ungraspable groundlessness

a multi-dimensional extravaganza

A multi-dimensional extravaganza

All we ever know directly is this here-now aware presence / present experiencing. We don’t really know what this is, why it’s here, where it came from or where it’s going. We have many ideas about all of this—scientific, metaphysical, psychological, political—but all of these ideas can be doubted, and all of them are subject to change, and when we look closely, the apparently real “things” to which they all refer can never actually be pinned down or pulled out of the whole.

Both science and spirituality have been obsessed, each in their own way, with getting to the bottom of things, finding the fundamental ground and nailing down exactly what it is, as if it were something that could be found and nailed down. But as an old Zen koan says in response to a monk searching for this fundamental ground, “It just moved!”

My sense is that this living actuality is bottomless, that there is no end to the unfolding revelations and discoveries, and that there is great freedom in not needing to land anywhere or grasp anything or nail down what this is. Maybe the security and certainty that we long for isn’t about getting hold of some unchanging Ultimate Reality, some final bottom to everything. Maybe it’s simply about being fully alive right here as this one bottomless moment, just as it is.

I’ve noticed, as you probably have too, that experience shows up in a multitude of different dimensions and can be seen from infinitely different perspectives or viewpoints. There is ordinary, everyday life with all its varied facets and dimensions. There are transcendental spiritual experiences of all kinds, psychic experiences, near death experiences, out of body experiences, drug experiences, psychotic experiences, experiences that come from brain injuries and neurological disorders and illnesses. There is the sense of being a particular person with a history and a lifespan, and there is the sense of being the timeless, impersonal, boundless aware presence being and beholding it all. There is waking life, dreaming and deep sleep. There are all the billions of different human viewing points, and the viewing points of all the other living beings. All of these infinitely diverse viewing points are continuously popping in and out of existence, dying and being born. It’s definitely a shape-shifting multi-dimensional extravaganza that never stays the same while never departing from the ever-present immediacy of Here-Now.

This one bottomless moment includes the whole universe, and yet it’s always just this. This cup of coffee, this taste of tea, this cool breeze touching the skin, this news report on the latest war, this pain in our knee, this train of thought passing through. Each moment is absolutely unique and unrepeatable, and yet the whole is fully present at every point. The ocean contains all the waves, and every wave contains the whole ocean. Nothing is really separate from everything else. It all belongs. It can’t be pulled apart.

To survive, we need to map our experience out in manageable ways. So thought labels, divides, categorizes, interprets and seemingly concretizes this seamless, boundless, centerless, inconceivable, multidimensional, uncontrollable flow of experience, creating the illusion of an apparently separate autonomous controller self encapsulated inside a body and living in an apparently solid and substantial outside world made up of many separate, persisting, observer-independent forms. This phantom self is supposedly authoring our thoughts, making our choices and navigating our life. But none of this holds up to scrutiny.

Every form dissolves as soon as it appears. Exprerience doesn’t hold still. There is no boundary between inside and outside. A person is like a waving of the ocean—an ever-changing movement inseparable from the whole. Our attention moves rapidly and uncontrollably from one thing to another, and however hard we work at controlling and taming it, that endeavor never quite works. It slips away again and again.

Our urges, desires, impulses, intentions, interests, preferences, abilities, talents, thoughts and actions emerge unbidden. Nothing could be other than exactly how it is in this moment. Seeing this is the freedom to be exactly as we are and for everything to be just as it is. It is freedom from blame and guilt and from the belief that anything should or could be different in this moment from exactly how it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t discover ways of healing and transforming ourselves and the world—we can. But it’s all a movement of the whole.

There is no finish-line in life, no formula, no method, nowhere to go, only this ever-fresh aliveness, just as it is.

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Stories and the inconceivable actuality

This is a selection from my second book, AWAKE IN THE HEARTLAND, from a chapter called “Is this Advaita, Psychology, Memoir, Zen, Post-Spiritual Inquiry, or What?”:

What if we drop all the labels, categories and frames that we use to contain our experience? What if we’re just here? Right now. What is this?

That’s what this book is about.

It’s not about finding an answer. It’s about that aliveness that can’t be objectified or grasped.

The mind is always looking for something else. It wants a winning strategy, future results, transformation, improvement. This book is not about that. It won’t get you anywhere other than where you are now. This is the miracle beyond belief…

Like all of us, I’ve assimilated a host of theories and explanations. I’ve been witness to an amazing proliferation of stories and narratives, movies within movies appearing and disappearing in dream-like fashion: the story of my life, the story of the world, the story of the universe, the story of your life according to you, the story of your life according to me, the Hindu story, the Buddhist story, the Judeo-Christian story, the multitude of scientific stories, the American story, the anti-American story, the modern story, the postmodernist stories.

A story is a way of seeing, a way of understanding, and for a moment, the fabrication appears solid and believable. Our story changes as the perspective changes. We look at life through a Freudian lens, a feminist lens, a Marxist lens, a Zen lens. With each new lens, the story gets re-framed, re-interpreted, re-visioned, re-invented and re-organized, and means something slightly or entirely different than it did before.

