"talking spirit", inquiries by graham

falling apart

2008-04-09T09:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-06T17:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-05T12:53:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-02T17:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-02T15:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-02T14:51:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T22:05:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-31T20:23:00.000-07:00

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.

making transitions

2007-12-11T01:05:00.000-08:00

We all know the only constant thing in life is change. But what does that mean? It means the best skill to have is a knack for transitions. Why? Because transitions are occurring every second, and never stop. Nothing is the same from one moment to the next.

That's a very big statement. Nothing is the same from one moment to the next. Nothing. If we look for an exception to this rule, we don't find one directly. The only thing we find is more things that are changing. But looking is brilliant for making that clear.

The clearer it is, the better we are at making transitions. They become second nature. We expect them all the time. We expect them right now. Our openness to them has a samurai's clarity. It is not a question of when, but a pledge of whenever.

Why not make one yourself? Why not open to change as deeply and daringly as you can? You don't need to wreak havoc in the name of it. You simply sit back and get it that change is every step. That way when it comes, you step right along with it.

The alternative is less agreeable. It's the heartache that follows when we push change away. We can learn to recognize that feeling. We can see for it what it is, which transforms it into gold. Then it's no longer pain, but reliable feedback, asking us to grow.

Are we willing to do it? That willingness is the paramount skill in a world based on change. If you have it, you're happy, and happiness seeks you out. If you lack it, you're not, and you can't catch a break. Why not let these words in and catch one right here?

meditating more

2007-12-10T14:52:00.000-08:00

People tell me all the time about their wish to meditate more. When I ask them why they don't, they don't really know. The only thing they are aware of is that periodically they try to build up a meditation practice, and for some reason it doesn't stick.

I hear this kind of thing often enough that I think it must be pretty common. I also know from my own practice that sticking to meditation on a regular basis can be a big challenge, especially during the periods when we need it the most, and therefore avoid it.

I can think of several times when the last thing I wanted to do was meditate, precisely because it was what I needed most. I was too wound up inside. Sitting still was very painful. It brought stress and emotion to the surface immediately, and I bolted.

In fact, I bolted a moment ago. I wrote the word bolted and flew out the door! I was halfway around the block before I realized what was happening. My writing process was creating the right content for the rest of this inquiry, using me as a prop.

What matters is that I returned, the same thing that matters when you want to meditate more. It's not about the fact that you didn't manage to. You have to let that go. It's about coming back over and over again, and resuming your routine with dignity.

Whenever you do, you deepen your understanding of why practices challenge us. It's one of their functions, and we're lucky to have it. We sit with our pain and complaints and distortions, and learn to free ourselves from them by enduring the storms.

the original unity

2007-12-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

The mind operates by dividing the original unity of the world and interpreting the resulting pieces. That's a big statement for the start of a short inquiry, so I'll ask you to read it a few times, if not right now, then immediately after reaching the end.

Once the mind breaks the original unity of the world into pieces, it begins casting a spell over us, and generally we succumb to it. There's a good chance we are succumbing to it now. It would be perfectly normal, but it may not be what we want most as spiritual beings.

The spell the mind casts is to make us believe in the pieces. There's nothing wrong with creating them. In fact, that's the mind's job. The mind is supposed to operate that way. It is following its nature when it divides things up and tries to gain a sharper view.

The problem is the pieces are not the deepest reality. They are not the deepest truth. The deepest truth is the original unity, a fact we tend to lose sight of as our minds do their job. In most cases we lose sight of it to the point of forgetting it completely.

Once we forget, we fall under the spell. Forgetting the original unity is the spell. Some people call it a trance. It's a restless state that always wants more. It's an emphasis on having more, becoming more, making things different, and overcoming adversity.

Those are natural responses to life when we're under the spell. They are all a masked quest to reconnect with the original unity of all things, to remember it again. But they don't deliver that result, and never can. They perpetuate division by believing in it.

slowing down

2007-12-07T18:16:00.000-08:00

There's only one thing that really helps when we're in trouble. When trouble starts, we tend to speed up. Speeding up is not what helps. But because we're going quickly, the thing that helps is slowing down. Whenever we feel wrong, the best bet is slowing down.

