In stillness, in silence, when there is simple open presence—spacious and free, empty of thoughts and ideas, although those may arise and pass through like clouds, but when they have no sticking power, no solidity, no weight, when there is only this vast emptiness, brimming with aliveness, this feels like the deepest truth. It feels like love, wholeness, the groundless ground of being.
When there is caught-up-ness in the movie of waking life—the dramas, personal or global; the ideas, beliefs and stories; the emotional turbulence; when the thought-sense that I am a character in this movie is believed—life then feels off kilter in some way—divided, conflicted, oppositional, upsetting, agitated, compulsive, obsessive, humorless, painful. It feels like being trapped in a tight place, separate and alone.
Where do we find peace?
The universe does not appear to be non-violent in the way that we sometimes imagine peace to be. There is tremendous energetic activity. Suns explode, asteroids crash into planets, volcanoes erupt, animals rip each other apart for food and fight over territory and mates. The sex between many life forms often appears to be non-consensual, and the males don’t always get the best deal either, as when the female praying mantis bites off the male’s head after they mate.
Throughout human history, there have been wars, genocides, torture, land theft, empires rising and falling, tyrants coming and going, and horrific acts of human cruelty. I live on land stolen from the Native Americans. What we see in the news is nothing new, not fundamentally, although specific situations are never actually the same way from one instant to the next, and our technological capacity for destruction and our now global world are new, but the basic patterns we see playing out are as old as the hills.
What has struck me so deeply over this past month of reading and listening to so many different reports and commentaries about what is happening in Israel and Gaza is how many widely different narratives, speculations, interpretations, assumptions and assertions are floating around, how attached we can all become to our views, and how we identify with different groups and then take it all very personally. I’ve been struck by how easy it is for me to be emotionally triggered, by how my views can shift, by how much we just don't know, by how easily misinformation can spread, and how stories can get (intentionally or unintentionally) revised and embellished as they are told and re-told. It’s easy to be a back-seat driver full of ideas about what world leaders and countries should do, but the situation is enormously complex and there really don’t seem to be any easy answers.
It can be seen that, in a very real sense, the actuality itself is utterly ungraspable and completely unpindownable. As I often say, what appears is like ever-changing kaleidoscopic Rorschach blots that the pattern-seeking mind is always reifying and interpreting—labeling them, putting them into categories, weaving narratives around them—and then presto, the apparently solid and fractured world appears.
But how solid and divided up is it really?
It certainly seems divided! The thinking mind operates in dualities: us and them, right and wrong, good guys and bad guys. We habitually want to blame someone or something for whatever seems to be wrong or unjust: Hamas, Israel, the US, Netanyahu, Putin, Biden, Trump, communism, capitalism, Islamic extremism, the right, the left, the global elite, the rich, the poor, the Jews, the Arabs, the gays, the blacks, the whites, ourselves, our parents, the neighbor who ran off with our wife, the drunk driver who killed our dog, the boss or the employee who is driving us crazy. But if we look deeply at our own minds, if we listen to our own thoughts, we begin to realize that we contain it all. And we realize that no one is really in control, that we are all aspects of one whole, each of us moving in the only ways possible from moment to moment.
Everything is indivisible, interdependent, inseparable. There are no actual boundaries in this infinitely varied seamlessness. What appears to be disorder and conflict at one level of reality may be in perfect order and harmony from a larger (or closer) perspective. Everything that appears, the ever-changing sensations, thoughts and energies, never really hold still, solidify or persist as any graspable form.
What seems to persist in some solid on-going way are the abstract reifications that the thinking mind creates. “My back pain” seems to persist, for example, or “the bombing of Gaza,” or “the state of Israel” — these can all seem to persist, and in a certain sense they do. But looking more closely, these are all abstractions or reifications in which the here-now reality of constantly changing, infinitely complex, utterly unresolvable moment-to-moment appearances and energies are clumped together into abstract, over-simplified, seemingly fixed and stable categories that are conceptually carved out of the whole and reified into something apparently persisting and discrete like the separate pieces of a puzzle. But in life itself, nothing can really be pulled out of the whole in the way that puzzle pieces can be removed from the puzzle, and no-thing actually persists for even an instant.
