falling apart

What if we regarded falling apart as part of the plan? Seeing it that way is a major redefinition of what the plan really is, isn't it? It's not your plan anymore, not the plan of an individual self making its way in the world. It's the plan of a universe expressing itself.

In that kind of plan, which is closer to reality, the experience of falling apart is not only normal, but absolutely inevitable. Everything that comes into being falls apart shortly afterwards. I do and you do and everything does that we take to be independent.

The truth is nothing is independent. How could it be? Everything arises from total dependency and returns there, and remains there all along. When something seems to fall apart, it is simply dispensing with the illusion that it was something to begin with.

The same is true when you fall apart. When you fall apart, you are dispensing with the illusory portions of yourself. You are dropping them away. You are letting them go because they don't really work anymore. They have no value and you shed them.

Some people shed them reluctantly and some people don't. Most people do. Most people try to hold on for as long as they can before stepping away from what's familiar and moving into the unknown. It takes significant pain for most of us to surrender.

Why not add some understanding and make the process your friend? Falling apart is an important part of the plan, of life's plan. When it's time to fall apart, it's time to fall apart. Let yourself do it and find out what happens. The results will surprise you.

no solution

There’s no solution. Whenever you have a problem worth having, there’s no solution on the level of the problem. The solution is not a solution at all, not in the way we tend to look for one. It’s more like discovering the problem is irrelevant.

It takes a while for that discovery to come. Before it does, we tend to consider everything else instead. How serious the problem is determines how compulsively we think about it. When you have a big problem, your mind performs acrobatics.

Intense mind activity never arrives at satisfactory answers for a problem worth having, but serves to wear us out until we give up. Once we do, a new intelligence arises from a deeper dimension inside us, not by effort but by total surrender.

Surrender is usually the last thing we do and the one thing that works. We admit we don’t know and permit ourselves to feel more deeply. It is highly common for great waves of difficult emotion to arise at this time, and overpower us.

The important part is to feel them, not to think your way around them anymore, or deny they are happening. The excessive thinking phase is over, giving way to greater honesty about the state of your inner world, the grief in your heart.

Your problem wants you to release that grief through sincere contact with it. That’s what your problem is really about. That’s what makes it worth having. It’s always a masked opportunity to heal and transform. As a problem, it’s irrelevant.

learning stillness

What is stillness? A mind that isn't still is bound to be put off by that question. A mind that isn't still says that asking what stillness is is a big waste of time, because stillness is obvious and there's nothing to say about it. The opposite is true.

Stillness is not obvious, and there's plenty to say about it. Unless we talk about stillness, there's a very strong tendency to annihilate it. Most of our sorrow as a species is the painful result of lapsing into this tendency. Kill stillness, kill ourselves.

That connection exists because stillness is wisdom. If we fail to honor stillness and to make a place for it in our lives, we fail to honor wisdom and our lives lose their place—not only metaphorically, but literally too. Planet earth kicks us out.

As many of us sense, that fate is not far away anymore. It gets closer every day, hastened forward by the frantic pace of consumption, population explosion, and dangerous forms of industrialization. We are begging the question of extinction.

The only genuine antidote is stillness. Unless we slow down, we are going to perish. Other solutions won't work. In fact, anything that keeps us on our current trajectory much longer without bringing stillness into the mix is now equivalent to suicide.

We have to slow down. You have to slow down. I have to slow down. There is nowhere to get to anymore unless we like racing to our death. Will we disregard stillness that much that the world forces it on us forever as a lesson? Let's learn it earlier.

merge with the present

Merge with the present and forget everything else. Become the present so deeply that you no longer think of it as something you inhabit, but rather as yourself. The one who is doing the inhabiting is not the real you. That which is inhabited is.

If you already know what I'm talking about, don't let the following words obscure your sense of it. The following words are meant for the times when you don't know what I'm talking about, or when you want to reawaken to what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is a spiritual realization of the highest order, a state of total surrender to being alive. It puts the emphasis on being, and wipes away everything else, including any thought in your head about who being belongs to or pertains to.

That's how present you can be. You can merge with the present. You can enter the field of being so completely that you realize your true self there, as the field. It's a marvelous thing. All your suffering and problems don't exist there, and can't.