It might feel terrible at first. We might experience pain when we try. But the pain we go through is what we need to experience. The pain is the reason we are going too fast in the first place. We did not want to feel it. So we accelerated inside and ran away for a while.

We might try all sorts of distractions when we get going too fast. We might cling to our gadgets or run all over town. The energy of not wanting to feel something painful is extremely powerful at times and it tends to possess us. We lose ourselves in it and get frantic.

Sometimes we wear ourselves out. That's one method of slowing down. It's the method of no other choice. We simply play out our frenzy and collapse into a slower state. In its extreme forms, this manner of slowing down is called personal crisis or exhaustion.

But other options exist. They depend on our willingness. They depend on an honest assessment of how quickly we're going as we speed up, and a choice to pull out of an impending tailspin before it crashes to the ground. We can make the right response into a practice.

The right response is slowing down. That's the only thing to do. Whenever we notice ourselves in a big hurry, whenever we start down the slippery slope into trouble, we can pause on the inside and let ourselves know better. Slow down right now!

change nothing

2007-12-07T11:58:00.000-08:00

Have you ever heard the following statement? Be the change you want in the world. That's a beautiful sentiment. But if you wrote it down, and I was your editor, I would cut the sentence down to only its first word. I would throw the rest out. Be. Period.

The biggest problem in the world is that everyone wants to change it. Change is fine as a political force, but it gets you into trouble on the spiritual frontier. In your spiritual life you have to learn not to change anything. Total acceptance is a much higher value.

Total acceptance is also very difficult. It's far more difficult than opposing things. There's no outward glory in it. There's no recognition. There is simply the expansion of humility until it sees the big picture and adores it as it is. Oh, there's happiness too.

The surprising result of acceptance of that kind is that nothing changes the world more. In fact, the strangest spiritual insight of all is that nothing else changes the world one iota. Appearances change, but the underlying issues simply resurface in a new form.

World history is one illustration after another of change amounting to bupkus. That's a yiddish word for nothing. What did Einstein say? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? That's a statement about change.

It's also an injunction to try something else. But the something else is paradoxical. It's a major paradigm shift, which is why so few of us commit to it easily or recognize it as an option. Don't change anything. Let it all change itself by not wanting it to change.

surrrender

2007-12-07T11:00:00.000-08:00

A word that comes up a lot in spiritual practice is surrender. There's a reason for that word. It's a word that implies something challenging is required. If it weren't challenging, we would use another word, such as trade, or improve, or evolve, or upgrade.

All those words have a positive connotation more or less. The last three especially. They also pertain to what surrender is about. But surrender is the word that best suits the situation, on account of how hard things can be when we reach the need for change.

The need for change often presents itself in our lives as a catastrophe or crisis. Once we accomplish the change, we can look back and understand the catastrophe was not the need for change after all, but our enormous reluctance to permit it.

It is because we try not to change when change is required of us that we suffer. We want to go on as we are, and often do everything we can to pretend that option is available. We cling to it desperately. We hold on for dear life rather than surrender.

But only surrender will work. That's why it comes up so often in spiritual practice. After we have tried everything else other than surrender, it becomes the last option, the incredibly hard response we were trying to avoid, and we give ourselves to it.

Learn to give yourself to it more quickly. Get familiar with the signs that surrender is knocking on your inner door, and let it in. It is not so bad after all. A breath of fresh air. Why was the air stuffy? Well, long before they die our bodies are rotting corpses.

paradoxes

2007-12-06T17:42:00.000-08:00

If we want more truth in our lives, we have to get accustomed to paradoxes. Increasing our comfort with paradoxes is what truth is all about. As our comfort with paradoxes increases, our contact with truth deepens and extends. We experience freedom.

So what is a paradox exactly? A paradox is a statement that seems to contradict itself, but the apparent contradiction resonates as wisdom. A good example might be how we're never more alone than when we're lost in a crowd. Read it again and consider it.

