The Spiritual Search

on giving up and not giving up

In the world of nondual spirituality, we hear repeatedly that, “There is nowhere to go and nothing to find.” One popular contemporary guru was famous for saying, “Call off the search.” I often speak about “not knowing” or “beginner’s mind,” or “just this, as it is.” A famous Zen koan tells us that, “ordinary mind is the way.” I have a chapter in one of my books called “It’s hopeless,” and my last book is subtitled “the end of self-improvement.”

Are all these different expressions meant to suggest that ignorance is bliss, that all spiritual exploration is a waste of time, that enlightenment (or awakening or liberation) is a myth, that the best we can hope for is being a miserable jerk and not caring about it, that it is pointless to have aspirations, that love is no better than hate, that nothing matters, that there’s no meaningful difference between Hitler and Buddha because “it’s all one” or “it’s all just a dream”? And what exactly is meant by “ordinary mind” or “just this”?

Nonduality is full of paradoxes, yes/no, it is and it isn’t, saying things and then erasing or contradicting them because no way of conceptualizing this is ever right and real freedom is the absence of fixation—not holding to any views. Nondual pointers are thus always tentative approximations that can be easily misheard or misinterpreted. And of course, there are many versions of nonduality, and different teachers and traditions approach it in ways that can seem (or even be) irreconcilable. Nonduality can get very subtle and nuanced and can sometimes feel very threatening. It’s easy to miss the mark in this line of work, and I have no doubt that I have missed it many times (and may even do so in this article).

Of course, it’s easy to think or say that, “It is impossible to miss the mark,” or that, “There is no mark and no one to miss it,” and that may indeed be true—but these kinds of assertions can be nothing more than vapid nondual slogans springing from a comforting new belief system, and in that context, they aren’t true at all. “You’re good with words,” Toni Packer once said to me, “but are you really here, really seeing? That’s the question!” That was a question to live with, I realized. The same words can be true in one moment and false in another depending on where they are coming from and the context in which they are being used.

I have the sense that spiritual exploration and discovery, in the best sense, is actually one of the most highly evolved human activities—it moves beyond the known and beyond the dream of consensus reality. Yes, it can also be a wild goose chase or a seductive opiate, it can sink into all the horrors of fundamentalist religion or the worst kinds of magical thinking, so the spiritual impulse can certainly go wildly astray. And yes, seeking can become a kind of addictive compulsion in which we never actually arrive—possibly one of the most common pitfalls on the path. And after years of trying and seemingly not getting the imagined results, in sheer frustration and exhaustion, many people throw in the towel and conclude that spirituality is a worthless load of crap. “Life is a bitch and then you die,” becomes their new philosophy.

But in my experience, there is indeed something to be recognized, realized (made real), embodied and lived, something deeply freeing and profoundly enjoyable. It’s nothing that isn’t here now, but it is often overlooked and ignored.

Although this boundless immediacy and aliveness is never actually absent, fully waking up to it, for most of us anyway, is a never-ending process (that always happens now) of seeing through the thoughts, stories and beliefs that seemingly obscure it. And simultaneously, it is a gradual present moment relaxing of the self-contraction in all its forms (mental-emotional-somatic-energetic), the contraction that makes us feel and believe that we are separate and encapsulated. All of that is, in one sense, the work of a lifetime, and yet, it can only ever be realized Now, in this moment. And it doesn’t promise a life of perpetual bliss—in fact, we become more sensitive, not less so. We have less and less certainty about our ideas, not more and more. There is a growing willingness to live in the openness of not knowing, to hold on to nothing. But this openness is not a state of doubt and confusion. In fact, it feels deeply grounded and free.

Some such process of exploration and discovery, as I prefer to call the spiritual search, is generally essential, because in the beginning, we’re not even aware of our thoughts and beliefs or the contracted energies in the bodymind, and we’re not noticing the boundless aware presence that is right here or the impermanence and emptiness of all apparent forms. We live mostly in our heads, mistaking our thoughts for who we are, and we search for ever bigger and better experiences, ignoring the common factor in every different experience. We feel totally identified as a separate, encapsulated self, and we think we have time to get to someplace better—hopefully to a new, improved me who is impervious to pain. It takes time to see through all this, although in another sense, it takes no time at all. Seeing is immediate.

I remember hearing Zen stories and pointers early on and finding them totally mystifying while also having a deep intuitive sense that they were true. I knew in some part of myself exactly what was being pointed out, but in trying to grasp it with the mind, it all seemed quite obscure. So the years of being on meditation retreats, hearing talks, attending satsangs, reading books, working with teachers, watching the mind, sensing and feeling into the body, and so on were all absolutely necessary in my case. Some people don’t seem to need all the things I needed—we’re all unique.

