Seeing Through Curative Fantasies
Finding peace with life as it is
Is it enough to simply be alive, to not know why we’re here or how the whole universe works, to simply be this ever-changing, breathing, sensing, experiencing aliveness?
I’m not a believer in purification projects, utopian fantasies, result-oriented practices, or the false (conceptual) divisions between spirit and matter, body and soul, spiritual and mundane. I’m not a fan of splitting off parts of ourselves and then denying, ignoring, repressing, or vilifying the parts we find unacceptable. In my view, it’s all included in what is. To me, the freeway and the office are every bit as spiritual as any church or temple, and emptying my ostomy bag is as sacred a task as taking communion, chanting the Heart Sutra, or performing any other religious ritual. To deny any part of life or try to expunge it out of existence in order to purify ourselves or the world is not my brand of spirituality.
Many forms of spirituality seek to escape the reality of human uncertainty, vulnerability, impermanence, pain, cruelty and death through a kind of spin doctoring or magical thinking in which we explain away the horrors in the world as “God’s will,” or insist that none of it is really happening anyway—it’s only a dream. That’s also not a version of spirituality with which I resonate. Yes, everyday life is dream-like in many ways, evanescent, not as solid or substantial as it seems, but that doesn’t mean that if you break your leg, it doesn’t hurt, or if someone drops a bomb on your village, the loss isn’t real. It’s real enough.
Spiritual practice is often rooted in the belief that, “This can’t be it,” and the insatiable search that follows for something bigger, better and different, something we hope that either arduous practice or some magical transmission from a guru will eventually deliver. This, too, isn’t the version of spirituality to which I am pointing.
The forms of spirituality I described above are what Zen teacher and psychoanalyst Barry Magid calls curative fantasies. Instead, like Barry and many others, I’m always pointing to this very moment, present experiencing, right now, just exactly as it is.
But how is it? That’s what I’m inviting us to explore and discover.
In giving attention to this very moment and to the sense of presence itself, I tune into a kind of spacious openness that I experience as the very nature of here and now, and also as the very nature of experience itself and what I am. Whether I zoom into the heart of any one sensation or out into the boundless awaring space beholding it all, I find the same vastness, the same spacious no-thing-ness that is ungraspable but definitely not nothing. I find a silence and a stillness that is filled with energy. I’ve even been known to call it God. Jewish Zen teacher Norman Fischer once said that meditation is “easy access to God-encounter—through encountering your own body, breath, mind, and presence.” I concur.
I’m well aware of the dangers of calling this God or any of those other names with capital letters (Consciousness, Pure Awareness, Self, Mind, Truth, Radiant Presence, etc). I resonate with and use these words at times, but I recognize that they can inadvertently turn this no-thing-ness into something, a kind of object, and maybe even into a belief that pretends to know the ultimate nature of the universe and thus promises to resolve all human uncertainty. There is a resolution to uncertainty, but it’s not in the realm of knowledge and ideas—it’s in the openness of here-now-presence. In the realm of knowledge and ideas, I’m very much about epistemological humility regarding the nature of consciousness or which comes first, mind or matter, or if they’re even two different things. I find such questions irrelevant and unanswerable. I also see the pitfalls of identifying a particular experiential state of openness as “it” and then trying to have or be in that state all the time.
It seems undeniable to me that human life contains many things that are truly horrific and cruel, and that we all contain a mix of light and dark. In my view, these things exist and happen because of infinite causes and conditions, some of which we’re aware of and many of which we’re not. In that sense, they’re not personal—they’re like the outer weather. I’m not inclined to spin doctor this all away as “God’s will” or “just a dream.” I’m more about accepting what is, as it is, unvarnished, and letting it reveal and unfold and dissolve itself in its own way, in its own time.
This acceptance doesn’t mean resignation, complacency or passivity. It’s part of our nature to want to heal illness, recover from injuries, solve problems, identify and correct mistakes, and so on—to find the light in the dark. But this can happen without imagining that we are going to end all forms of disease, solve all problems, eliminate death, turn ourselves into perfect saints, and create utopia on earth. Those are fantasies.
I quoted Zen teacher Norman Fischer at the beginning of my last book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement:
Practice is not about overcoming human problems. It’s not about becoming serene and transcendent. It’s about embracing our lives as they really are, and understanding at every point how deep and profound and gorgeous everything is—even the suffering, even the difficulty. So we forgive ourselves for our limitations, and we forgive this world for its pain. We don’t say, “That’s not pain.” It is pain. You don’t say, “It’s not difficulty.” It is difficult. But when we embrace the difficulty… we see this is exactly the difficulty we need, and this difficulty is the most beautiful and poignant thing in this world.
As someone who has recovered from addictions, compulsions and once violent rages, I certainly believe in the possibility of healing and transformation, and I credit meditation and contemplative inquiry and exploration—along with psychotherapy, somatic work and political understanding—as major factors in my ongoing awakening journey. But I can’t pin down exactly how any of the changes that have happened came about. Cause and effect is always a story, a conceptual overlay that selects a tiny part of the whole and leaves out everything else. That said, it does seem to me that all these changes had something to do with the transformative power of awareness and the light of attention illuminating what was previously unseen or unrecognized.
