The Freedom to Be As You Are

No Way to Get It Wrong

As I've shared before, my mother said more than once in the last year that she was alive, "It's so freeing to realize that nothing really matters." My mother was a very big-hearted woman who loved animals, visited sick friends and relatives even in her nineties in the dead of winter in Chicago, and cared deeply about the injustices and suffering in the world. She did not say this nihilistically or cynically. She said it with relief as if an immense burden had dropped. 

At Peter Brown's final zoom before he died, the zoom where he said goodbye, he reiterated very emphatically what he’d said many times before: “It doesn't matter what you do. It does not matter what you do!”

That sounds outrageous because, of course, in everyday life, things do seem to matter—whether we’re rich or poor, healthy or ill, whether we’re a child sex trafficker or someone rescuing animals and planting gardens—these things matter in terms of both what our our own experience will be and how we will affect others and the world. Being hideously tortured in a dungeon is undeniably a very different experience from drinking margaritas in the garden with the love of your life. So what on earth did Peter mean by this? What did my mother mean?

I’d say it’s about not taking our conceptual maps and narratives seriously and not mistaking them for the living actuality. Thought automatically and choicelessly divides unbroken wholeness into imaginary categories like subject and object, inside and outside, cause and effect, here and there, good and bad, enlightened and deluded, success and failure. We imagine a fractured world in which one thing causes another thing, but all the “things” are imaginary. They only exist conceptually.

Thought poses as “me,” the thinker of my thoughts, the maker of my choices, and then takes what happens personally (“my” mistakes, “my” successes). We judge ourselves and others, often very harshly, and think that we and everyone else and the world could and should be different from how we are. This is all very painful.

But while reality is infinitely varied and ever-changing in appearance, it is seamless and inseparable, and it never departs from here and now. And while experiences can have many different textures and flavors, the common factor in every different experience is the sheer presence of it. Peter often calls it the radiance.

Different experiences are like different waves in a singular ocean. You can’t extract a wave from the ocean. All the waves are a movement of the whole. No wave can go off in “the wrong” direction, and no human can either. You can’t have the light without the dark. The light turns into the dark and the dark turns into the light. In some unfathomable way, everything is included. It all goes together. It might be compared to a dream in which every part is equally nothing other than the dreaming consciousness.

Furthermore, we don’t get to decide our fate or the fate of the world or the universe. By fate, I simply mean what happens in THIS ever-present, bottomless moment Here-Now. This moment cannot be other than exactly how it is, and we’re not something separate from or other than this instantaneous presence that is as it is.

Our individual lack of control can certainly seem like bad news, and most humans cling to the illusion of personal free will. It’s a powerful illusion, and we certainly seem to make choices. But when we look very carefully, we find no “me” at the helm. Our next thought, our next urge, our next desire, our next experience, our next emotion, our next carefully considered move, our next action all emerge unbidden. Thought, posing as “me,” takes credit or blame before or after the fact.

When this lack of control is deeply realized, it puts an end to guilt and blame and the endless suffering that comes from judging what is and trying to fix ourselves and save the world. We may still be moved to go into a recovery program, see a therapist or demonstrate for social justice—but it will be clear that this action emerges unbidden and that the results of it are not in our hands.

For me, the most liberating realization has been that nothing can be other than how it is, that everything is one undivided and indivisible whole that can never be grasped, pinned down or pulled apart, and that each of us is a unique and unrepeatable movement of the whole.

This is from Darryl Bailey in a recent email to me:

I feel that the most that any of us can offer to society is acceptance of ourselves, and of each other, just as the ordinary expressions that we have to be.  That isn't easy ... even when we see clearly that we're all expressions of a great mystery, and have to be what the mystery expresses.

I think it's so valuable that, in a world filled with judgment, there are those who are offering this permission to others, to be who they are, just as they are, and to value their own unique participation in life.

I feel that you are fortunate to be part of that with your own work in the same way that I feel fortunate to be part of it with my own.

