Open Attention—Simple Being: The Pathless Path to Right Here, Right Now

Nothing More or Different Is Needed—Everything Belongs

I want to share excerpts from three different chapters (“The Simplicity of What Is,” “Why Sit Quietly?”, and “The Pathless Path through Suffering”) from my third book, Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks & Dialogues about Non-duality. This book was based mostly on transcripts of meetings I held in Chicago in the early 2000s.

(1) from the chapter “The Simplicity of What Is”:

Here / Now is not an idea or a concept, but a palpable reality. When we talk about “waking up” to it, or “being here now,” it can sound as if it is a special experience that is absent in one moment and then present in the next moment – a particular state of consciousness that can be attained or lost, something that comes and goes, and in a sense, that seems to be true.

Whenever the focus of attention shifts from the mental story (“I’m a failure, I’ve wasted my life, this is miserable, what can I do to fix this?”) to the aliveness of non-conceptual, present moment sensory awareness, there is an immediate sense of relief and freedom. Suffering disappears. Everything feels spacious and open, colors seem brighter, what is ordinary sparkles and reveals itself as extraordinary, beauty is visible everywhere, there is a felt-sense of love, joy and peace. But any experience of expansion and sparkle is always temporary. Thoughts, stories, neurochemical weather, unpleasant or contracted experiences inevitably show up. So at first it seems as if Here / Now is a special state or a particular experience that comes and goes. And in the story of coming and going, there seems to be this phantom “me” who goes back and forth between “being here now” and “not being here now,” or between “getting it” and “losing it,” or between “certainty” and “doubt.”

But what actually comes and goes are the thoughts, stories, ideas, experiences, sensations, perceptions – the forms that appear and disappear Here / Now, including both the expanded experience of “being here now” and the contracted experience of being “lost in thoughts.” Here / Now isn’t actually an experience. It is the experiencing that is equally present as every experience. Here / Now is beginningless and endless. And there is no one apart from this ever-present boundlessness who can find it or lose it – that “me” character is nothing but thoughts, stories, sensations, and images appearing Here / Now. 

Yes, this boundlessness may seem invisible or absent, apparently obscured by the thoughts, stories, dramas and ideas that so easily capture the attention and fill the screen of awareness. Consciousness, by nature, seems to be a thinking, exploring, searching, wanting, grasping, story-telling, dreaming, drama-loving, imagination-producer. Again and again, thoughts spin their hypnotic webs, movies appear, attention becomes absorbed in drama. But this only seems problematic within the drama, from the perspective of the mirage-like separate self, and only if there is the mistaken idea that there should or could be a permanent experience of expansion.

From the vantage point of unicity, nothing is a problem. Only from the vantage point of the fragmentary (and always imaginary) separate self does the need arise to banish some experiences and acquire others. One of the more sophisticated dramas that consciousness produces is “me” trying to step out of “my story,” the character trying to free itself from itself. This is like a mirage trying to eliminate a mirage, or a phantom trying to pull itself up by its own imaginary bootstraps, or a dog chasing its own tail.

But whenever resistance and the search for improvement stops, what remains is peace. When all belief and all grasping for answers ends, doubt and uncertainty vanish. When thought stops, all suffering ends. But this relative peace is always temporary. The suffering and the doubt may all come back a moment later if the grasping and the seeking resume, and there is no one who can control this coming and going of thoughts, movies and imaginary dramas. In fact, the attempt to control it only lends it a sense of reality and importance. All of this is bothersome only if there is a need for it to be otherwise or if it is taken personally. When it is recognized that everything is unicity, that unicity is all there is, then nothing is really a problem.

But if you reference unicity as a particular experience and then search for it, you immediately make it into an object and confirm the story of separation and lack. If you try to hold onto any particular state of consciousness, it immediately seems to vanish. It is like trying to hold onto a handful of water or air. Experiences come and go, clear ones and cloudy ones, but Here / Now is ever-present.

The mind typically imagines enlightenment to be some special state that a person attains. It is sometimes said that there is no coming back from enlightenment, and the mind interprets this to mean that a person one day crosses an imaginary finish line and enters a special “enlightened state” of infinite duration. This “enlightened person” is then imagined to be forever after permanently established in something called “unicity” or “oneness” or “the Now,” and this is conceived of as a perpetual experience, a permanent state, or a final understanding that never again lapses or disappears for that person.

But actually, the word enlightenment points to recognizing the mirage-like nature of the separate person who would enter some special state and then stay there forever after. Enlightenment points to realizing that the only eternity is now, that time is only a way of conceptualizing. There is no such thing as “forever after” or an experience of infinite duration – there is only timeless presence. Nothing is excluded from unicity. Even seeking, doubting and pretending to be a separate person are all nothing but unicity. No one attains unicity because the one who would attain it is nothing but a mirage, and the mirage is nothing but the unicity it seeks. There is no person, in reality, who is enlightened or unenlightened. There is only this infinite, ever-present Here / Now, even if it appears otherwise. Sometimes enlightenment shows up and sometimes delusion shows up. None of it is personal. Unicity includes it all, the light and the dark. Being is undeniable and unavoidable even when thoughts are running wild and movies are playing in the mind.