Some people say that identification as a separate self and all sense of being a person has disappeared permanently for them—that this me-identity, and the smog of emotion-thought and contracted energies at the root of it, all fell away completely at some point in time and never came back. I can’t make that claim. In my experience, sometimes the smog still shows up. Something triggers me or pushes a certain button, and I feel angry or insulted, fearful or threatened or hurt or whatever it might be. There is a visceral sense of contracting back down into this tight little seemingly encapsulated me, and this “me” now feels in conflict with, and separate from, something or someone else. I may then behave in defensive or aggressive ways. Yes, it’s only a movement of energy, and it’s not really personal, it’s only passing weather, nothing substantial, and the stories that provoke and sustain it are never entirely believable anymore, but still, in the moment it is happening, it can feel quite real, and my behavior is often hurtful to myself or someone else.

Will this eventually stop happening and never come back? I don’t know. I do know that chasing something that others claim has happened for them is a good way to remain contracted and identified as the little me and to feel deficient and separate. And my own sense is that even after the pathless path has passed through the gateless gate of awakening, exploration and discovery never truly end—there is no finish-line. And there is no such thing as an awakened person (or a deluded one). Both ideas are delusions that conceptually freeze and box up what is actually moving and impossible to separate out or grasp. There’s only this undivided happening doing what it does, vanishing as soon as it appears. And the only real finish-line is NOW. Waking up only happens now, in this one bottomless moment, which is all there ever really is. Whether some awakening or opening was here yesterday or will last forever is all thought, memory and imagination—the stuff of dreams.

Gradually, on the pathless path, it is seen more and more clearly how we avoid simply being here, and how we fall instead into mental confusion and suffering. It becomes ever-more obvious that what is sought can only be realized NOW, in this moment, and that searching for it somewhere else, in the imagined future, is a form of avoidance or postponement. Result-oriented seeking is seen ever more clearly as a habitual way of continuing to pick up and believe the story that, “This isn’t it,” that “I’m not there yet,” that “Something (more, better, different) needs to happen.” It’s a way of continuing to identify as that mirage-like separate “me” at the center of all such stories, the one who seems to be lost and deficient and never quite good enough. In reflecting back on it, awakening may appear to have been a long process over many decades, but the seeing, the waking up, and the abiding is aways only NOW, timeless and immediate.

Eventually, it is clear that boundless aware presence (Here-Now) is never actually absent, that what comes and goes is the smog, the confusion, the doubt, the me-story, the delusion. And however many times that shows up, even when it feels personal, it never really is, because that apparent owner of experience is a kind of mirage, and the happening itself is empty of any substance. In my view, we are all inseparable movements of a seamless evolving whole, and each of us is dealing with a unique set of challenges. The apparent mistakes, failures and set-backs are a vital part of the journey and are often the source of our deepest insights. Everything is grace when we see it as grace. So, as I wrote about in my last Substack article, comparing ourselves to others is sheer folly and a form of suffering.

And let’s be very clear here—at least in my experience, seeing through the false self and realizing boundless presence doesn’t mean we lose all functional sense of being a person, or that there are no longer the tendencies and patterns that we call a personality, or that we may not still have issues that are better addressed by psychotherapy or medical intervention than by spirituality. We don’t need to stop being a wave to know ourselves as the ocean. From the inside, there may simply be transparent empty space with no center and no periphery, moving as it does, but from the outside, we are showing up as a unique individual, and paradoxically, when we no longer feel like a somebody, we can move much more freely and authentically as the unique waving of the ocean that we are.

In one sense, everything is this undivided wholeness, even the smog, and nothing can be pulled apart from everything else, and in that way, it all belongs, and none of it is really solid or substantial or better or worse than anything else. But in another very important sense, delusion is not clarity, and in everyday life, the difference matters greatly. The ability to discern this difference is part of what this whole happening is doing! To take the example I often use, I would not say that Hitler and what he did was an expression of unconditional love or enlightened being. If we think of Buddha and Hitler as different waves on the ocean of boundless being, both are equally movements of the ocean, both equally water. But the difference is, Buddha knows that, while Hitler is caught in the delusion of being an independent autonomous wave, separate from the ocean and from the other waves. This difference results in very different life experiences and very different actions.

