Boundless, seamless consciousness appears as a vast and playful, fractal and holographic multiplicity that can be seen from infinitely varied perspectives. Consciousness identifies itself as billions of different bodymind organisms, characters in billions of simultaneous, overlapping dream-like movies of waking life, and there arises in each one of these characters the sense of being “me,” an apparently separate, independent, autonomous entity with free will and choice who seems to be authoring my thoughts, making my decisions, and directing my life.
This “me” in turn identifies with all kinds of other things in the movie of waking life. It identifies with categories such as race, gender, age and nationality, and with stories and beliefs about what these categories mean. It identifies with political perspectives and positions. It identifies with religions and religious beliefs. It identifies with stories of being deficient or not good enough, or with stories of being a winner who never loses, or stories of being unlovable, or stories of being misunderstood or mistreated. It identifies with causes and with different groups, with underdogs and topdogs. It identifies with certain other characters in the movie. And when anything or anyone with which it is identified is under attack or is being questioned or threatened in some way, this “me” takes it very personally. It feels as if “I myself” am being attacked or threatened.
As an example of this, a few days ago, I found myself firing off an email filled with indignant fury at Israel for what they are doing to Gaza, and I could tell even as it was happening that this upset was in some way delusional. In exploring it later, I noticed that I seem to be identified with the people of Gaza, whom I perceive as the underdogs or victims of a massive and unjust assault by a much more powerful military force. I’m not identified with the fundamentalist religious beliefs some of these people probably have, or with all the ways their culture has treated women and LGBTQ people, or with Hamas and what was done on October 7, or with whatever anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews some of these people may have. I’m not identified with any of that, but I’m identified with them as underdogs in a struggle to survive and exist.
The people of Gaza were at that moment evoking in me all my own age-old feelings (from the perspective of being a separate “me”) of helplessness, powerlessness, being treated unjustly, being misunderstood, having no control, being at the mercy of more powerful humans, and so on. (Of course, many other people are identifying with the Israelis, seeing them as the underdogs, and then having very similar feelings to mine, so what matters for this discussion isn’t the specific group being identified with, but this phenomenon of identification itself.)
When I felt into those feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, being treated unjustly, being misunderstood, having no control, being at the mercy of more powerful humans—all the feelings that were detectable under the surface of my indignant anger—what seemed to be at the bottom of them all was a fear of annihilation, of not surviving, not existing, being totally overrun and wiped out. And the question arose:
What if I were to completely give up, surrender, allow myself to be totally destroyed?
To be clear, I’m not proposing that this is how we should respond if we are physically attacked, nor am I suggesting that this is how the Palestinians (or the Israelis) should respond to an attack. A real life and death situation is another matter, at least potentially—although exploring our own reactions may illuminate the folly of what Israel is currently doing, as well as the folly of what Hamas did back on October 7, and it may suggest a radically different possibility. What moves us as individuals is really no different at the bottom-line from what moves empires, nations and dispossessed groups. And as we know, the biggest bully is often someone plagued with a deep sense of inadequacy or a fear of defeat, and bullying the bully rarely dissolves the underlying issues. Fear drives so much of our human behavior, whether we are conscious of it or not.
In my case, right now, I’m not in any physical danger. I’m not on the ground in Gaza. I’m not actually being bombed, shot at or forced to flee my home. I have nothing real to lose by surrendering. It won’t involve giving up my physical life or ceding any actual territory. It’s simply about allowing the false self to be overrun, defeated and annihilated. And when that is allowed, something opens in a very profound way. It turns out to be a huge relief. There is nothing real to be overrun, nothing real that dies, and what remains in the absence of that hypnotic delusion feels totally open and free. Suddenly, I again feel compassion and love for all sides. The upset is totally gone. Peace and equanimity replace upset and agitation.
This palpable shift from identifying as an encapsulated fragment in conflict with other fragments to knowing oneself as the whole and as no-thing at all is often called awakening. But it is rarely a permanent one-time event. It’s true that once it has happened, the delusion of encapsulation is never entirely believable again. But the illusory thought-sense of separation and identity, along with the accompanying feelings of vulnerability and fear of annihilation, tends to reincarnate in human beings. As Karl Renz noted, “There is no happy end. That’s the beauty of it.”