What seemingly obscures this simple beingness is what the physicist David Bohm once beautifully called neurochemical smog. Hinduism calls it Maya, Buddhism calls it samsara, Christianity calls it sin (literally “missing the mark”). This smog is the dream-like drama centering around the imaginary “me” and “the story of my life” – the illusory sense of separation and encapsulation – all of it a kind of mirage created by unexamined thoughts, concepts, ideas, stories and beliefs, and also by neurochemistry, genetics, conditioning and who knows what forces of nature and nurture. It is this conceptual smog that Zen and Advaita and nonduality aim to expose and clear away, revealing the jewel that has actually never been absent.

The joke is that there is really nothing substantial to expose or clear away. The smog is a mirage, not a real obstacle. It is an imaginary problem. It has no actual substance. What solution is needed to an imaginary problem? The mind keeps desperately seeking solutions, but any solution it undertakes only confirms the apparent reality of both the imaginary problem and the mirage-like entity who seemingly has the problem.

Even the smog is revealed to be none other than the jewel. Boundless unicity shows up disguised as smog and mirages. Nirvana and samsara are not two, everything is one inseparable whole, and nothing can be pulled apart from everything else. Every relative experience always contains its opposite. Opposites appear together and define each other. Clarity and smog, expansion and contraction, enlightenment and delusion – you cannot have one polarity without the other. The manifestation requires contrast in order to appear at all.  But nothing is actually separate from anything else. There is diversity and variation, but not separation. There are no independent parts and no individual owners.

Here / Now is the placeless place, the timeless presence, the formlessness appearing as ever-changing forms. This seamless unicity is not something complicated, exotic and hard to get. It is inescapable and impossible to avoid. What makes this so apparently hard to get is how simple it is, how obvious, how effortless. Here / Now is present in spite of whatever experience shows up, never because of any experience. This boundlessness is prior to every experience; it is what remains when every experience is gone; it is what every experience is. This boundless unicity is causeless and depends on nothing. It requires no shift, no transformation, no understanding, no figuring things out, no attainment, no special experience or state, no “being here now,” no becoming in order to be.

(2) from the chapter “Why Sit  Quietly?”:

No matter how many times we hear that “this is it,” and “there's nothing to attain,” and “there's only now,” and “there’s no self” – no matter how many times we hear all this stuff, there's a very persistent habit of thinking otherwise – thinking that there is a “me” in the driver’s seat, thinking that this isn't it, working very hard to get rid of something that’s here or trying to achieve something that isn't here, feeling a sense of lack. The belief that something is missing is quite strong, quite tenacious, as is the idea of “me,” this seemingly solid entity encapsulated in a separate bodymind, adrift in an alien world, trying to get control. There seems to be a big gap between the things we read and hear about nonduality and our everyday experiences of unhappiness, doubt and uncertainty. 

So sitting quietly is a way of stopping our usual activity (all the talking and doing) and simply being present to the bare actuality of what is going on in this moment. We can call it meditation, but that word has so much baggage attached to it and means so many different things to different people, that I prefer to call it nothing at all. What I’m talking about is nothing more than a simplified space where there can be careful attention given to what we usually overlook, overlay, ignore or avoid. And as we explore the present moment in depth, we can discover firsthand for ourselves how suffering happens, how the mirage of separation is created, how decisions and choices actually unfold (as opposed to how we think they unfold), and we can see directly how the idea of “me” and the story of “my life” are created by thought and imagination. We can discover that true joy, true happiness, true love, and true freedom are here in this simple presence that is right here, right now…

Being silent is a space to look and  listen and to begin to appreciate and enjoy the wonder of simple things like the breeze and the chirping of a bird and the sound of traffic, and to discover and see through subtler and subtler layers of conceptualization.

Seeing is not thinking. It's seeing the thinking as thinking, being aware of the thinking. Awareness is upstream from thinking. A thought pops up like, “There's got to be more to life than listening to the traffic.” That’s a thought.  It tells a story, delivers a message, or draws a conclusion, and the truth of that story or that message or that conclusion can be questioned. There’s also an awareness of that thought, a seeing of the thought as a thought. That awareness is outside the thought-realm, prior to thought. Awareness is not bound or limited by the imaginary map-world that thought creates. Awareness is unconditioned, unbound, free. There could be a second thought commenting on the first thought, such as, “I shouldn’t be thinking,” or something like that. Awareness is seeing that thought as a thought. Awareness is always without judgment or preferences. Judgments are always thoughts, and preferences are impulses rooted in hereditary or conditioned tendencies of the organism. Awareness sees judgments and preferences.