Of course, such over-simplified categorizations are an undeniable aspect of how this living reality shows up, important for our everyday functioning, so I’m not suggesting we could or should eliminate or deny any of these. But our suffering—the mental overlay on top of pain and painful circumstances—is always in the abstractions, not in the living actuality. So if our focus shifts from those abstractions to the immediacy of this present moment, this present experiencing, this alive presence—it can be very freeing. There will still be pain and painful situations, but they will be experienced very differently and we won’t suffer over them in the same way.
And when the focus of our attention shifts from the dramas in the movie of waking life to the open space, the stillness, the freedom, the love that is right here—the very heart of this awaring presence that we most fundamentally are, the common factor in every different experience—when that happens, everything changes in our experience. And because aware presence is boundless and undivided, and we are not actually separate from, or other than, the people in faraway places, my sense is that this love and openness permeates everywhere and affects the whole world.
Aspiring to be rooted in this deeper truth is a wonderful intention, but it’s important to recognize that everything belongs, that everything is included. Even the times of apparent caught-up-ness and emotional upheaval are in some way part of the whole dance and cannot be otherwise in the moment when they appear. All of our inner weather is no more personal or controllable than the outside weather. It simply is as it is, and however it appears, that appearance is only another momentary Rorschach blot in the ever-changing display that never departs from the aware presence here-now.
The truth is, we don’t know what all this is. Words pour out onto the empty screen from I know not where. Is there anything here in control of what I write, or whether I find myself watching another political podcast or sitting down in meditation? Can I choose to shift the focus of my attention? Sometimes it seems like I can, whenever the desire and intention to do so is followed by actually doing so. But why doesn’t that always work? Perhaps because our desires, intentions and abilities arise unbidden from we know not where.
In a sense, this question of choice and responsibility always depends on what we mean by the word “I”. The character in the movie, which is a mental image and a bunch of thoughts, has no power at all. The power is in awareness—the whole—the intelligence-energy of life itself. In knowingly being that, ever-more possibilities open up, and there is more responsibility (response-ability, the ability to respond from wholeness). But when the illusion of being the separate little me seems believable, that me is nothing but a movement of habit and conditioning. If we believe that this illusory me has free will, we are easily prone to guilt, blame and the thirst for vengeance. But if we pick up the opposite belief, we may be ignoring our true responsibility. [See my substack articles on Free Will (Oct 29) and The Power that Knows the Way (Aug 27) for more on all that.]
In this dance between engaging with the world and opening into the vastness of unconditional love, a poem by Issa comes to mind, one that has always touched me very deeply. I believe he wrote it after the death of his young daughter:
This dew drop world
is a dew drop world,
and yet…
We can discover and realize (make real) the most transcendent truth—that vast openness and unconditional love—and we can realize that everything perceivable and conceivable is all ungraspable, evaporating drops of dew, but still, we are human. Our hearts break, our bodies are vulnerable. We love our children, our aging parents, our siblings, our friends, our beloved animal companions, even the people we see on the News in faraway places. We care. Or sometimes we don’t. But if we’re sensitive, we often do. Maybe all we can offer one another is our shared humanity with all its uncertainty and heartache, and our ability—from time to time—through grace, to touch into the timeless deeper dimension in which there is no separation whatsoever.
That dimension is never actually absent—it’s always here-now, present in and as every scene in the movie of waking life. But when the focus is on the storylines and the drama, when we are identified as the main character in the movie, we can then seemingly lose touch with wholeness and become hypnotized by the thought-sense of separation. The more we see how this happens, and the more we are able to let go and relax into simple presence, the more readily available this openness and freedom seems to become.
The pathless path really does seem to come down to simply being alive. Feeling the present moment in all its dimensions, from the cosmic to the mundane, both boundless and embodied. Breathing. Sensing. Awaring. Here-Now. Not knowing. Open. Being what we cannot not be—this one bottomless present moment, just as it is.
Love to all and may there be peace in our hearts if not always in the world…
Love the piece, thank you. I see the word "stollen" (rather than stolen) and smiled - that's the Christmas bread ;-) xoxoxo
That is a wonderful first paragraph. I’ve read it over and over. You’ve made my day!