The willingness to be incurable

and the beauty of imperfection

“What I’m talking about is the courage to give up, to die, to let go… giving up the idea of perfection, how I should be. A lot of people who come and listen to me are now giving up vegetarianism, and putting on weight, and dying of heart failure. But I’m saying that’s okay… You can’t not be in grace. Everything about you is totally absolutely perfectly appropriate. All the things you think are wrong with you are absolutely right. God wants to be neurotic. That’s part of the game of manifestation. The knobbly bits we think we have are beautiful and unique.”

—Tony Parsons, with characteristic humor, from a talk I heard many years ago

[For those unfamiliar with Tony Parsons, he is an iconoclastic radical nondualist in the UK, not to be confused with Toni Packer, my now deceased friend and main teacher to whom I often refer. Meeting and being with Tony Parsons in the early 2000s was very liberating for me. I loved his passion, his irreverent humor, the warmth and juiciness of his expression, his deconstruction of anything we try to grasp, and his emphasis on the indivisible immediacy of what is. I still have great fondness and appreciation for him, even though he and I don’t see eye to eye on everything. I resonate deeply with his kind of uncompromising, absolute, radical expression, but unlike Tony, I don’t see it as The One and Only True Nonduality.]

Responding to a comment on my last Substack article (“Being Free”), I wrote:

I wasn’t exactly saying there is no cure for suffering. But paradoxically, the cure seems to arise in the willingness to be completely incurable. And that willingness to be completely incurable is an immediate surrender or letting go. It doesn’t mean not getting help if we are experiencing addiction, panic attacks, serious depression, or any other problem. And it doesn’t mean abandoning our spiritual quest from a place of discouragement or resignation, having decided it’s all bullshit. And, of course, many forms of suffering can also be reduced or ended through psychotherapy and many other approaches, as I have experienced. But again, it seems to ultimately boil down to being okay with how we are. Perfectionism and idealism are suffering-inducing thought-patterns.

Years ago, in my late teens and early twenties, I nearly died from alcohol and drug abuse. In 1973, I found myself sobering up with a wonderful therapist at a publicly funded community mental health center in San Francisco that served LGBT people. I saw my therapist once or twice a week (at no charge) for the better part of a year. My life changed dramatically. Indeed, there was a cure and it worked. Was this a choice I made? Did it resolve all my problem? Had my life of drinking and drugging been a huge mistake? Would it have been better if all that had never happened?

My therapist was a brilliant young medical doctor only a year older than I was. She used a mix of gestalt therapy, transactional analysis, feminist therapy, and intuition. At the same time that she was working at the community mental health center, she was also running a program for pregnant heroin addicts at San Francisco General Hospital, and working part-time as a doctor in both a women’s prison and a women’s health clinic.

She approached addiction through the model of choice. In her view, I had made an unconscious choice to kill myself, which I was slowly doing with alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and reckless living, and once I understood that choice and how I came to it, I could (consciously) make a different choice. As our therapy revealed, I was also using alcohol to overcome fear, so that I could do things I didn’t believe I’d be able to do sober (e.g., writing, dancing, initiating an intimate relationship, being sexual, speaking my truth and saying what I really meant without censoring myself, etc). As my therapist saw it, the power was in me (or more accurately, I’d say, in awareness), not in the substance. She didn’t believe, as AA did, that I was powerless over drinking or that alcoholism was a permanent condition or identity.

I met this therapist seemingly completely by chance—I’d gone to the women’s clinic that day for something else. I had no idea she worked there, but I’d heard about her from my former junky-prostitute lover who had been in prison. When I realized it was the doctor I’d heard about, I spontaneously told her right then and there that I wanted to sober up. I’d had the impulse and intention to sober up several times before this, but it had never worked. Why did it work this time?

I could say it was because I’d finally hit bottom, and because I met this brilliant lesbian therapist with whom I totally hit it off, and whom I could see for almost a year at no charge. I could say it was because I really did want to live, and because I had loving, supportive parents. I could say it was because it was a time in San Francisco when women’s clinics, bookstores and coffee houses were just starting to emerge, enabling many lesbians like myself to leave the gay bars behind—not to mention the existence of the community mental health center where I sobered up. It was a perfect confluence of favorable events and circumstances. And all of that is certainly true as far as it goes. But in the end, that’s all a story that carves out, abstracts and reifies bits and pieces from the infinitely complex and seamless flow of life. It over-simplifies the ungraspable aliveness and fits it all into a number of neat and seemingly coherent cause-and-effect narrative threads.

Even though it was a recovery model based on choice and free will, I’d say that every moment of it happened choicelessly, in the only way possible. Understanding the illusory nature of free will and of the “me” who seems to have it doesn’t mean apparent choices and decisions will no longer happen. They will, because that’s how life functions or appears. We have no choice but to act at times as this character and to seemingly make choices. But in reality, as we can discover by giving open attention to experiencing itself, the whole show is an indivisible, seamless happening in which no-thing ever actually forms in any persisting way, and in which no-thing can be pulled out of the whole. The apparent person is like a waving of the ocean—thorough-going flux, empty of independent existence, inseparable from the whole ocean. (For more on free will, see my Substack article “Free Will” from October 29, 2023).