That statement is a paradox because it operates on two levels at once. The first level is literal, involving crowds and isolation. The literal implication of a crowd is the opposite of being alone. If we're out among thousands, we're not by ourself. Not literally.

But somehow we are. Not literally, but we are. That's the second level of our statement. We are more aware of how alone we are precisely because we shouldn't be alone, and we know it. The literal level says so. But that contradiction is not the main idea.

Are you wondering how this investigation pertains to spirituality? I hope so. Because every time you approach the truth with words, they bend into a paradox, almost as if we are looking through a microscope as delicate crystals form in a fathomless solution.

Here's the crystal of the day. You have a self and you don't. It's a fundamental paradox. On the literal level it's impossible. It's a senseless contradiction. But once you get comfortable with it, it's the way things really are. It's the truth refracted as you.

divine birdsong

2007-11-29T10:49:00.000-08:00

People talk to me a lot about God. I enjoy it immensely. It's much like these writings. An attempt to use words for describing what can't be described in words. The word God is a primary pointer to the absolute openness beyond our minds and within our hearts.

There are many words for this openness. Openness is one of them. So is Spirit, Truth, Reality, the Unknown, the Great Mystery, the Source, the Eternal, the Present, the Eternal Present, the One. These are all names for God. Synonyms for God. Pointers.

Like the word God, they all point beyond the realm of words. The response they want from us is a special form of hearing that carries us into the sacred silence within ourselves that words can never touch. Words can point there, but never substitute for it.

That's the point of the words. The point of the words is to point. If we use them that way, we let go of them promptly when the pointing pans out. As soon as it reconnects us to the divine element within us, the words have done their job to completion. Period.

When people talk to me about God, I know they are seeking to reconnect with a deeper truth about life. I know they are feeling disconnected from that truth and the words they use for it are not as important to them as resuming the experience of it.

I never fixate on what words a person uses. To me every word we have is a beautiful pointer to the same sacredness within us, where words are not the prize. Language is birdsong. It's marvelous to hear it. Every twitter is divine, and points beyond itself.

dropping in

2007-11-27T11:21:00.000-08:00

My friend shared an expression with me the other day. He called it dropping in. The idea of it is that you drop back into the present whenever you happen to notice that life is sweeping you out of it again. Life will sweep you out of the present all the time.

On one hand, that's not true. Life can never sweep you out of the present for real, because the present is all there is. But staying in touch with the present is another story. Overall we tend to drop out of the present. That's why dropping in restores us.

It's something you can do any time. You simply notice, repeatedly, that you aren't as present to your life as you'd like to be. Your thoughts are elsewhere. You're thinking about the past and the future a great deal and the present is fading from awareness.

That's the time to drop in again. Aha! I'm not in touch with the present experience of my life anymore. You might say something like that, and drop back in. It's a form of mindfulness and meditation. It's the opposite of turning into your thought process.

When you do it, when you drop in and become present again, you steal some thunder from the thought process. You tell it who's boss. For that moment of return to the present anyway. It's like saying to your mind that life is outside it and you want life.

You should try it. The next time you notice yourself thinking a lot, drop in again. Let yourself be present instead. Notice the present experience of your life, the life that is going on outside your mind, the life we all share outside all our minds. Drop in.

letting go

2007-11-25T10:34:00.000-08:00

Life is a training ground for how to let go. You may think it's about something else, but after you play those cards out, the thing you always return to is the need to let go, usually of whatever you were trying to get a hold of in the first place.

Let's say you get it. Enjoy it, but try not to get attached. The letting go is only painful if you develop the wrong kind of attachment to what you have. The wrong kind is defined by how unwilling you are to let go when the time comes.

The time always comes for letting go. That's why life is a training ground for it. No other outcome is possible for anything you have because life ends in death, which is itself a very large form of letting go, if you haven't done so already.

Some people have. More people will. They let go of their lives before their bodies force them to by expiring. It's called spiritual death. One simply dies to oneself. That which one can get for one's own sake altogether loses its luster and attraction.

