The Holy Reality Is Right Here

plus some reflections on aging and two Zen talks I greatly enjoyed

The Holy Reality Here-Now:

Perhaps, like me, you sometimes have moments of feeling the vulnerability of this human body, moments when you feel in your gut that primordial fear of being utterly alone in a vast, inhuman universe. If you do have such moments, perhaps you have found yourself wishing that you could still believe in the sky God of childhood, that all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving Divine Parent who is reliably watching over you and who will care for you and save you. But probably, like me, you can’t believe in the sky God any more, if you ever did. You know too much now. It’s the 21st Century.

But then, if you’re very lucky, you remember that God is right here, closer than close, and that you simply need to breathe and return from the realm of scary emotion-thought and imagination and give your whole-hearted attention instead to the immediacy of this alive breathing presence that you are.

A friend who knows the Bible much better than I do, tells me of a beautiful line spoken by the Apostle Paul:

"In God we live and move and have our being.”

— Acts 17:28

Using different words, we could say that we live and move and have our being in presence, awareness, wholeness, unconditional love, which is the Holy Reality. We are this one bottomless moment that is ever-changing and always Here-Now, and the heart of it is undivided and utterly trustworthy. Believing that as a comforting idea doesn’t help. It must be felt and known directly, and that discovery and realization is part of what meditation and contemplative exploration is all about.

Religion and spirituality at their best come from and are devoted to this vast wholeness that is open, boundless, centerless and all-inclusive. They encourage us to discover and see the sacred everywhere, and to treat everything and everyone as expressions of this undivided wholeness. The best of these religious and spiritual expressions move us away from belief and toward a faith that relies solely on our own immediate direct knowing.

There are many different ways of discovering and appreciating the Holy Reality that is always right here. In my last post, I emphasized the approach of being fully present with what is showing up here and now—the thoughts that are passing through, the storylines, the emotions, the breathing, the sounds of traffic or birds, the sensations throughout the body, the whole field of present moment experiencing. As we attend deeply to each particular unique expression of life, each waving of the ocean, we discover that the whole ocean is there in every wave. We are both wave and ocean, both human being and the awaring presence beholding (being and holding) it all.

A seemingly different approach is to begin by turning attention away from the ten thousand things and instead turning it around toward the listening presence, the unseeable awareness, our innermost core, the heart, the naked “I” to which we all refer, what we most truly and most fundamentally are prior to all the things that are added on later (name, age, gender, race, nationality, social class, personality type, occupation, etc).

When we look for this “I,” we can’t find anything objective that we can point to and say, “There it is. That’s it.” Whatever the “I” (this undeniable sense of aware presence) most fundamentally is, it is more subtle than anything we can grasp. It has no shape, no size, no form, no location. This “I” is no-thing. And yet, it is not nothing. It is alive and full of absolutely everything, like the ocean that includes and is all of its infinitely diverse wavings, all of its unique expressions. The “I” is limitless, boundless, all-inclusive—at once impersonal and yet also most intimate.

What begins initially by withdrawing attention from the ten thousand things and turning it around toward the unbound awareness beholding it all, eventually discovers that there is no boundary between inside and outside, or between awareness and content, or between self and other, and it becomes a path of love and total inclusion.

As Rupert Spira writes in his beautiful book The Heart of Prayer:

All the great religious and spiritual traditions draw their knowledge from this single understanding: peace and happiness are the nature of our being and we share our being with everyone and everything…

In time this understanding sinks more deeply into us. It doesn’t just pervade our minds but floods our hearts. It permeates the body and flows out into the world.

This is the process that is referred to in the Christian tradition as the Transfiguration, the gradual pervading of everything with the light of pure being, and the eventual transfiguring of everything into that. It is the outshining of all experience in God’s being.

Different approaches and different expressions appeal to different people, or to the same person in different moments. It’s not that one path or expression is right and the other wrong.