In actuality, wholeness (boundless awareness, unconditional love, unicity) is never really absent. What seems to obscure it doesn’t actually exist. But chances are, this contracted energy and this thought-sense of identity as a fragment will return again and again. After all, in my case, this is not the first time that the illusory separate self or this phenomenon of identity and identification has been noticed and allowed to dissolve.
In the movie of waking life, we often find ourselves identified with a particular group or cause, or with one character in the drama and not with another. When feeling like a separate little “me,” it’s easy to feel attacked or threatened and find ourselves acting defensively or aggressively. We have that sense of self-righteous indignation at something that seems to be outside of us, something that we think is wrong and shouldn’t be happening. This contracted and encapsulated little “me” is inherently insecure and ever in need of approval and defense. This “me” often shows up as a kind of existential “NO!” to something life is presenting.
But this “me” is always only a mirage, and there is the possibility, in any moment when this happens, of tracing it back down to the root, feeling into that sense of separation and vulnerability, and simply letting go, giving up, opening, relaxing. The “me,” which is only a collection of thoughts, memories, mental images, stories and sensations, can’t will this letting go to happen or force itself to relax and dissolve. Relaxing doesn’t happen by resisting tension. It’s more about noticing the tensing up, feeling it, not fighting it—allowing it to undo itself in its own time, rather than trying to forcibly release it through will power and effort. Awareness (unconditional love) is what truly transforms, not resisting, demonizing or forcing.
And it can be discovered that none of this is personal. This identification is something consciousness does by its very nature. It identifies as, and becomes hypnotized by, its own creations. It enjoys its own movies and the momentary suspension of disbelief that makes that possible. And so, although wholeness is never actually absent, it can seem to be obscured or lost. Consciousness is playful. It enjoys movies!
But movies always eventually come to an end. There is a natural waking up from being “lost in thought” that happens by itself. We don’t actually “do” that waking up. The obscuration dissolves when seen for what it is. And after it dissolves, there may be a habitual tendency to take the obscuration personally, to see it as some personal shortcoming or as a sign that, “I am not fully awake yet.” And then there might be more thoughts: “When will my ‘me’ finally be gone forever the way I’m sure Ramana Maharshi’s was?” or “When will I stabilize permanently in being awareness and not a person?” Thoughts like these always refer to the character, the mirage-like “me.” Awareness is never not awake. Awareness is not worried about the movies that come and go in consciousness. Habitual thoughts such as, “I am not fully awake yet,” are just another layer of the same phenomenon, the same misidentification. None of this is personal. The characters don’t wake up from the movie, and the movie is never really a problem, even when it seems to be filled with horror and destruction.
When we stop thinking and grasping and simply allow everything to be just as it is—when we’re simply present here and now as this open spacious aware presence that we truly are—all our problems vanish into thin air. They may not vanish forever after, but they vanish NOW, and Now is actually the only reality there is. If thought starts up again and insists that, “Gaza is still being bombed, so obviously all problems have not disappeared,” notice that this is a thought. However relatively true it may be in terms of everyday relative reality, at this moment, it is a thought. What purpose is it serving? From where is it coming? Who is asking it and why? Will believing this thought actually help to bring peace to Gaza or to our own hearts, and are those actually two separate things or are they one whole happening?
The situations in life that upset us cannot be any different at this moment from exactly how they are, nor can our upset, and none of this ever really holds still in any way that can be pinned down. What upsets us in others or in the world is not actually “out there” separate from us in the way our thinking suggests, for inside and outside are one whole indivisible happening that no one is controlling. And none of it has any actual substance or continuity.