Even the way the so-called “bare facts” are reified from an infinite sea of utterly undivided, ever-pulsating, sensation and vibration, in other words, the way some thing is made up out of no-thing at all, is already a huge spin… The brain selects and sorts unfathomable chaos into seemingly meaningful categories and creates an apparently coherent narrative that is further modified by the distortions of memory and changed every time it passes from one person to the next. It is no longer any secret that what we think of as the factual and true story of our life, or the factual and true history of the world, is nothing but a very partial abstraction of something that never really happened at all. On some level, every twenty-first century person knows this. It’s there in the new physics, in postmodern literature, in the cultural mirrors all around us. And yet, on a gut level, the deep-seated belief in the reality of the illusion persists. It is, after all, a very convincing illusion. Even the notion that there is any such thing as “twenty-first century people” who “have” this illusion is all part of the illusion! The whole thing is made up out of thin air. You, me, the world, the twenty-first century… look closely, and you’ll find no-thing at all.

Stories, mythologies, novels, plays, operas, movies, television programs, dreams, daydreams and fantasies are all an expression of the mysterious emptiness from which they spring and into which they disappear. Beautiful, horrific, fabulous, astonishing, breath-taking creations, they serve a function every bit as vital to the dream of human life as the spider’s web is to the spider. They are totally real in a sense, and yet, they are phantasms, protean apparitions forever revising and erasing themselves. Like Rorschach inkblots, they become anything and everything. Like colored shapes in a kaleidoscope, they tumble endlessly into something new. Like the mirage in the desert, they vanish if you approach and try to catch them.

Stories make apparent sense out of what would otherwise be incomprehensible. They give meaning and importance to the fiction of myself and all that I identify with: my family, my civilization, my ethnic group, my political leanings, my sexual orientation, my subculture, my gender, my generation. Stories are entertaining. God apparently enjoys drama, play, hide and seek, lost and found.

Sometimes a story helps to expose and dissolve limitations; sometimes it creates and reinforces them. Stories can lull us to sleep or wake us up, reveal truth or conceal it. The same story can serve different functions at different moments. It’s a great art to discern when a story is breaking open the heart and waking us up, and when it is lulling us to sleep, perpetuating illusion and generating suffering. Likewise, it is a great art to discern the difference between actuality and concept. The conceptual filters through which we think about everything are so ubiquitous and so seemingly real that it’s easy to mistake them for actuality. No separate, independent, solid thing really exists, except apparently, in the story.

When I look for what I know to be true beyond any doubt, what I come to is presence itself, the simple fact of being here. Everything else is made up… We use words to point to it, but the words have a way of deadening and obscuring what they describe, for they turn the inconceivable and limitless into something conceivable and limited. Listen to the words in this book with your heart. Their intent is to dissolve structures, not to create new ones. They are meant to leave you with the open wonder of not knowing, rather than with a new set of deadening answers.

— from Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is – written in the late 90s and early 2000s, self-published in 2003, published by Non-Duality Press in 2006, then by New Harbinger, and now by New Sarum.

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This hopelessly imperfect (and utterly perfect) character:

Here I am, more than two decades after writing that book, still at times gripped by conditioned habit patterns, deficiency stories, uncertainties and curative fantasies—still at times attempting in subtle ways to manipulate the mind and get something better or deeper to happen. Maybe some of you might be wondering how someone who saw all this so clearly back in the 90s could still at times fall into delusion decades later. It turns out I addressed this very question decades ago in that same book, Awake in the Heartland:

Joan, the apparent author of this book, is a character more or less like you. She has ups and downs, good days and bad ones, strengths and weaknesses. She’s nobody special except in the sense that everyone is somebody special. We humans have a strong desire to put spiritual teachers up on pedestals and imagine that they are beyond neurosis, beyond confusion, beyond doubt, beyond anger, beyond petty personal concerns, beyond flattery and insult, and basically beyond being ordinary human beings. We love to believe in the Mythology of Perfect People. It’s comforting and inspiring to the ego…

As far as I’m concerned, real spirituality… has nothing to do with being a perfect person or having everything neatly resolved. It isn’t about arriving anywhere, other than exactly where you are now…

[Ed: But in spite of seeing all this so clearly, old conditionings and habit patterns could still capture the attention, and questions could still arise in the mind:]

Was I awake? Was this it? Or was there some kind of even bigger awakening that I hadn’t had yet, a total and irrevocable shift like some teachers seemed to be describing, an event that turned you inside out forever, after which all identification with the bodymind, all sense of personal doership, and all belief in the illusory me were completely and permanently erased, never to return? I was still seduced and mesmerized by the promise that maybe there was more to be had, a bigger Big Bang for me. I discovered that it’s never too late to climb back onto the treadmill of samsara and go for another ride. I went for many rides…

Somewhere along the line, I remarked to a friend that I couldn’t finish this book yet because the issues involved were still unresolved. My friend questioned why they needed to be resolved. Perhaps what I was writing was not supposed to be “the final answer,” but rather, the questioning itself. Perhaps there actually was no answer!

