What Really Works

Psychotherapy, Spirituality and Beyond

The essence [of “the work of this moment"] is to come upon a profound kind of listening and openness that reveals the intense power and momentum of our human conditioning, how we are caught up and attached to ideas about ourselves and each other, how violently we defend these ideas—not just individually but collectively—and how this defense keeps us isolated from each other and from ourselves. The other aspect of this listening is to come upon an inner/outer silence—stillness—spaciousness in which there is no sense of separation or limitation, outside or inside.

—Toni Packer

The Heart of What Is

When we are silent and still, we come in touch with an energetic vibrancy that we might call formless presence, pure consciousness or spirit. No words can capture it. This aware, awake presence feels open, vast, spacious, uncontained, boundless, limitless, empty and immensely alive. It is empty of any place to land or anything to grab onto. It cannot be objectified. It isn’t a “thing” among other things, or an idea to believe in.

It’s our most primal and undoubtable experience, the knowingness of being, the impersonal I AM, and even more subtle and closer than that, it is the eye (I) that cannot see itself, the primordial ground of being, the germinal darkness that remains even in deep sleep, prior to any experience at all, prior even to the first sense of impersonal presence. It is that out of which the formed world emerges and into which it withdraws, the no-thing-ness appearing as everything.

This entire phenomenal world is a movement of that radiant darkness, a waving of the great formless ocean. Go deep into any form—a sound, something seen, a tactile or somatic sensation, a taste, a fragrance—and you find the whole universe, infinity, no-thing-ness, emptiness—just as if you go deep into any wave, you find the entire ocean and nothing solid. Each wave includes and is a movement of the whole ocean. The ocean can’t be pulled apart or grasped and held onto. Life is like this. Consciousness is like this. We can only be this. And we already are this. This is all there is.

But consciousness can be lost in its own creations, in the very convincing illusion of separate, persisting, independent forms, and in the illusion of being a separate self existing in an apparently outside world. Consciousness can be mesmerized by the narratives and dramas in the ever-changing movies of waking and dreaming life. These movies can be appreciated if we know they are fictions, but when we take them too seriously and become identified as the main character, suffering follows. What to do?

There are many things that can happen, many ways of exploring that can expose the illusion of being a separate, encapsulated self and that can wake consciousness up to the realization of boundless wholeness, and there are many explorations that can prepare the ground for such discoveries. There are many paths, methods and healing modalities, all of them movements of the whole universe.

These include myriad forms of psychotherapy, recovery programs, various kinds of somatic awareness work, the Enneagram, The Work of Byron Katie, various forms of meditation, prayer, contemplative inquiry, and many forms of religion or spirituality. These activities can help to expose and see through the stories and beliefs that are often running our lives and creating suffering. They can open us to more subtle and nuanced dimensions of being. They can transform our experience of life in myriad ways.

Ultimately, they can expose the illusory nature of the “me” and put an end to the endlessly disappointing search for something bigger, better and different in a never-arriving imagined future. They can reveal that what we most deeply long for is right here, closer than close, if only we know how to open to it and dissolve into it. They can show us that the sacred is everywhere—that it is present not only in the temple or out in nature, but also in the traffic jam, the city streets, the bathroom, the war zone or in whatever location or situation shows up. Of course, these paths and methods can sometimes also inadvertently mislead or confuse us or create a false dependency on something outside of ourselves. So part of what the best teachers, teachings, methods, practices and paths must do is to pull the rug out from under themselves again and again.

Psychotherapy and Spirituality: the same or different?

Therapy and spirituality share a process of becoming aware of our thoughts and habitual storylines about ourselves, the world, life and other people. This is a process of coming to recognize that these thoughts are not objective reports on reality, but simply habitual patterns and beliefs arising from our conditioning. In the light of awareness, we begin see through these storylines and no longer believe what they tell us.

Therapy and spirituality also share the development of a capacity to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, to simply be present with them, allowing them to be here without needing to repress, resist or express them—to be with an emotional itch without scratching it, allowing it to dissolve naturally. Therapy and spirituality can help us notice the thoughts and sensations that together make up emotions, enabling us to observe the thoughts without believing them and to simply be present with the sensations without turning to addictive escapes.