It’s possible to discover that all the players on the ground in Gaza are doing the only possible in each moment, as are we. Our surge of indignation and self-righteous fury is as much a happening of nature as the attacks on Israel, the bombing of Gaza, the eruption of a volcano that destroys homes and kills everything in its path, the giant tornado that flattens whole towns, the predator ripping apart its prey, the wildfires, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, lightning strikes, viruses, epidemics, melting glaciers and everything else that seems to be happening in this movie of waking life.
It is one whole happening, one whole moving picture, and the more closely we look and feel and sense into it, the more we discover it to be infinite and without edges. It never actually resolves into the seemingly solid, persisting, independent, divided up “things” that thoughts and words conjure up. All the apparent things (“Gaza,” “Israel,” “me,” “you,” “the United States,” “Netanyahu,” “Biden,” “October 7,” “September 11,” “January 6,” “Trump,” “Putin,” “Ukraine,” “Russia,” “World War II,” “my awakening,” “my delusion,” and so on) are actually ungraspable, ephemeral movements of energy, inseparable from everything they supposedly are not.
But once we have those labels, these “things” all seem to coalesce (in the imagination) into solid entities and events that can be defined, understood and categorized. In fact, these “things” are always over-simplified conceptual abstractions. They don’t actually exist in the way they seem to exist. The living reality, which can always be explored right here and right now, is not like that at all. It’s not solid and fixed and divided up. It doesn’t hold still. It can’t be pulled apart. It has no inside or outside. It’s constantly changing—dying from moment to moment—gone before it even arrives, perceivable in infinitely different ways. It can’t be captured by any conceptual formulation.
As we hear over and over, the word water is not water; the map is never the territory it describes. This sounds so obvious, but we are so easily swept away by our conceptual ideas. We so easily think that all these word-created things are real and that we know what they are—and what we are—and what should and should not happen. But actually, we don’t know any of this.
When we let go of all our attempts to grasp the ungraspable, to resolve the unresolvable, to control the uncontrollable, to make sense of what is infinitely complex and ever-changing, we find an immense joy and freedom in simply being alive, being no-thing and everything, holding on to nothing at all, not knowing what all this is and not needing to know. There is simply this seamless happening that is as ephemeral and unsubstantial as cloud formations in the sky. Open, spacious, aware presence (which is what every “I” truly is) is being and beholding it all, allowing it all to come and go, including the occasional moments of contraction and misidentification and the feelings of being separate and lost. We (as the little “me”) don’t “do” any of this. It is doing itself. It is doing us. And, of course, there is no “us” and no “it.” It’s like a dream that evaporates upon awakening.
And yet, here it all is, this wild magic show, with its endless mix of light and dark, sadness and joy, forming and unforming, appearing and disappearing, always right here, right now, always just as it is. Try to get hold of how it is, and it has already dissolved into something else. In this evaporating no-thing-ness or indivisible unicity or radiant presence, all our ideas of cause and effect, choice or choicelessness, active or passive, conditioned or free, no longer apply. The attempt to grasp this living reality with thought relaxes. As Zen teacher Steve Hagen puts it: “Are you breathing? Or are you being breathed? You need not answer. There is no essential difference.” This ungraspable no-thing-ness is freedom. It is “the peace that passeth understanding.”
THIS here-now cannot be put into words, and yet words pour out. The words and the thoughts and the maps and the menus and the mental movies and the night dreams and the illusions and delusions of waking life and the apparent mistakes are all included. Nothing is left out. It’s all perfectly just as it is, and it never stays the same for even an instant. In the words of the late Peter Brown, “This, right here, is the breaking wave of this astounding radiance. It is not inert.”
Already it has moved on! And without ever departing from Here-Now!
Enjoy the show!
Happy Solstice, Happy Holydaze, Love and blessings to all….
💝🙏
Awesome, thank you for the reminder that even when I know it’s a movie,🎥 I get sucked back in. It seems like either I am enjoying the dance or I’m complaining about where I am on the Dancefloor or my partner is not dancing properly. It all seems so real at the time! Like you beautifully said, when I go to the root, What is found is the identification with some fragment that I consider real. When seen, the trance is broken for the moment. It’s nice to know that I get second chances, continuously. Much love, Christopher.