Questioning Everything

Holding on to Nothing

If we’re honest, we’re all clueless about what this whole happening is, where it came from, where it’s going, and what “should” happen next. Our ideas and opinions on everything from gender, gun control, vaccines and the war in Ukraine to the nature of consciousness and what happens after death appear and disappear like the forms in a dream, or we could say they are the result of infinite causes and conditions and our unique nature and nurture. We don’t “decide” how to interpret our experiences or what sources of information seem trustworthy to us any more than we “decide” what foods we like best or who we fall in love with. It all simply happens.

I’ve been attracted to religion and spirituality all my life. Who can say why? I’ve spiraled around through Buddhism, Advaita, various nontraditional approaches, and radical nonduality. Over many decades, I’ve had some truly remarkable teachers, had many wonderful experiences and made many liberating discoveries. I’ve chased after my share of spiritual fantasies as well, thrown myself (metaphorically) at the feet of a few gurus, devoured a multitude of books and videos, attended retreats and satsangs, done endless practices and explored many different ways of manipulating my experience, although I wouldn’t always have called it manipulation. At times I’ve been like a wonderstruck kid in a candy store, at other times probably more like an addict chasing a fix. I’ve written five books about all this and along the way became a teacher myself, albeit I don’t like to use that word and don’t ever think of the folks who come to me as students.

Some of what’s out there in the spiritual world, spoken at times with absolute certitude and authority, strikes me as pure horseshit. It feels to me like the kind of stuff that promotes dissatisfaction, offers false hope, encourages dishonesty and self-deception, and leads people into endless spiritual seeking. I think there’s a lot of horseshit in spiritual culture.

I’ve undoubtedly put forth my share of it as well. Chances are we all do. It’s so easy, as humans, to hypnotize ourselves or be hypnotized by others, to mimic and imitate, without even realizing it. That’s basic primate behavior, after all. It’s how we learn. And sometimes what we learn is delusion. In my book, no one is ever too enlightened to fall into delusion, often without even realizing it. Delusion is an inescapable part of the nature of what is, and in my view, waking up is a never-ending, on-going process. A sense of humor is helpful.

I find myself at times questioning everything I’ve thought, done, said and believed—from spirituality to politics. Not from a place of berating myself, but from a place of genuine curiosity and a deep urge to not settle for something that doesn’t feel genuinely alive.

I often feel like I’m saying the same things over and over. Sometimes it all sounds like horseshit, which in some way it all is. I have recurring fantasies at times of leaving the whole thing behind. But then, as my friend and teacher Toni Packer once asked me, “What is the whole thing?”

What follows is from my first book, Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life, and it’s the part where she asks me that question:

I was looking more and more deeply at wanting. Wanting experiences. Wanting to Get Somewhere. Wanting final, permanent enlightenment. Wanting to know, to understand, to figure it all out, to get it. Wanting security. The fear of everything blowing away. Wanting to control, to manage my life, to hold on. Seeing the mind doing this on ever more subtle levels.

Toni says, “All of this experience-mongering, wanting enlightenment and so forth, is a form of resistance. In a flow without resistance you don't have to know how you're doing. It's alive. It's the airplane. The wind. You know, it's such a relief to realize that we don't have to be anything.”

I began to wonder again about my dependency on Toni. I went into a meeting during retreat and brought it up. How would I feel if tomorrow Toni turned around and left us, saying that she was into something else now and that this whole thing had been a huge mistake. Would I be devastated?

"What's the whole thing?" Toni asks.

I laughed and laughed and laughed.

Because that's the problem. I've got a huge "Thing" in my mind that I'm dragging along, trying to maneuver, alternately fighting with or chasing after. This enormous dead object that talks, and it's nothing but thought!

"There can't just be nothing!" I said, laughing—but I was serious. It's too simple! I was quoting P'ei Hsiu in his dialogue with Huang Po that Toni reads to us at the end of retreats:

“Q: What is the Way and how must it be followed?

 A: What sort of thing do you suppose the Way to be, that you should wish to follow it?

Q: Should we not seek for anything at all?

A: By conceding this, you would save yourself a lot of mental effort.

Q: But in this way everything would be eliminated.  There cannot just be nothing.

A: Who called it nothing?  Who told you to eliminate anything?  Look at the void in front of your eyes. How can you produce it or eliminate it?”

In the meeting room later, feeling how I want something from Toni, from our meeting, some final and permanent insight that will set me free forever. Listening to the wanting and to an airplane passing overhead. The thought comes up, the airplane isn't enough.

"The airplane isn't enough," Toni says, "but the listening is. It can get so quiet."

The next morning, completely absorbed in the sky while walking briskly between two buildings, I walked right into a concrete post. I had a huge egg on my forehead all week. There was no separation between me and the sky, I told Toni, and then suddenly there was no separation between me and the post either.

—from Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life

Having a giant lump on my forehead for the rest of that retreat was a good reminder of absurdity, human folly and the humor of it all. That was many years ago, back in the 90s, when Toni was still alive and in her prime.

I’m getting closer to the end of this life now, and things keep getting simpler and simpler. I return to the openness of simply being here, not knowing anything, not needing to know, just simply being this whole happening, whatever it is, however it is. Finding the perfection in the imperfection and the beauty in the ordinary. And then (choicelessly) writing about it. And (choicelessly) holding meetings about it. And (choicelessly) having questions about it. And sometimes (choicelessly) imagining leaving it all behind. All of that seems to be what this Joan whirlpool choicelessly does, or what the universe is (choicelessly) doing through this ever-changing process called Joan. There’s no “me” in the driver’s seat at any level, at least not that I can find. It's all happening effortlessly by itself, even the apparent effort.