We all contain both possibilities in every moment. The spiritual path is about discovering how we fall into delusion and how we open into presence. Being awake is seeing as Buddha sees, seeing from wholeness, and that way of seeing and being is unconditional love. That means there is deep insight into the whole picture, and there is compassion for the suffering of both victims and perpetrators, seeing how we all contain the seeds of both, and recognizing that, “There but for the grace of God go I.” It’s easy enough to get that intellectually, but often profoundly challenging to truly realize and live it. To quote Zen teacher Joan Sutherland:

Everything comes from the same dark, everything is filled with the same light. Which isn’t to say that everything is completed just yet; there is still more horror and viciousness than it’s possible almost to bear. But aren’t those the very things most in need of inclusion in this agonizingly slow, grievously uneven awakening?

The pathless path can indeed seem to be agonizingly slow and grievously uneven. So I encourage us all not to give up in frustration, but to give up in a much deeper sense—to let go of the thought-story, when we can, and to relax, when we can, into the simplicity of being here, present and aware, boundless and whole—to let go of trying to figure it all out mentally. And to forgive ourselves (and others) when we can’t do any of this. And really, “we” are never doing any of it; it is doing (and undoing) us. Freedom resides not in getting something, but in letting go of everything, not once-and-for-all, but right now.

there comes a time
when you have to let go
all the words
all the teaching
and trust the infinite

—Billy Doyle, from The Mirage of Separation

That doesn’t mean we can’t ever listen to or work with another teacher or read another book. Sometimes reading or working with a teacher or listening to a talk can open things up. But we grow increasingly able to discern when this is helpful and when it’s a form of avoidance or postponement—the kind of addictive seeking that never actually arrives. At some point, we do know quite well from our own direct experience where peace, happiness, equanimity, freedom and joy are actually found and what kinds of activity drive them away. But that doesn’t mean we are always instantly willing or able to “give up the search” and let go. For most of us, there is a recurring fear of letting go, even when we know from experience that it’s nothing to fear—so there is a holding back at times, and there can be a powerful momentum to the habit patterns that are deeply engrained in the bodymind.

My deepest aspiration is to embody and live from presence, from love, from wonder and openness, and to be true to what has been recognized. As a person, I often fall short, but I have an intuitive trust or faith in the wholeness of being, in presence or awareness (I even call it God sometimes). In moments of doubt or upset, that faith can grow momentarily dim, and old addictive patterns of fear and avoidance can sometimes take over the bodymind like a virus. It happens. The Catholic monk Brother David Steindl-Rast wrote that, “Going forward in faith is not a train ride [where we just need to board, and then it will bring us to our destination]; it’s more like walking on water.” 

When I was in the hospital with cancer five years ago, I had a conversation with one of the nurses about dealing with pain. She was a Catholic, and we expressed our spiritual insights in different language, but we met in the heart, and what she said helped me. As I wrote in my last book, I told her I feared the pain that would come with the radiation treatments. She told me the way through pain is to keep your focus on Jesus. “That’s where Peter went wrong,” she told me, “on the sea, when he was walking on the water, he took his eyes off Jesus and then he began to sink. You have to keep your attention on Jesus.” I remembered that in the story, Peter had been distracted by the ferocity of the wind and had become afraid and filled with doubt and had lost faith. In my mind, I silently translated “Jesus” into my own language and understanding as Presence, Awareness, Here-Now, God—and “the wind” as the ever-changing play of thoughts, emotions, circumstances, and that doubting mind that feels separate from life and therefore endangered, the mind that loses faith—not faith in some external thing or some belief system (some golden chain, as the Buddhists call it), but faith in what is actually trustworthy—that open, spacious unconditioned aware presence Here-Now. I told her I agreed, that was the key, staying focused on Jesus, although not always easy. She nodded. “Not always easy, but that is the way.”

So don’t let language stand in the way of true hearing. And don’t mistake belief for faith, or ideology for the presence that is right here, right now. Abide in not knowing, in open being, in the ever-present NOW, in just this – the aliveness of this one bottomless moment, just as it is. This living actuality can’t be pinned down by words and concepts. And yet here it is, plain as day. Actually, it is unavoidable, and somehow, it all does belong, even the darkest parts.

Love to all of you, my companions on the pathless path to Now-Here, the placeless place where we always already are.

---

A personal note:

I’ll be offline at times in the next few weeks because I’ll be replacing my computer and then hopefully taking some time to be on a solitary retreat at home. So if I don’t always respond promptly to comments, questions or emails, or if my Substack is silent, that’s why.

---