In my experience, that illumination and seeing of what is, and feeling fully, is where the deepest healing always seems to begin. Paradoxically, transformation emerges from the complete acceptance of what is, and not from willful efforts to change it and the deeply ingrained stories that, “This isn’t it” and “I’m not okay.” As Gangaji once said, “When you’re free to smoke, you’re free to stop.” In my experience, intelligent action emerges from the acceptance of right here, right now, just as it is. If we start anywhere else, from resisting what is and aiming for what isn’t, what follows tends to go in murky or harmful directions.
In Buddhism, emptiness generally means impermanence, interdependence and non-self. It means that there is no fixed, persisting, essential self, and that no one and no thing exist independently of everything else.
It has been said that a complete understanding of impermanence is that nothing is impermanent. In other words, no-thing ever actually forms or persists to be impermanent. We might say, there is only streaming, although no way of conceptualizing reality holds up to careful scrutiny. And in Buddhism, emptiness isn’t meant as a way to ignore, dismiss or deny relative everyday conventional reality. Because here it is! Undeniably, a world is showing up in which we have dogs and cats, computers and chairs and tables, mountains and rivers, wars and peace treaties, trauma and healing, astronauts circling the earth in a space station, planets circling the sun, and billions of different life forms including billions of different human beings, each of whom come into and eventually pass out of existence. We have joy and grief, attachment and longing, and the whole range of human emotion.
And while each of us is an absolutely unique, unrepeatable expression of life—no two snowflakes, fingerprints, or human beings are identical—none of us exists independently of everything else in the whole universe. We need to be ourselves and find our own unique path in life, and yet we never stand alone or start from scratch. We exist as ever-changing relationship or interbeing, like the jewels of Indra’s Net, each of which is only a reflection of all the others. Thich Nhat Hahn explains this very beautifully by giving the example of how the whole universe is present in a single sheet of paper. How? Well…that paper wouldn’t exist without the trees it was made from and the soil in which the trees grew and the lumberjacks that cut down the trees and the lumberjacks’s parents and grandparents and the food they all ate and the sunshine and rain that grew the food and the explosion that created the sun and so on all the way back to the Big Bang and everything in between.
Nothing can be pulled out of the whole. The whole is both seamlessly inseparable and infinitely diverse. It is at once ever-changing and yet it never departs from here and now, this one bottomless moment. Every person is vividly and uniquely themselves, and at the same time, each person is made up of and cannot exist without everything they apparently are not. When we try to pin reality down conceptually, we inevitably end up with apparent paradoxes. How can a complete understanding of impermanence reveal that nothing is impermanent? How can life be without beginning or end when birth and death are undeniable facts of life? How can transformation come from accepting what is? None of this seems to make any sense! But when we simply observe life as it is, these and many other apparent paradoxes melt away. And that melting away through observing and being present as this very moment of life is what a life of intelligent meditation and contemplative exploration is all about in my view.
It’s not about leaving the messy world behind or denying the unpleasant reality of pain and suffering, or imagining that all the horror and cruelty in the world is somehow “God’s will” and therefore not really as bad as it looks or feels. Finding the grace and the light in the darkness doesn’t mean getting into some special transcendent, thought-free state and staying there 24/7. It’s not about purifying ourselves and being perfect. It’s not about sainthood. It’s not about beliefs and magical thinking. It’s about opening to the living actuality here and now, just as it is. When we open fully to this, it reveals itself in surprising ways.
This living actuality includes the light and the dark, the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the horrific. It includes the whole show. It cannot be pulled apart. Being awake isn’t about being dissociated, numb to pain, or immune from heartbreak. It’s not about never getting upset or angry or depressed. It’s not about looking away or closing our eyes and imagining ourselves in some transcendent fantasy life far above the fray, untouched by any of it. It’s right here in washing the dishes, shopping for groceries, untangling the latest computer disaster, reading the news, experiencing a moment of frustration and anger, having a headache or back pain or neuropathy or cancer. It’s right here in the sunlight and the morning breeze and the sounds of the freeway. It’s just this. Life as it is.
Two beautiful articles I very highly recommend:
John Astin on the groundless ground from which no deviation is possible:
Robert Saltzman distinguishing between non-self and no-self:
A book I very highly recommend:
When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen by Norman Fischer.
Love to all…
Wow. This is my favorite of all I’ve read by you. Life is so full of unsettling changes and, for me, fears of inconsolable grief. The desire to be above and beyond it is quite compelling. It wasn’t until my mother died that I could begin to relax into it because I had no choice. Leonard Cohen said that the understanding that your suffering is exactly the same as everyone else’s is the beginning of a responsible adulthood. That is so true. ❤️
Joan, I love your mind. It strips away all of the bullshit. ❤️