Both therapy and spirituality endeavor to see through and deconstruct negative self-images and self-defeating storylines, but nondual spirituality takes a further step and deconstructs the positive self-images and storylines as well. It reveals the illusory nature of the one who is seemingly at the center of these storylines. Meditation is in part about seeing through the meditator.

As spirituality deconstructs the apparently separate “me” who seems to be at the center of our experience, it simultaneously invites the discovery of wholeness, formlessness, no-thing-ness, the bigger context, the boundless and seamless aware presence within which the movie of waking life occurs and the unresolvable formlessness of every apparent form. Waking up means coming to know ourselves as the whole ocean. That doesn’t mean we have to deny being a wave, but we see that the wave is an ever-changing movement, not a solid or persisting thing, and that it is never other than or apart from the whole ocean. Realizing this ends the psychological fear of death.

What should you do?

Maybe simply see what you are doing! Stop, look and listen. Explore what is. See how this living reality actually is, instead of how you think it is. And as I always say, go with whatever works, whatever sets you free. That can change over time, and what helps one person may not help another. You have to find what works for you in THIS moment here and now. And don’t worry about whether it might be “dualistic” or “not advanced enough.” Everything has its time and place. And it’s all happening by itself! It’s all an impersonal movement of the whole. The individual, apparently autonomous author-doer is an illusion. Nothing can ever be other than exactly how it is. You truly can’t get it wrong. The problem is always imaginary.

What actually liberates us

Thinking about all this, analyzing it, understanding it conceptually, reading about it, philosophizing about it can perhaps be helpful. But ultimately, so-called awakening or being free here and now is about going beyond thought to the living actuality itself. Diving deep into the living actuality—into presence itself, both the formless presence that we discover in stillness and silence and the apparently formed presence that is appearing everywhere. Being just this moment, not thinking about it. Of course, this living actuality includes thinking and imagining as well, but it isn’t lost anymore in the stories and beliefs or identified as the main character. It is free of all that.

There’s a wonderful statement in Vedanta that says:

The world is illusory;
Brahman alone is real;
Brahman is the world.

The world we think is “out there” as a bunch of separate, substantial, observer-independent, persisting things is an illusion. That world is not real. But even a dream or an illusion has some reality. The reality is the presence of it. Presence, boundless wholeness, no-thing-ness, nonseparation, nonsubstantiality, emptiness—this alone is real. The apparently formed world is nothing other than unicity appearing as multiplicity, formlessness appearing as form, and when recognized as such, it is real. The mountains we see in a dream have no independent existence outside the dream; their reality is the dreaming consciousness. This is equally true of the mountains we see in waking life. And it’s true of the character we seem to be.

We are both a particular momentary waving of the ocean and the eternal, timeless, ever-present, all-inclusive whole ocean. And the wave is never a solid, separate thing apart from the ocean—that is an illusion. When we believe that illusion, death can seem terrifying. It’s like the fear people used to have that if they sailed out to sea they’d fall off the edge of the earth. It’s a fear based on a misunderstanding of reality.

No metaphor or analogy is ever perfect. The word is not the thing to which it points. The map is not the territory it helps us to navigate. So the invitation in spirituality is always to put the book down and dive deeply into the territory. To be still. To stop, look and listen. To be this vast listening presence without borders or seams.

Not someday. Not forever after. Not “me” being “that.” But right here, right now, noticing that this is how it always already is. Discovering that HERE, there is no me, no division, nowhere else to go, nothing to become, nothing to grasp. There is simply this one bottomless moment, appearing in infinitely varied, ever-changing ways, while being at the core utterly still, silent and immovable, never departing from the immediacy of this timeless, eternal, infinite present-ness Here and Now. THIS, this living reality, is the True Teacher which all other teachers are pointing to and inviting us to discover.

Don’t settle for the words or the concepts.

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

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Love to all…