In other words, your suffering and problems don't belong or pertain to you either, not when you permit the word "you" its chief meaning, which is the present. That's who "you" are, and "you" just have to settle back into yourself to remember.

Yes, the illusion of not being present may recur afterwards. Or maybe it won't. In either case you have these words to remind you. They aren't the same thing as remembering for yourself, but actually they are. Whenever you remember, you'll see them that way.

motivation transformation

Let's talk about the transformation of motivation. That phrase is a mouthful, and it's pretty common to choke on it. As our motivations change, there eventually comes a point where they fall apart completely. That's pretty common in spiritual growth.

Why would it be common? If we take a look at what spiritual growth is ultimately about, we begin to appreciate that major loss of motivation in life is a natural stage in the process, and in many ways an intelligent one, requiring time and adjustment.

Our spiritual growth brings false values directly into question. That's its purpose, or how it goes about unfolding it. We get more and more perspective about the things we are after, and one by one the less valuable things drop away, their futility exposed.

Meanwhile, those were also the things motivating most of our actions. When we see they'll never deliver the true happiness we want, which is a spiritual realization best referred to as a blessing, we tend to break down altogether, unable to act.

I consider that outcome a blessing because it signals a period of potential transformation. If we honor it, it will blossom. If we allow it to be true that nothing we used to do or feel motivated by really matters anymore, a secret door opens inside us.

I can't describe what that's like, except to say nothing matters more than finding out. I don't know if you'll believe me, but I mean it: nothing matters more. Your former motivations all died for the sake of clarifying that fact. That's your new motivation.

waking up

The expression "waking up" comes up fairly often in spiritual dialogue, but how often in the literal sense? When I talk about waking up in this essay, I'm referring to that curious period of time when a good or bad night's sleep concludes and your eyes open.

Few people think about how enormous that daily event really is or how much is at stake in every occurrence of it. On the contrary, we tend to take it completely for granted, or brush it under the rug, so to speak, as we maneuver out of bed to start the day.

What a pity! Because spiritual things are taking place there like nowhere else, and a diligent consideration of what they are is likely to teach you more on the spiritual path than a huge stack of soulful books on your night table. Yes, volumes more.

Have you ever considered that while you're asleep, everything you tend to imagine yourself to be is not only completely suspended, but doesn't exist? In sleep, consciousness is free of all your ideas of yourself. You can't even call it yours. Hmmmm...

Then waking up comes along and in rush all those ideas and notions again. Their return takes a split second, if that long. Then it's, "What do I need to get done today?" and "Where do I need to be?" and "What do I want to do?" It's seldom inner silence.

I'm suggesting you pause in the morning when you first wake up and spend several minutes remembering you were absolutely no one until your eyesight intruded. Take that no one intelligence into your day and share its perfect peace. That's waking up.

wanting peace

After enough ups and downs in this world, most spiritual seekers realize they want peace. It's a sensible response to suffering, great or small. But the only way to bring it about is to value peace more than everything else. You can't want anything more.

It's much easier to say you want peace than to mean it. In fact, part of saying it is discovering all the ways you don't mean it. That's what saying it is about. You say you want peace, then you watch all the ways you contradict yourself afterwards.

Keep your eyes open and take stock of your actions. Pay attention to the ones that push peace from your life. Those are the ones with your true values hidden in them. Ask yourself what you valued more than peace to wind up without it.

Sometimes the answer is funny. Sometimes it's daunting. Most of the time it's something you didn't realize you valued at all, certainly not more than peace. Things like anger, or being right, or saving five minutes—to leave more time for peace!

The important thing is seeing what happened. You sacrificed peace for something else, and now you can decide was it worth it? If not, your priorities are clarifying in the direction of peace. You are that much closer to meaning what you say about wanting it.

Once you mean it completely, you won't need to say it anymore. Peace will stay with you, and the one who talked about it will no longer be needed. That voice in you will fade away as one more example of things you once put before peace, and learned not to.

self relocation

I remember when I first understood that the spiritual masters, when they used the word "I", meant something different than I do. That tiny sound, for them, referred to something vast and unknowable, and that's what they took themselves to be.

It was a big event in my mind-made sense of self. A house of cards began to fall. I knew I was making a mistake whenever I used the word "I". I knew that my utterance of it, while useful for regular conversation, was also a lie I blindly believed in.

