Silence
Simplicity Itself
There is something so simple –
Silence
Stillness
Presence
Love
And when the darkness comes,
Stop. Look. Listen. Be Still.
[Zen meditation] is radically simple… No matter what you believe or think, this simple practice of sitting down in silence and feeling the present moment will have a powerful impact on your life.
– Norman Fischer, from What Is Zen? Plain Talk for a Beginner’s Mind, by Norman Fischer and Susan Moon
Open Aware Presence
There is a stillness, a spaciousness, an openness at the heart of our being that beholds everything from wholeness and unconditional love. In this open aware presence, there is both infinite potential and compassion for everything being just as it is. There is no separation, no division, no inside, no outside, no other.
This one bottomless moment is ever-changing in appearance while never departing from the immediacy of right here, right now. Thought conceptually divides, labels, categorizes, interprets and seemingly concretizes the ungraspable, unpindownable flow of experience, creating a kind of virtual reality made up of apparently solid, separate, independent, persisting things.
But it may be discovered that all apparently formed things, including people, are like waves in the ocean—ever-changing and inseparable movements of an undivided whole. When we are hypnotized by the thought-sense of being small and separate from the rest of life, feelings of deficiency, anxiety and dissatisfaction inevitably follow. We search for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense openness and freedom.
What is offered here invites firsthand exploration and direct discovery, not belief or dogma. There is no finish-line, no formula, no method, nowhere to go, only this one bottomless moment and this ever-fresh aliveness.
— the current home page of my website
If we’re referencing “being awake” or “liberation” to a particular experience or state of mind—maybe a very expanded, open, peaceful feeling—that will inevitably prove disappointing because that state will disappear. The open aware presence it reveals is simply what remains when the me-system is quiet or when it is totally accepted as simply the weather of this moment. That open boundless aware presence is actually ever-present, even when apparently obscured by obsessive, me-centered thoughts. It is the common factor in every different experience. And those thoughts are nothing other than this same aliveness, the One Reality, showing up as thoughts. Experience is ever-changing like the weather. It’s never personal. It’s a happening of the whole universe. But if we take the stormy, cloudy, foggy weather personally, then it seems like we have lost that expanded openness that we tasted before. If we imagine that there is a persisting, independent self (“me”) who is either awake or not awake, that is only an imagination. No such persisting, independent self can be found. There is no experiencer outside of experiencing. Clinging to or chasing after experiences of spaciousness is a great way to avoid them. And eventually, we see that every experience, whether contracted or expanded, clear or muddy, is always just this.
This totality or wholeness includes every possibility. It includes what we call pain, bankruptcy, war, torture, disease, disability, dementia, betrayal, abandonment, natural disasters, genocides, rapes, factory farms, and all manner of cruelty and upset. This is all part of the movie of waking life, as are all the many ways we react and respond to all of this. And yet, all of that is a kind of dream-like appearance, dissolving as soon as it appears. The apparent forms never really exist in the way they seem to if we don’t look too closely. They are like ever-changing, kaleidoscopic Rorschach blots that the pattern-seeking mind is always interpreting—identifying them from memories, labeling them, putting them into categories, weaving narratives around them—creating the illusion of a seemingly solid world of separate things “out there.” But the more closely we attend to the bare actuality of present experiencing, the more we can see that there is no actual boundary between inside and outside, and that nothing actually forms into solid, persisting, independent things.
There is something so simple –
Stop. Look. Listen. Be Still.
Enjoy this moment, the only moment,
just as it is.
Love to all…
No finish line. No formula. No method. No path. No guru. No doctrine. No elaborate practices. No conceptual framework. Stripped, naked, and alone. How beautiful. What a relief!
"Clinging to or chasing after experiences of spaciousness is a great way to avoid them." Great line!