I wanted so much to write a pure book, a book that spoke only the highest truth. But I keep discovering that what people seem to appreciate most in me is my honesty. Being a fucked up mess was beginning to seem like my vocation. Not exactly the one I had been picturing! I had hoped to be an awakened guru. But then, awakening is truly nothing more or less than recognizing God right here in the middle of this actual mess.

— from Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is

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Open-ended conclusion

Indeed, that seems to be our human koan: finding the sacred right here in what often appears to be a mess, a mistake or a total failure.

And it does seem to be my calling to be honest about my actual experience, as best I can be. When I do that, apparent imperfections are revealed, and perhaps in the same alchemical way that the music of the blues transforms suffering into beauty, perhaps something similar happens here, I don’t know. I’m simply doing what life moves me to do. But maybe revealing my imperfections suggests to others that perfection is not the goal and that we’re all okay just as we are. That’s not to deny our natural urge to clarify and heal, or the things we’re moved to do to bring that about, or the possibility of genuine transformation. And it doesn’t mean we don’t call out abusive or harmful behavior and try to stop it. And for me, it doesn’t mean getting stuck in a new identity as a fucked up mess.

But perhaps we no longer have the idea that spirituality is about creating perfect people or bringing forth some imaginary utopia on earth. We’re no longer living for an imagined future or regretting the mistakes of the past, as if we or anyone else could have done better at the time. Instead, we’re focused on the actuality here and now—not all our stories and ideas about it, but the aliveness itself—that which cannot be caught in the net of words.

This spiritual journey I’ve been on in some form for more than seventy years hasn’t turned me into a perfect person who is always happy and kind and never confused. But the good news is that I’m more at peace than ever before with being exactly as I am. It helps greatly that I know from my own direct exploration that all of it is a choiceless movement of the whole, that none of it is personal, even if it sometimes feels as if it is, and that nothing could be other than exactly how it is. Happily, I no longer worry about whether or not I’m “really” awake, nor am I seeking “a total and irrevocable shift.” I know that life includes the light and the dark and that what comes will go. The attention is fickle by nature—it moves around while never departing from here and now—and I’m no longer trying to control it or make it stay put.

I also know from my own direct experience that awareness is the great illuminator and transformer, and that the way out of psychological misery, confusion and distress is right here in simple aware presence. Not resisting, not judging, not analyzing, not seeking, not trying to figure it all out—simply being still right here in the middle of the fire. And I know that this doesn’t always happen. And when it doesn’t, that no longer feels like a personal failure.

I’m also happy to report that I continue to find God (beauty, joy, the sacred, the transcendental, that which is worthy of attention) in the most unlikely places—in the messy work of caring for my ostomy, in the sounds of traffic, in friendly conversations about the weather, in trash blowing across the street, in lizards darting over warm stones outside my window, even in the insane and calamitously mess the world so often seems to be in. I resonate with Lester’s final words (in a voiceover) at the end of the movie American Beauty, after he’s been shot in the head:

I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it's hard to stay mad, when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.

—from American Beauty, screenplay by Alan Ball

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Finally, speaking of movies, I just finished watching the documentary Chimp Empire on Netflix, and it puts many things in perspective. I’ve been feeling like a chimp ever since. I’m moved to type and share and ponder in the same way our primate ancestors are moved to do all the things they do. These articles are a slightly more refined and complex bunch of grunts and sounds and relational moves that life is doing. What we call galaxies, stars, microbes, cells, quarks, lizards, mountains, tornados, hummingbirds and primates are all included in this inconceivable dance without a dancer.

We can invent explanations, but the truth is, we are as clueless as our ancestors. And yet at the same time, we know exactly what to do now. Just like the geese who know exactly how to sit on their eggs and when to migrate and what route to follow and how to find their way home again. This moment is clear and obvious, utterly simple, always reliably doing exactly what it does.

Is my life better now than back when I was a drunk? It certainly involves less suffering, but all of it is seen now as a movement of the whole. It all goes together. It all belongs. None of it is what we think it is. So if my fingerbiting compulsion never completely goes away, if I continue to have occasional depressive moods and sometimes fall into mental confusion to the day I die, all of that it simply the movement of life. I may do my best to change some of it, but I’m okay with it being however it is, including sometimes not feeling okay.

Movement / stillness, changing / unchanging — in the end, no such conceptual distinctions hold up. There is simply this utterly indescribable aliveness, this here-now being, just as it is. We have many words for it like awareness, consciousness and presence, and they can all be useful, but right now, what if we let all the words go along with all our ideas, thoughts and beliefs about what this is and what we are? What if we’re simply here, not knowing what this is or where it’s headed?

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with Love…