What's It All About?

the bottomline

What is spiritually, nonduality, awakening, or whatever this is that I write and talk about actually all about? What’s the bottomline?

Is it simply being fully present right here and now as this one bottomless moment just as it is? Is it finding the sacred everywhere, in everything? Is it realizing the no-thing-ness, the emptiness, the non-substantiality of everything and the dream-like nature of waking life? Is it realizing the indivisible wholeness and inseparability of everything, the way it all goes together and can’t be pulled apart? Is it seeing through the illusion of the separate self and living from that bigger perspective of wholeness or unconditional love, rather than from the illusion of separation? Is it seeing delusion as delusion, without taking it personally, without judgment or defense or despair—simply seeing it clearly, as it happens?

Spirituality is often talked about in terms of awakening, waking up, or being liberated.

Waking up from what? Being liberated from what?

I’d say, from the thought-sense-belief that we are a separate autonomous self, encapsulated inside a body, living in an apparently solid, substantial, observer-independent outside world, and from the unnecessary suffering and confusion brought on by mistaking beliefs, ideas, thoughts and conceptual abstractions for the living reality. Waking up is noticing, awaring, recognizing, seeing and seeing through habitual ways of reacting to pain and painful circumstances that only make them worse—i.e., discovering how we do our suffering. Waking up is also being liberated from the oppressive, guilt-and-blame-inducing illusion of being an autonomous person with free will who is (or should be) in control of our life.

Waking up to what?

I’d say, waking up the no-thing-ness (the non-substantiality, the emptiness, the evanescence) of everything, the way every apparent form appears and disappears instantaneously, so that no persisting thing ever actually forms and everything is self-liberating, vanishing as soon as it appears. Waking up to the undivided wholeness—the non-dual, holographic nature of reality in which the whole is fully present at every point. Recognizing the unpindownable, ungraspable, multi-dimensional nature of present experiencing, and the open, boundless, spacious, all-pervading, luminous awareness being and beholding and illuminating it all. Discovering that there is no boundary between inside and outside, or between awareness and what appears—that nothing can be pulled out of the whole, that it all goes together. Recognizing that all ideas and interpretations of this living reality are partial abstractions that never hold up to careful scrutiny. Recognizing that even the first impersonal sense of aware presence, of being here now, disappears every night in deep sleep along with everything perceivable, conceivable and experienceable. The presence that remains is subtler than space—the eye that cannot see itself, the zero on which all other numbers depend. There is no bottom to this one bottomless moment (Here-Now), there is no ground to be found, only the freedom of groundlessness.

Waking up is the freedom to be as we are and for everything to be as it is—including our urges and attempts to change it. It is the freedom of unconditional love—accepting everything and clinging to nothing. It is the freedom of realizing that no-thing ever actually happens, that there is no one apart from the whole to fail or succeed, to be enlightened or deluded, and that in the deepest sense, nothing matters.

Waking up is always NOW—not yesterday or tomorrow or forever after. In fact, there is only Now. Anything else is a story.

Waking up is coming home to the place we have actually never left but may not have noticed because attention is so habitually absorbed in the me-story and the world of apparent forms and narratives. Waking up is also the realization that even that absorption in the me-story is itself an impersonal appearance like the weather, empty of substance or meaning.

Waking up is not about belief, and it’s not about getting the right idea or the right metaphysical framework or the right words. It’s not about getting something or going somewhere. It’s discovering what we actually cannot not be, this one bottomless moment that no words or concepts can capture.

Waking up is a letting go, a relaxing or a dissolving—not an attainment or an acquisition—but paradoxically, it includes contraction and tensing up, stormy weather and calm weather, sunny days and cloudy ones. It’s not personal in any way. It includes the person, but is beyond the person—it includes and transcends the ordinary view of everyday life—it sees the person as a dream-like character in a fictional story, a waving of the ocean (the totality) that is nothing other than the ocean moving. This ever-present home (this ocean) is no distance away from you (the wave). It is not complicated or difficult. It is actually effortless simplicity itself. It’s what already IS. Just this!

How do we wake up? What to do?

This is where it gets very paradoxical—but only if we think about it. There is already only this infinite, eternal, indivisible Here-Now from which nothing stands apart to get it or not get it, and there is no “it” to get. There is no way, and no separate one, to “do” waking up. But, in the story put together by memory and thinking, there are apparent shifts in perspective (for no one) and an apparent journey over time (for an apparent someone). And there are things that can happen or apparently be done.