If two people depart from the same place, one walking East and the other walking West, they will eventually meet. If they continue on, East will become West and West will become East, and they will eventually meet again, back where they started. Meditation and spiritual exploration can, broadly speaking, go in one or the other of the two general directions described above, and much like the people walking East and West, both directions eventually meet and bring about very similar revelations. Both will ultimately bring us to Here-Now (God’s being), the place we’ve never actually left, and both will wake us up to the beauty and holiness of everything we encounter (and are).

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

—T.S. Eliot

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Growing Old and Being Timelessly Present:

This body is undeniably growing older, gradually disintegrating, moving toward its eventual disappearance, like a wave merging back into the ocean, which it never actually left. This growing up and growing old—like the ocean rising, cresting, and falling—is a movement in time, and time turns out to be a kind of imagination, a way of conceptualizing or thinking about what is happening. The only actual reality is the eternity of Here-Now, this one bottomless moment, from which we never depart, except in imagination, and that imagining only happens now. The “I” that I AM prior to name and all acquired identities and labels is timelessly present as this open, all-inclusive aware presence that is boundless, centerless, ageless and ever-present.

As the body ages, I become in some ways more limited. I know, for example, that it’s too late to go to medical school, and I know that there are many people and places dear to my heart that I will never see again. That vast realm of future possibility is closing down and shrinking. And as I wrote about in my last book, Death: The End of Self-Improvement, that limitation is actually a blessing. It forces us to find freedom and fulfillment right here in this very moment.

And indeed, I feel increasingly unlimited in a deeper sense. I’ve been freed from the seductive allure of future possibilities. I’ve been brought home. I find myself ever more deeply appreciating the simple moments of love and joy in everyday life—a few words exchanged with someone I pass on my morning walk… the gorgeous song of a bird and my own heart leaping with joy on hearing it and another bird responding, the three of us somehow dancing together in a field of love… sitting later in my armchair, seeing the shadows of a flock of birds passing quickly again and again over the walls of the buildings across the way, shadows flashing out of emptiness and vanishing, and each time, the heart again leaping with joy, while the green leaves on the red bud tree outside my window shimmer in the light and the breeze. How simple it all is. For in the Holy Reality we live and move and have our being.

It has been said that “old age is not for sissies,” and indeed, it can be quite challenging. It typically involves ever-increasing physical pain, and it always involves growing losses and limitations. Simple things we took for granted such as eyesight, hearing and the ability to walk, may disappear. Living from day to day takes strength, endurance and faith, as well as surrender and acceptance. And then, to our surprise, each loss and limitation can be a doorway to the unlimited and the ever-present.

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Finding Freedom in Limitation:

Lately, I’ve been exploring some of the video talks by SFZC teachers on the YouTube channel of the San Francisco Zen Center, which was my first real practice home many decades ago. I shared one of these talks in my last post, one given by someone I knew back then. This one I’m sharing now is from someone I had never heard talk before. He is Green Gulch Farm’s current abbot, Jiryu Rutschman-Byler. This talk has a lot to do with limitations and finding freedom in limitation (and of course, you don’t need to be old to experience limitation). It’s also a talk about love, wonder and not knowing:

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On Being Completely Yourself:

Here’s another talk I loved by Jiryu Rutschman-Byler, and think maybe some of you might resonate with it as much as I did. I just couldn’t resist sharing it as well:

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There are many different ways of expressing and pointing to the Holy Reality. As I always advise, take what resonates at this moment. Don’t imagine it is The One Right Way. Don’t get stuck on the words, or caught up in mentally arguing and nitpicking over different expressions or trying to analyze them conceptually. Listen with the heart. Go where they point. Let the words dissolve. In this placeless place, right here, at the very heart of your own being, there is no real contradiction between these diverse and varied expressions, even if there seems to be at the level of the thinking mind. This wholeness includes them all. It is all of them. Enjoy!

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Love to all…