Shifting Perspectives

“spiritual bypassing vs. illusion indulgence”

I've long been fascinated by how experience can shift in a split second from the vast open perspective to the seemingly narrow and limited one, from the obviously ungraspable and indivisible to the apparently formed and divided up, from the clearly unresolvable to the seemingly certain and resolved. In the blink of an eye, the formed world snaps into existence—or so it seems.

One of the examples I often give of this shift is of a day in Chicago when I was walking down the street and there was simply open being—sunlight, trees, sky, clouds, breeze on the skin, sensations of walking and breathing and being alive as this whole vast universe—open aware presence and the flow of experiencing, with no me in the picture at all and no sense of being encapsulated, limited or separate.

Suddenly, I ran into someone I went to high school with, and she asked me what I'd been doing since we last saw one another some thirty-odd years ago. Instantly, I could feel myself contracting down into the sense of being this seemingly small, separate, encapsulated person called Joan. Thought was spinning away trying to conjure up a coherant, socially acceptable answer. I went from being nobody (or everything, or no-thing) to being somebody. Suddenly, I felt “on the spot,” where a moment before I had been feeling free, spacious and boundless.

Other examples are when I suddenly become caught up in some personal or world event or some seemingly very serious political development. Last October and November, it was Israel and Gaza, and more recently, it was Joe Biden’s horrifying performance in the first presidential debate. In both cases, I became emotional at times, obsessed with the situation, and identified with my point of view. I felt threatened or disturbed by opposing views and unable to resist arguing my case, sometimes in mean-spirited or pushy ways. In such moments, there is a felt-sense of separation and contraction.

In Peter Brown's book Essence of Recognition, which is a version of the Pratyabhijna Hridayam, a text from Kashmir Shaivism, with commentary by Peter, it talks about how the unresolvable, unpindownable actuality can appear to be something limited. It suggests that limited perspectives persist because of appearance, investment, interpretation and continuity: "Appearance is the spontaneous presence of apparent characteristics in your experience, investment is attributing importance to them, interpretation is holding them to be in some particular way or as some particular objects/conditions, continuity is the seeming persistence and recurrence of particular conditions." I would add identification, which I’d define as holding them to be part of one’s identity or self.  

And, indeed, in each of the situations I mentioned above—meeting my high school classmate, the war between Israel and Hamas, and my reaction to Joe Biden's terrible debate performance—all of those elements were there: appearance, investment, interpretation, continuity and identification. In each case, the natural (actually ever-present) condition of open, free, spacious, boundless being, and the seamless flow of experience, seemingly contracted down into a felt-sense of being "little me," dealing with something seemingly other than me, something apparently outside of me that felt in some way threatening. Even the high school friend's innocent question was in some very subtle way threatening because I felt the need to provide a coherant, socially acceptable answer—to be somebody, and to be somebody whose life would sound okay—whereas a moment before, I was nobody enjoying the freedom of not needing to be anybody.

As I've written about many times, an infant does not see tables and chairs. The infant sees colors and shapes and learns over time how to divide, label and categorize them. That's an important part of human development and a vital survival function, but it also creates the illusion of an apparently solid and fractured world made up of separate, persisting, discrete, observer-independent objects "out there," a world that doesn't actually exist in the way we believe that it does.

The pattern-seeking mind is always reifying and interpreting the ever-changing kaleidoscopic Rorschach blots of experience—labeling them, putting them into categories, weaving narratives around them—and presto, the apparently solid and fractured world appears. And with it, "I" appear as both the apparent center or subject of experience and as one of those apparently discrete, formed things—“me,” the one who is supposedly living in this world. The apparent divide between subject and object is the primal split or root dualism. And what arises out of all this is my unique movie of waking life.

The "me" at the center of this imaginary creation is the biggest illusion of all—the apparently separate, autonomous, independent self who is supposedly at the control panel of this bodymind organism, authoring its thoughts, making its decisions, having its experiences. And, of course, the "bodymind organism" is itself one of those illusory "things" that thought and conditioned perception have carved out of what is actually unpindownable, ungraspable, seamless flux. This doesn’t mean there is nothing here that we call Joan, but we can’t actually pin down exactly what it is or where it begins or ends. The more we look for it, the more elusive it seems to be.

We can't actually find a real boundary between inside and outside, between subject and object, awareness and content, self and environment. There is no actual place where one thing ends and the other begins. And none of these “things'“ actually exist as the discrete entities that language suggests they are. In direct experience, there is no seer who is seeing and something else being seen. That’s all a conceptual overlay. In direct experience, there is simply seeing. (Or some would prefer to say, there is only the Seer or only the seen, but the point being made is the same).