I began to question it periodically. Am I really this notion of self, that one, the next? Why do I need to assert them if they're really who I am? Doesn't the need to repeatedly assert who I am in one way or another undermine the reliability of it all?

It can be very difficult to explain what goes on when the mind-made sense of self begins giving up the ghost, or what happens after. The most you can tell people is they aren't who they think they are, and what they are is outside all their thinking.

What I like to suggest is a relocation of selfhood. Move your sense of who you are outside your mind and emotions, outside absolutely everything that comes and goes under the influence of change. Watch those things happen from your new location.

The new location is who you are, although it's not a location in the way our minds conceive of one. It's the vast and unknowable field of awareness in which everything happens. That's who you are, the same as all the spiritual masters saying "I".

the word god

The word God has been used a lot, for better and worse. What I'd like to do here is discuss the better use of it, hopefully diminishing the worse use of it along the way. Of course, only you will be able to say in the end how it works best for you and why.

My assertion is that we need the word God (and what it represents) when we are feeling cut off from the source of all life. At those times, perceiving ourselves as a fragment, not the whole, we naturally long for reconnection with the universe at large.

When we use the word God to reconnect in this manner, to overcome the separation we feel and melt back into an awareness of ultimate unity, the word serves us very nicely—so nicely, in fact, as to render itself mute, at least for a short period.

That is, when the word really works, we no longer need it for a while. When the word really works, we slip back into a sense of ourself as inextricably interwoven with the totality, and the self who longed for reunion, having gotten it, evaporates.

That's why the word becomes mute. There is no one left to say it when the saying of it works out well. When the saying of it works out poorly, there is not only someone left to say it again, but often an army of someones who claim ownership of it.

Ownership of the word God is, in my opinion, the worse use of it. But it's very hard to talk about these things without risking hypocrisy, which is how sacred sounds make a monkey of their organ grinder. My God is your God is all God is muteness.

put learning first

Today I'll talk about putting the cart before the horse. I'm applying that metaphor to the topic of spiritual development. If you put things before your spiritual development, or always put it last, you'll have a horse with a cart in front of it, and nothing will roll.

There comes a time when your spiritual development matters more than the other demands in your life, and needs direct attention from you right away. That time will come more than once, especially if you neglect to honor it well, a habit you can work on.

The most pertinent time for giving prolonged attention to your spiritual development is right on the heels of a lapse into your least skillful behavior. Say, for example, a thick cloud of emotional negativity swallowed you whole. As it lifts, do immediate inner work.

Put the horse before the cart. Give yourself the attention you deserve by assimilating whatever just happened into your deepening wisdom about life, no matter how long it takes, several hours or a series of days. Stick with the process until you feel it conclude.

Until it does, sustain your devotion to inner inquiry. Read books that resonate with you on the subject of spirituality. Watch and revisit videos of your favorite teachers. Find the truth of their words in the specific examples of your latest challenging experiences.

Only then will you harvest those experiences for the spiritual growth that transforms suffering into intelligence. Only then will your life afterwards operate in a more harmonious way, which is reason in itself to cooperate, right? Stop the cart and feed the horse.

no one's life

Many of the great spiritual teachers awakened in a radical fashion. By radical I mean their state of consciousness expanded all at once, as if going supernova. Afterwards their former sense of self was wiped away, transcended. They were reborn into wider awareness.

This same process occurs in all of us. We all wake up to wider awareness again and again in our lives. Life permits no other outcome. As long as we believe we are somehow separate from life, we are due for more awakening to rid us of our latest illusions.

In most people, the process of awakening is ongoing, seldom completing itself in one fell swoop. It can take many years for the process to unfold, progressively deepening its claims against our false impressions of who we are, aside from being Life itself.

Meanwhile, in almost every case, mine or yours or humanity's collectively, the process is also reiterative, requiring us to work through the same issues and hang-ups over and over, in ever-tightening cycles, before the core of the matter sufficiently clarifies.

Until it does, our freedom won't last, but periodically gives way to surprising relapses into attitudes and behaviors we believed we outgrew. Then it's time to stand up, dust ourselves off, and see where the next omitted nuance of our spiritual work is.

Eventually the repetition of this pattern yields the essential insight that all problems are the same problem, repeating in various forms. There is only one problem and everyone has it. Everyone's life is about seeing through it for good. No one's life is apart from all life.