As a drunk, I did many things that were harmful to myself and other people. I was often violent. I hurt people. I had black-outs. I ended up in jails, hospitals, foreign countries and in bed with strangers with no idea how I got there. My parents went through immense emotional pain, not hearing from me for months at a time, never knowing if I was dead or alive or if I’d ever sober up or even survive. I could easily have died many times. I’m infinitely grateful that I sobered up. But in all honesty, I don’t feel that my life as a drunk was in any way less perfect than my life now. It had its beauty. It took me to places I would never have gone sober. It gave me compassion, insight and wisdom in ways I doubt I would have gotten any other way.

As I see it, my life as a raging drunk was as much an expression of wild nature as a hurricane, an erupting volcano, a tsunami, an earthquake, or a wildfire. It was a crucial part of my life journey. Without it, I’d be a completely different person. I can say the same for the pre-natal amputation of my right hand and the recent cancer that has left me with an ostomy bag attached to my belly. If we were choosing our lives, these are the kinds of things we’d all choose to leave out, and yet, they are vital parts of the whole fabric, and in some ways, they are often our greatest gifts. This appearance can only show up in contrasts and polarities. Would we really want a life of only sunny days and happy moments? Probably not, any more than we’d want to see a movie that had only that. And in this movie of waking life that turns on every morning, how real are the appearances? What is real right here, right now? How real are you? What is real about you and what isn’t?

In these last almost-two-months since October 7, I’ve read and heard more different perspectives on Israel-Palestine than I can count. The more I learn about what’s going on there right now, not to mention historically, the less certain I am about any of it. I see a mix of truth and misinformation on all sides. Some of the misinformation is deliberate propaganda, some is the fog of war, and some is the rumor, exaggeration and distortion that inevitably tends to happen as stories spread. As we watch the News or read history books, events all seems very substantial and nailed down. But every moment of this living reality instantly vanishes into thin air, and everyone in these events or watching them from afar is seeing a different movie. Which version is real? Has anything solid or substantial ever actually happened, or is it all as ephemeral as clouds, smoke or music?

There is really nothing solid to grasp. We could see it all as energetic movement, like ocean currents and waves crashing together—indivisible unicity unstoppably doing what it does, utterly unpindownable. We could realize that it is all happening choicelessly—every action, every reaction, every protest, every counter-protest, every different contradictory narrative—all of an unfathomable whole. And this is true not only of Israel-Palestine, of course, but of everything in world history and current events and in our personal lives and histories. The past is gone, and there’s nothing here now except this instantaneous, ephemeral appearing/disappearing.

This whole nondual, spiritual, being awake deal is really very, very simple. Very immediate. It boils down to the fact that there is always just this. This one bottomless moment, ever-changing and ever-present. It is nothing more or less than the sound of the vacuum cleaner, the chirping of a bird, the sound of an airplane passing overhead, the taste of coffee, the mulchy smells of fallen leaves, the thin skin of ice on the pond, the afternoon light dancing on the wall, the poop sliding into my ostomy bag, the sudden pain in my knee, these little black shapes we call letters and words tumbling out of nowhere onto the screen and turning into meaning in all the different ways that unfolds in each reader—all of it empty of substance, continuity and independent existence—an inseparable whole that cannot be grasped by any conceptual formulation—a unicity from which nothing stands apart. It’s just this, the utter simplicity of being alive. And it’s incurable. It needs no cure. It’s perfect just as it is.

And that perfection includes all the apparent cures—the psychotherapy, the recovery programs, the yoga classes, the cancer surgeries, the radiation and chemotherapy, the meditation retreats—it includes our longing for wholeness and relief and all the myriad paths that take us Home to the placeless place where we always already are—ALL of it is included. And so is the drunk passed out in the gutter, the addict shooting up and ODing, Joan still compulsively biting her fingers at age 75, George Floyd dying on the streets of Minneapolis, the October 7 killings in Israel, the carpet bombing of Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the holocaust, the politicians we hate, the changing climate, the air pollution—that’s all here, too. It all goes together in some unfathomable way. Without the war in Vietnam, we would not have had Thich Nhat Hanh and everything he brought forth. It can’t be pulled apart. Everything belongs, everything is included. And none of it is what we think it is. The more closely we look, the more we find only unresolvability and ungraspable aliveness, each instant disappearing before it even arrives, like snowflakes in a fire.

In the willingness to be just as we are, which is always changing and always right here-now, there is peace and freedom. Not the freedom to do as we please, and not the peace that is the opposite of war, but “the peace that passeth understanding,” the peace that includes everything, and the freedom for everything to be just as it is, which is never the same way twice. In this utter simplicity of being, all is well, even when it seems otherwise. We appreciate the wonder that is everywhere, the way everything is God (the Beloved, the Infinite Wholeness, the no-thing-ness) speaking.

And since I started this with Tony Parsons, perhaps I’ll end with another favorite quote from him:

“There’s no destiny, there’s no God, there’s no plan, there’s no script, there’s nowhere to go because there is only timeless being... and it is alive and fleshy and sexy and juicy and immediately this.”

I was going to end there, but a friend just sent me this beautiful article by a Sufi teacher, The Breath of the Merciful, Pir Elias: The Mysticism of Music, and I paused to read it, and I loved it so much that I thought I’d share it here as well. Enjoy!

In (and as) this wildly unpredictable life, may we all enjoy the dance of inhaling and exhaling, the play of relative and absolute, wholeness and particularity, form and emptiness—and may we value our beautiful imperfections and the apparent imperfections of the world and everyone else as well. May we see the Beloved everywhere, in everything, and perhaps most importantly (and most challenging of all), in ourselves.

with Love to all…