There is something enormously freeing in discovering that the whole dramatic movie of waking life that seems so serious and real is indeed a kind of dream-like creation of consciousness; that the only actual reality is this unfindable instant right now; that everything “self-liberates” by vanishing as soon as it appears; and that right now, without thought, memory and imagination, there is no “me,” no separation, and no problem. The apparently solid, substantial, persisting, broken up world is indeed illusory, and our whole life is very much like a dream.

But questioning the reality of the formed world can feel at times profoundly threatening, especially when it involves questioning the reality of such things as wounded children in a war zone or the reality of our dearest loves ones. It seems to threaten us in a very deep way to suggest that these are simply imaginary creations of the conditioned mind or appearances in a dream that have no actual substance.

Letting go of our certainties about reality can feel scary and life-threatening to the survival mind that seeks control and that is always trying to locate itself and get a grip. The survival mind is uncomfortable with free-falling emptiness and nothing to grasp—with the openness of not knowing anything other than the immediacy of this moment. Thus, waking up to the illusory and dream-like nature of the formed world can be a challenging and difficult process. Something in us resists.

But as I see it, awakening to the non-substantial, undivided, evanescent, dream-like nature of reality doesn’t mean completely ignoring or denying the everyday world of appearances or trying to banish all sense of being an individual person. I would never want to deny the reality of either suffering or love, whether in the form of wounded children in a war zone or our loved ones whom we cherish.

In my view, awakening isn’t about seeing all of this as merely a dream in a dismissive way, rendering it unimportant and best ignored. In fact, on the contrary, when the dream-like nature of everything is apparent, and when none of it appears to be outside of me or other than me, that absence of substantial, persisting existence feels like unconditional love. It includes and accepts it all, and sees all of it as my own being.

So I do find it profoundly liberating to hold the human drama more lightly and to see what is illusory about it. But I notice that how believable it all feels in any given moment, or how “out there” and threatening it seems to be, is not in “my” control—or at least, not reliably (if ever).

For many years, spirituality meant to me a path of seeing through delusion, noticing how that shift happens between the vast open perspective and the seemingly narrow and limited one, and hopefully dissolving many painful behaviors and ways of thinking in the process. It was a path of awareness and open attention to what is showing up here and now in this one bottomless moment. And that’s still a part of what spirituality means to me.

But at some point in my journey, I began to see everything as aspects of this undivided whole, and it no longer seemed—as it had in the beginning—that the goal was for a mirage-like self to stabilize permanently in an open, boundless, free dimension of experience and eradicate any sense of being a person along with all those pesky human emotions and behaviors such as anger, fear, defensiveness, aggression and so on. I began to see that it all belonged, that it couldn’t be pulled apart, and that none of it was personal—it was all interdependent, impersonal weather—momentary appearances in a dream. And the more closely I observed any of it, the less graspable and resolvable it was discovered to be. Moreover, I couldn’t find a boundary between “it” and “me,” or between inside and outside. It became clear that there is simply THIS, just as it is, which is no way in particular.

I tend to regard all dimensions of reality as real—the relative and the absolute, the whole and the particular, the apparently formed and the ungraspable formlessness. I see the so-called awakened life as a kind of dance between taking the movie of waking life too seriously and completely dissociating from and ignoring it. An old friend of mine talks about what she calls “spiritual bypassing vs. illusion indulgence.” That feels like a really good description of two ways of potentially missing the mark.

As “illusion indulgence” has dissolved more and more in my life, I see ever-more clearly the truth in radical statements such as “nothing matters” or “nothing ever happened.” Sometimes people fear that seeing all this will result in completely losing any moral compass and becoming serial killers or lazy bums. But that hasn’t been my experience. Something I heard Gangaji say years ago to someone who was trying to quit smoking comes to mind in this regard. She said, “When you’re free to smoke, you’re free to quit.”

Somehow, paradoxically and counter-intuitively, this understanding that “nothing matters” and “nothing ever really happened” and “it all belongs” and “it’s all a dream-like appearance with no substance” seems to open the possibility of changes that had previously been unavailable—but such changes are no longer needed. Perhaps this is because, as they say, what we resist tends to persist, and because by taking all our apparent problems seriously and focusing on them, we are in some way empowering them and substantiating their illusory reality.

I’m still apparently caught up at times in “illusion indulgence,” as my old friend calls it. And a few of you have accused me at times of “spiritual by-passing.” But am I actually ever caught up in either? Isn’t that always just another story, another dream-like memory? And who is the one supposedly caught up? Right now, without thinking, what is this? What are you? What am I?

There is no answer. There is simply THIS. Always right here, and yet never the same way twice. Truly miraculous and astonishing, sometimes horrifying—THIS seems to have infinite dimensions, infinite faces, ever-changing weather, lots of surprising moves. And however far we seem to travel, here we always are, and however old we get, we have never for one moment ever departed from now. There is always just this, as it is, which is no way in particular. Vast emptiness. Open. Free. Boundless. Seamless. Limitless. Ungraspable. Unresolvable. Playful. Alive.

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Love to all…