I suspect that this “leaving it all behind” isn’t so much about never holding another meeting or writing another book, but rather, it’s about something much more fundamental, something that is actually, in my view, at the very heart of spirituality: holding on to nothing, questioning everything, letting all the answers go, being this moment in all simplicity, being this open aware presence, this present experiencing, this aliveness, just as it is. And showing up as this unique human being as well, not trying to be somebody else. In other words, “leaving it all behind” is about seeing through “The Whole Thing” that the mind creates out of no-thing at all—seeing through it not once-and-for-all, but again and again. Given the complexity of our human minds, this can be the koan of a lifetime, or put differently, the koan of this one bottomless moment here and now.

Is this a practice? Toni didn’t like that word, and I don’t use it much either. It tends to suggest something methodical and rote, a kind of effortful, goal-oriented preparation or rehearsal for some future performance that will be the real deal when it arrives someday in the future. It tends to reinforce the mirage-like separate self, the apparent meditator-observer-practitioner who is supposedly “doing” this, and it almost inevitably carries some undercurrent of self-improvement and purification however much the teacher may emphasize the seeing through of all that. I prefer to see the pathless path in a more open way, as a pathless exploration and discovery, being what you cannot not be. It may involve structure and discipline, but it may not. It shows up in whatever way is needed. We’re not doing it; it is doing us.  

I’m no longer trying to be mindful, or trying to be present, or trying to feel myself as the open space of awareness—perhaps I’ve internalized all those various “practices” so deeply that what they revealed happens naturally, when and as it does, but I’m no longer deliberately trying to do any of it, and I’m no longer prioritizing any of that over any other states of mind. I’m simply here as this present experiencing and this aware presence, which are not two different things, but one seamless happening. Emptying my ostomy bag is as spiritual as sitting in meditation.

Are we trying on the spiritual path to reach some pure and perfect place where all our human foibles have been erased or ironed out?  It often seems that way. Many spiritual teachings encourage us, for example, not to express anger, but instead to feel it in the body and see through the thought-stories behind it, or perhaps to know ourselves as the open space of awareness in which it is appearing. And while all that can be helpful, we may get the message that expressing anger is not the spiritual way, that Thich Nhat Hanh is closer to the truth than Charles Bukowski. But when I watch a wonderful movie such as Babyteeth, as I did the other night, what I love about it is the way it lovingly embraces the whole chaotic mess of human relationships and human life—all the characters are flawed and imperfect, their relationships are messy—and that’s all part of the beauty. The beauty or ugliness is in how we see it, isn’t it? 

I find myself ever-more inclined to find the beauty in the whole catastrophe, just as it is, not just in the gentle, calm, peaceful parts. The purification and improvement project and the curative fantasies, all of which are deeply conditioned in most of us, keep falling away more and more. There’s still a natural interest in waking up from delusion and suffering, but it’s not the personal self-improvement project it once was.

I also find myself no longer interested in having transcendental experiences. People talk to me of their journeys on 5-MeO-DMT or psilocybin, and I loved Michael Pollan’s movie How to Change Your Mind. I’m all for this kind of exploration and healing work, and occasionally I feel tempted to try out one of these drugs. I did a lot of strong, high-dose LSD and other psychedelics in my youth, but I was listening to rock music back then and enjoying the ride, not contemplating the nature of consciousness. So sometimes, for brief moments, I think it would be interesting and maybe transformative to do these things again, and who knows, maybe I will. But my interest in all this seems to wane rather quickly. I am no longer hungry for transcendent experiences or huge breakthroughs. Ordinary life seems like miracle enough. And I’ve discovered that all experiences are in some essential way fundamentally the same, whether it’s an experience of contraction or expansion, depression or elation, trash in the gutter or some supposedly cosmic psychedelic vision of God and the nature of the universe. It’s all another scene in the dream-like movie of waking life, another momentary shape that this presence is taking. All the shapes and forms are impermanent, gone in a flash. Is there something that doesn’t come and go?

In one chapter of my book Nothing to Grasp, I pointed out the twin delusions of making something out of nothing and making nothing into something. The mind is slippery, and we can’t actually completely escape either of these delusions, and sometimes we will inevitably be holding on to something, at least apparently. But the more closely we look, the more we discover there is no one holding on and nothing to grasp. There really is no one apart from the flow of life to hold on to any part of it, and there really are no separate parts, and we can’t actually hold on to life any more than we can hold on to flowing water. And the great news is that all of this, the delusion and the waking up, the holding on and the letting go, is all part of the ride. It’s all included. It all belongs. Obviously, because it’s all here. It can’t be pulled apart, this indivisible flowing whole that never departs from right here, right now.

In closing, consider for a moment the absolute miracle of what is occurring right now. You (this aware presence) are seeing little squiggles on a screen and these squiggles are being instantly translated into meaning—into some kind of seemingly coherent message. Isn’t that amazing? And of course the danger is that the message seems to cohere into something solid—a kind of conceptual map or ideology—something to grasp or believe, a new “Whole Thing” to drag around with us. And that’s the tricky part. Playful, ungraspable sounds and shapes emerging from total cluelessness can seem to become very serious authoritative words about the nature of reality, as if we’ve really nailed it. But in any moment, there is the possibility of letting it all go, letting it all wash away.

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Thank you all for being here. And by the way, I very highly recommend that movie I mentioned—Babyteeth. It’s a quirky Australian comedy-drama that I thought was really lovely and funny and moving and surprising and beautifully acted and filmed.

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Housekeeping

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