—Darryl Bailey

And this is from Peter Brown's excellent book THIS THAT IS, from a chapter called Radiant Presence Doing, Seeing, Dancing Itself:

There’s only one thing, which is the radiance. The radiance is all of it… We have a problem with nomenclature. We have too much of it. We have thousands of words in the dictionary, and there’s only one thing present here, and so they all refer to it. Take any word and ask: Does this refer to the radiance? The answer is yes...

You’re always dancing with radiance. Worship or some emotional devotional engagement is one flavor of dancing with the energy of presence. Reading or going into some kind of mental world or mental application is another way of dancing with the energy, dancing with the radiance. Cooking is another way. Body movement, such as doing t’ai chi, or exercising, or making love, or anything whatsoever that you do is nothing other than dancing with the energy that Radiant Presence is. It is all Radiant Presence dancing with itself...

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you do. Ultimately, it’s all the same. Everything you do is the radiance dancing with itself. When you see that, it doesn’t matter what you do. But since it doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter what you don’t do either, and so you’re just totally free...

There’s only one thing here. There’s only one action. There’s only one activity. All action is this one activity, which is the radiance dancing with itself.

—Peter Brown

(John Astin commented recently that paradoxically, it seems like it makes all the difference in the world to recognize that it makes no difference. How true!)

We might fear that realizing that we have no control and that it doesn’t matter what we do would free us all up to be serial killers. It can sound like a very dangerous and threatening idea, as if the social order would completely collapse if this were widely realized. It flies in the face of everything we’ve been told all our lives.

But actually, there’s no way we can be a serial killer unless that is our fate. Most of us couldn’t be serial killers even if we tried. We really can’t do anything other than exactly what life moves us to do in each moment. If that were widely realized, it would eliminate a great deal of the violence and conflict that comes from the opposite assumptions, the violence of blame and revenge, the self-hatred that consumes so many humans, the guilt and regret, the self-righteous certainty about how everything ‘should’ be. This realization would give us compassion for ourselves and everyone else. It would free us to be at peace with being exactly as we are in each moment.

That doesn’t mean we couldn’t recognize so-called mistakes and be moved to correct them, but such actions would happen in a much different way, without the guilt, blame and regret, without taking any of it personally as “my” mistake, without imagining it all means something about “me,” such as, “I’m a good for nothing failure” or “I’m so much better than all of you,” or any of that. All of that would disappear. What a relief!

And, of course, we can also say that EVERYTHING matters! Everything is the Holy Reality, the divine expression, the unfathomable what is. For Zen teacher and psychoanalyst Barry Magid, Zen is not about detaching from life, purifying oneself, or being some kind of unchanging awareness impervious to the vulnerability and messiness of life. He speaks of Zen as “moment to moment reverence and awe, and the kind of attention that treats ordinary things as extraordinary and worthy of that kind of attention.” Instead of trying to fix ourselves or transcend our humanity, Barry invites us to be just as we are in this moment, finding the absolute in the relative, the wholeness in the particular, and the perfection in the seemingly imperfect.

These are the kinds of pointings that have been deeply liberating for me, and this is the essential message that I endeavor to convey in my own work.

I often quote others whose work resonates with me because sometimes we can hear something from one person that we can’t hear from someone else because each one puts it slightly differently. I also quote others because I see us as something akin to jazz musicians playing together, each a unique voice creating one whole song. And it’s good to remember that it’s all a playful dance, and not some deadly serious endeavor as we so often imagine it to be.

When singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen went to India to meet Ramesh Balsekar, Ramesh apparently said to Leonard: "The whole business [of seeking] is taken far too seriously. That is the ridiculous thing about it. There’s nothing serious about it, because there’s no seeker! And who is serious about it? — the seeker!"  Or as Ramesh said elsewhere, “Who cares?” That caretaker is a phantom, which is why Karl Renz often spoke of liberation as care-less-ness and seemed to treat the whole spiritual endeavor as a huge joke. It’s another way of saying, nothing matters.

There’s truly nowhere to go and nothing to get. THIS really is all there is. We hear this and don’t believe it. But even that disbelief is just another meaningless waving of the ocean. Truly, nothing is lacking and nothing different or better needs to happen.

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