It’s raining lightly as I type. Wonderful, delicious sounds. And really, that’s what life is, these ordinary happenings like the sounds of rain pattering on the roof, and these words forming, and the taste of tea, and the beauty of bare, rain-soaked branches, and the mulchy smells of the balmy November air, and maybe also a burning pain somewhere in the body. Just this—this vivid aliveness.
In our mental world, we worry about the meaning or meaninglessness of life, we wonder about our purpose, we judge and evaluate ourselves and compare ourselves to others, we seek escape from the vulnerability and the pain and the heartache that life inevitably brings, and we seek exciting and pleasurable experiences that will thrill us and maybe also enhance our self-image in our own eyes or in the eyes of others. We go on long journeys, sometimes for decades, searching for enlightenment, or the perfect partner, or the perfect place to live, or the perfect career, or the perfect friends.
But meanwhile, here-now we always are, and right here, there is the utter simplicity and wonder of life itself—the sounds of rain, the freshness of the air, the ache of grief, the taste and texture of this moment, just exactly as it is. And it never stays the same, for everything is always changing. The universe literally begins anew in each moment. And really, this moment is all we have. But we so often ignore this vital reality, overlook or dismiss it. We don’t really notice the wonder and the beauty of it, even the wonder and beauty in its sharper, darker, more bitter and challenging forms. We want something else, something bigger and better, more exciting or more pleasurable, or simply different.
As many of you know, I’m working on a fifth book now, a book that explores death and growing old. But it has another aspect now as well, namely the end of my long search for transcendence, and the embrace of groundlessness and not knowing—waking up to the simplicity of being just this moment, exactly as it is. Not knowing what all this is or why it’s happening or what will happen next. Living in groundlessness, rather than desperately trying to find ground in some transcendent metaphysical ideology—e.g., that I am the Ultimate Subject, or that Consciousness is all there is, or that Consciousness precedes the brain and Mind precedes matter, or that awareness is ever-present even after death, or that I am boundless awareness and not a person, or whatever that transcendent ideology might be.
I could always see quite clearly that these were all actually beliefs and not verifiable facts. But sometimes, when self-doubt is a deeply engrained psychological pattern, we override our own intelligence and insight and doubts again and again and swallow what others who seem more enlightened are telling us. And sometimes, even when we tell ourselves (and others) that our search has ended, we are actually still seeking.
Yes, I can feel a sense of boundless awaring presence, the spacious openness of here-now that has no center and no boundaries. I can feel this vast listening silence, and the emptiness at the core of everything. I can see that there is only here-now. When I look, it is obvious that we can never experience anything outside of consciousness, and that every experience is an experience in and of consciousness. But there’s a metaphysical leap, some teachers call it “higher reasoning,” that moves from these direct insights into the metaphysical conclusions I mentioned (e.g., Consciousness is all there is, Consciousness precedes the brain, I am awareness and not a person, and so on).
I can even sense into being the Ultimate Subject, that which remains beyond everything perceivable and conceivable. These were never just intellectual ideas in my head, they were felt experiences, intuitive realities. So, they seemed real. And they were real as experiences. But that’s all they were: sensations, intuitions, experiences. And when mixed together with metaphysical ideas that I was imbibing from the Advaita world, it was easy enough to arrive at the conclusion that I am boundless awareness, infinite consciousness, impersonal presence or the Ultimate Subject beyond all experiences—and it was easy to overlook the fact that I had taken a leap from direct experiencing into metaphysical belief. And I’m not saying any of these beliefs are false, only that they are based on what is actually simply another experience, another sensation, another intuition, another idea. They have, through “higher reasoning,” reached a philosophical conclusion that is in no way verifiable as Ultimate Truth. But we cling to these conclusions in our search to avoid groundlessness, uncertainty, vulnerability, lack of control, and the reality of not knowing. We turn them into Ultimate Truth.
Of course, when I was dispensing this kind of teaching, I would have insisted that it wasn’t “just another experience, another sensation, another intuition or another idea.” I would have insisted that it was That in which all experiences appeared and disappeared. It was the unchanging, ever-present, ground of being. And I could easily experience it that way. After all, everything appears in awareness. It’s truly easy to hypnotize ourselves or to be hypnotized by teachers, and it’s so easy to slide over from direct insight and experiencing into metaphysical conclusions and beliefs. It’s a subtle line we cross, and we don’t always see it, especially when we are surrounded by a whole subculture that is reinforcing the belief system and the assumption that some metaphysical idea is actually Truth.
In such transcendent teachings as Advaita, which come out of Hinduism, one is no longer a mere mortal or a person, no longer a vulnerable body or a vulnerable human mind, but instead, one is boundless awareness, infinite consciousness, the Ultimate Subject, God—unconditioned, indestructible, imperishable, free. Again, I’m not saying this is all untrue. In fact, I feel such teachings do point to certain realities about life—that there is something right here that is open and free and unconditioned, and that the universe (or whatever this is) is infinite and eternal (i.e. here-now), and that we are a momentary expression of something much larger. Death may be the end of “me” and “my story” and my particular movie of waking life—I assume it will be—but it’s not the end of this larger wholeness of which “Joan” is a momentary and ever-changing movement, like a wave on the ocean. The fear of death comes from being exclusively identified as the wave, and imagining the wave to be a solid, fixed, independent, separate thing rather than a flowing movement of the ocean.
But if we go to the opposite extreme and deny the reality and the preciousness of this body-mind-person, this unique and unrepeatable wave that will never happen again in exactly the same way, and if we try to identify exclusively as the whole ocean and not the wave, we miss something very important. We miss the actual living reality of our life—the taste of tea, the sounds of rain, the smell of garbage, a burning pain in the gut, the bright red fire truck streaking past, the joyous companionship of a good friend or a beloved dog and the grief when they die. We miss the actual life of this moment.
Many of us have given up alcohol and drugs only to become spiritual junkies. I’m not saying we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and renounce all of spirituality as worthless. I’m not saying we should give up meditating if we enjoy it, or that we should stop going on silent retreats—I think spending time in silence is beautiful and enlightening and wondrous. I’m not saying we should renounce all teachers and throw away all spiritual books and never use the word “spirituality” again. There is something real in spirituality, at the very heart of it. But what is it? Is it some belief system, some set of answers and explanations for how the universe works, some metaphysical certainty about life that gives us a feeling of security? Is it some transcendent experience where we leave this life of flesh and blood far, far behind?
Or is it the raw, unmediated aliveness of this very moment, just as it is?
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