True meditation as I mean it is simply awareness. It’s not about thinking and trying to work all this out conceptually with analysis and rumination. That doesn’t mean we try not to think, or that we aim to banish thought completely. It simply means that meditation is an invitation to be aware, to be still, to be present. To stop, look, and listen. To be what we always already are – aware being. Meditation is not about thinking our way to clarity. It’s about seeing the false as false and waking up to the simplicity of what is. In silence and stillness, we begin to notice this ever-present Here / Now and we become consciously aware of being aware. Eventually the boundary between meditation and the rest of life melts away and we see that awareness is always present. Meditation isn’t about correcting what is showing up, or fixing it, or manipulating it, or changing it, but simply beholding it, as it is. Meditation is a way of being awake to present moment actuality. Simply this, as it is...

You don’t have to be sitting, you can be lying down – sitting is not the essence of it. And you certainly don’t need to be in any special posture. You can be in a recliner or on a park bench or on an airplane or anywhere at all. You can move when you feel like it – you don’t need to be motionless, rigid or bolt upright. There is a natural stillness that occurs by itself, and a naturally open, relaxed and grounded posture that the body finds. There are no special hand positions. You don’t have to close your eyes or open them or keep them half closed or anything in particular. This isn’t about forcing your mind to stop thinking and focus instead on your breathing. It isn’t about visualizing deities or repeating a mantra. It’s nothing more or less than being silently present, doing nothing other than being here. And if this attracts you, as it does me, then I encourage you to take time and make space to be still, to do nothing, to simply be aware, to explore and enjoy the present moment, exactly as it is.

(3) from the chapter “The Pathless Path through Suffering”:

There's an old Zen story where somebody asks the Zen master, “What is your teaching?” The master writes the word “Attention” on a piece of paper and holds it up, and the questioner says: “Attention, yes, but what does that mean? What is your teaching?” Again the master writes the word “Attention” and holds it up. And the questioner says, “Could you please say a little bit more about that? What do you mean by that? I don’t get it.” The master writes the word “Attention” again and holds it up: “Attention, attention, attention.” Maybe that is the purest and most radical kind of religion – simple attention. Present moment awareness. Instead of a belief system, awareness sees through all beliefs. 

Another word for awareness or attention is unconditional love. Jesus was always talking about love and seeing God everywhere, and if you read the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus starts to sound more and more like an Advaita, Taoist,  Zen master. I suspect that at their root, in their most radical forms, if you strip away all the trappings, most religions are offering a way of seeing or being that is essentially a path through suffering to liberation.

The original founder of any religion is often a radical, iconoclastic outlaw who defies the prevailing traditions and overturns everything. But it doesn’t take long before the followers turn it into one more oppressive, authoritarian organization with opulent buildings, codified beliefs and dogmas, and a bunch of clowns in fancy robes and silly hats pretending to be holier and closer to God than everybody else. Instead of being all about waking up, religion quickly becomes what Karl Marx once called the opium of the people. It becomes a belief system. We may think we’re beyond such foolishness, but even radical nonduality, if it’s nothing more than a comforting philosophy, is not really all that different from believing that Jesus saves us and we’re going to heaven. It’s just a somewhat more sophisticated and nuanced version of that same kind of opium.

So instead of that belief-based version of religion and spirituality, what’s being pointed to here is seeing through all the words and all the beliefs, however wonderful they may sound, however comforting they may be, and returning to the bare actuality of Here / Now as it is before we conceptualize it. Being present without knowing what anything is. Attention, attention, attention. Or, as I would prefer to say it, open, spacious awareness. Listening, seeing, feeling, sensing – without judging, without moving away, without seeking a result, without doing anything at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not speaking against book learning or conceptual thinking. I enjoy reading about scientific discoveries, psychological theories, religious and philosophical ideas. I’m not in any way suggesting we ignore all this or throw it all out. It all has its place. But to see that ideas are ideas, and that all ideas can be doubted. There is something right here now that is not conceptual, something that cannot be doubted, and that’s what’s at the very heart of these meetings. And you don’t need to be a physicist or a Buddhist scholar to find it. In fact, you can’t avoid it or escape from it because it is all there is. But see it for yourself, don’t take it on faith as an ideology.

Don’t look for it or try to figure it out because then you just get more and more confused. Instead, attention, attention, attention. Open, spacious awareness. Nothing more and nothing less. And whenever you see the mind trying to codify, conceptualize or make something out of this bare attention, something you can hold onto – a belief system or a practice – let that go and come back to the simplicity of this moment, just as it is. The sounds of the traffic, the sensations in the body – this vast, open listening presence.

—from Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues about Non-Duality

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Two More Chapters:

You can read two other complete chapters from this book on my website, including both the opening talks and the dialogues that follow between myself and participants:

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Love to all…