There is no single way to discover all the things I’ve mentioned above. Some people report enormous shifts, sometimes out of the blue, while for others (like myself) the imaginary journey seems to unfold more gradually and even imperceptibly and often involves many practices and exposure to many teachers and teachings. Everyone must discover their own path, and the great paradox is that the path isn’t going somewhere else—it’s waking up to here and now, where we always already are—and the one who seems to be on the path is a movement of the whole, not a separate, autonomous entity, and the whole apparent journey over time only exists in memory and imagination. It’s a story, an imagination—it may be relatively true, but ultimately, it’s only a story. Now is timeless. Waking up is now. And nothing graspable actually happens!

Whether life moves you to take up meditation or attend talks with Tony Parsons and Jim Newman, whether it moves you to get drunk at the local bar or travel the world working tirelessly for peace and justice, whether you are moved to bite your nails or read the scriptures, you will inevitably be moved to do something in each moment. As someone wisely said, we’re always practicing something, whether it’s meditation, compulsive shopping or obsessive thinking.

There are many arguments over whether spiritual practice is a help or a hindrance. In my view, these arguments are all equally right and equally wrong. In my experience, there are many practices that may be helpful in revealing the delusions that seemingly get in the way of feeling at home, and there are practices that may open us to the felt-sense of aware presence, to the ever-present Here-Now, to boundlessness and seamlessness, to the impermanence of all experiences, and so on. But a potential pitfall in any kind of intentional practice is that it can inadvertently reinforce both the dualistic illusion of a separate, deficient “me” endowed with free will who is on its way to a better place, and the whole idea that something (more, better, different) needs to happen. Eventually, the best practices will reveal and dissolve all such delusions.

The single practice I find most helpful—and I prefer to call it an exploration rather than a practice—is simply taking time as often as it invites you to be silent and to do nothing other than simply being. You can be sitting down or lying down or walking, but if you’re walking, just walk (no phone, no music, no conversation, etc). And if you’re sitting, just sit. Give open attention to present experiencing, just as it is, however it is—hearing, seeing, feeling, sensing, awaring, breathing.

Thoughts will come and go, and when you notice the attention is absorbed in a train of thought, simply notice it and gently return to sensory experiencing. There’s no need to judge the thinking or evaluate how well or how poorly you’re doing. That’s all just more thinking, and this isn’t about success or failure or you.

You can even explore thought itself. Rather than logging in to the content of it—the storylines, the headlines, the assertions it makes, you might instead explore thought as an energetic, sensory, felt experience—what exactly is it? As pure experience, a thought seems to be a very quick, ungraspable flash, utterly intangible and invisible, gone in an instant, and yet it magically unfolds a whole apparently solid world in the imagination.

Engage in this exploration of present experiencing much in the way babies and toddlers explore themselves and the world around them—as a form of curiosity and play, not as a heavy-handed, result-oriented, effortful task. There’s no way to do this wrong. Have fun. Play with it. Enjoy.

Let all the words and concepts and explanations go. Let go of all the efforts to concentrate, control, focus or manipulate the attention and all the efforts to get somewhere or have some particular experience. Instead, give open, spacious attention to the utter simplicity of direct present moment experiencing. Simply this, just as it is. Seeking nothing, resisting nothing.

We can still tell our story about our spiritual journey—nothing wrong with that—I’ve written about mine in several of my books—but we know it’s a fiction, a kind of dream. There has never been anything other than ungraspable, unavoidable, ever-changing, ever-present, here-now-being. This is it.

My first Zen teacher told me all of this, maybe in different words, but it seemingly took many decades, many other teachers, many retreats, many hours of meditation, and many life experiences to fully absorb and grok it, and even now, delusion still shows up and insight continues to deepen. It’s a never-ending awakening.

And yet, it was perfectly and fully present back when I heard my first Zen teacher say, “This is it,” and I immediately had the thought, “This can’t be it.” Even that was it. Even being a drunk in the years before that was fully this here-now-being, empty of any substantial or persisting reality, inseparable from the whole universe. Everything is included. Everything belongs. Everything is equally no-thing at all. It’s all equally real and equally dream-like.

We can’t land on it is or it isn’t, on real or unreal, on time or timelessness, on relative boundaries or absolute boundlessness, on practice or no practice, on something to do or nothing to do, on person or no person, on this way or that way or no way—and the only paradox in all such apparent irreconcilables is in thinking about them and trying to map it all out conceptually. Life cannot be mapped. Not really. Not ever. It cannot be figured out. And yet, here it is—absolutely unavoidably and vividly present. That’s the beauty and the freedom and the joy and the wonder that is right here, right now!

The spring flowers, the autumn moon;
Summer breezes, winter snow.
If useless things do not clutter your mind,
You have the best days of your life.

—from the Gateless Gate, Case No. 19, Zen Master Nansen’s Ordinary Mind Is the Way

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Love to all…