me,” the character in The Story of My Life and the self-image we have of who and what this person is. This is the bodymind organism, a unique person with a name, a gender, a race, a nationality, an age, a life history, and lots of opinions and ideas. This person was born and will eventually die, although actually, the bodymind is dying and being born from moment to moment. At age 76, I’m not the same person I was as a newborn baby, although certain patterns remain. This person is never as solid or substantial as it seems to be when we think about it, and this thought-sense of being a person is intermittent. It’s not there all the time.

In our actual first-person, present moment, subjective experience, which is never absent and which is utterly obvious but often overlooked, we are this unbound, unencapsulated, wide-open space, this aware presence, this nothingness that is showing up as everything. This aware presence is the timeless and eternal Here-Now in which everything, including time and space and our face in the mirror and all the other faces and our life story and the entire movie of waking life and the whole universe, appears and disappears.

Here-Now is the Original Face, the One Consciousness, the unbound presence-awareness that we all have in common. Awareness or presence is not a “thing” we can see or point to or grasp, and yet, it is the common factor in every different experience. All experiences are impermanent, but awareness doesn’t come and go. Our life seems to unfold in time and space, but we never actually depart from Here-Now, this one bottomless moment. This presence is always changing shape, and yet it is always just this. And there is no boundary between awareness and what appears. Without any such words or ideas, there is simply THIS—aware presence/present experiencing, right here, right now. Ungraspable but unavoidable.

Spiritual awakening points to the recognition of this unbound vastness that we are, this all-inclusive, unconditional love that is always accepting everything, this aware presence that often gets overlooked because attention is habitually focused on the me-story and the dramas in the movie of waking life. The recognition of Big Mind doesn’t mean that all sense of being a particular person disappears forever after. That thought-sense of being “me,” the unique person associated with this particular bodymind organism, continues to appear intermittently, sometimes functionally and sometimes in useless ways that only create suffering and confusion.

We can learn to see how this works and to discern the difference between the functional sense of personhood and the delusional manifestations of it that are forms of suffering and confusion. We can also discover that Big Mind is never actually absent, and we can relax more and more easily into being simply this aware presence and this present experiencing, just exactly as it is: the hum of the airplane, the wind blowing gently, the rain dripping, breathing, humming, pulsating, opening, closing—just this.

That which is before you is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete. There is naught beside. Even if you go through all the stages of a Bodhisattva's progress toward Buddhahood, one by one; when at last, in a single flash, you attain to full realization, you will only be realizing the Buddha-Nature which has been with you all the time; and by all the foregoing stages you will have added to it nothing at all.

—Huang Po

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Love to all….