Then you live in a constant state of letting go. You are the equivalent of exhalation. There is not even enough of you left to lament this transformation, and if there is, you simply let go of that sense of yourself also, because you know it isn't real.

The only people who contact reality at its deepest level are the ones who become that reality by letting go of everything else, including themselves. Then they can have anything at all and they don't stick to it. It doesn't stick to them. There's no having.

That reality is where suffering finally ends and lasting happiness and fulfillment become the natural by-product of simply Being. Alignment with that reality is the chief spiritual task of all human life, and it all gets there sooner or later, whether you like it or not.

being enlightened

2007-11-23T10:00:00.001-08:00

The two words in the title go very well together. In some ways, they are the entirety of the teaching about the ultimate truth. We might imagine the space between them, that single press of the space bar, as an equals sign. But remember the blank space too.

The blank space is what the first word is all about. The word Being is all about experiencing ourselves as a blank space, permitting the emptiness aspect of us to have our attention and remain blank for a while, even as things come and go within it. That's Being.

The word Enlightened is what we might call a big word. Big words are wonderful, but we have to sustain our understanding that big words are also only words. What makes a word big is how much potential it contains for evoking the wordless truth of Being.

The point of the big words, and really the point of all words, is to evoke the wordless truth of Being. The point is not to get attached to the words themselves, but to use them as stepping stones into the wordless source from which they arise. Go there.

Stay there. Spend some time there. Experience for yourself how mysterious life is, and how wonderful, when we extend our capacity to remain in the wordless source from which all life arises, and into which all life always returns. We are that source.

That source does not arise or return. That source simply and always is. Everything happens within in, on account of it. I do. You do. The trees do. The wind does. The entire content of our inner life does. Everything comes and goes owing to that source.

It can be very hard to believe, after or amid a lifetime of seeking, that the thing you are looking for is not actually a thing in any way, but the invisible thing-less-ness that gives rise to all the rest. The first taste of it is often surprising and strange.

What makes it strange is how different it is to our regular mode of operation. We tend to go after the truth as something you can really go after and get. Then we discover our ability to be in contact with the truth is about not going after and not getting.

The better we are at not seeking, the more truth we make contact with. The better we are not needing to get anything, the more truth makes contact with us. It's a two- way street, and it merges into nothingness. When we favor nothingness, we shine.

We can all favor nothingness, although our minds become uppity about doing so. We can all see our minds assail us with that reaction and remain in the nothingness anyway, telling ourselves it's only the mind, arising and subsiding in the source of Being.

If we want to be enlightened, that's the way. Devotion to the source of Being rather than anything within in it is the way. Abiding in the source of Being is enlightenment. Everything else is distraction from enlightenment, including our minds.

It's because a major paradigm shift is required that being enlightened is so difficult for many people. They don't have a knack for existing in the new way. They don't have a knack for simply existing. It isn't anyone's fault. It's the way it is.

It's also less of a problem than it seems when it's difficult. Because the fact is a knack for simply existing is everyone's birthright. It's the most natural thing in the world. Far more natural than how we proceed when we sacrifice existing to existing as something.

Existing as something, as anything, is a massive energy drain. It has to be. When the source of Being separates from itself and insists on emphasizing the separation more than the underlying unity, it has to use energy to persist in that orientation over time.

The main reason for that price tag is that the source of Being cannot really separate from itself at all, since everything traces back to it. If everything is really the source underneath, how can the source become other than itself? It can only pretend to.

Pretending to be other than the source of Being is what humans do. They disregard the most important thing: not to. They consider themselves human beings more than they regard themselves as expressions of the source. It happens in a blink.

Being enlightened is about transforming that habit. We admit we operate from that habit. We don't beat ourselves up about it because that just perpetuates the habit. Instead we admit it and rearrange our priorities. We re-emphasize simply Being.

We may need to do it millions of times. We may need to train ourselves to reorient our sense of who we are from endless mental grasping at things to silent residence in simply existing. But we can do it right now. We always do it right now. That's how.

When our emphasis is on simply existing, for that moment we are fully enlightened. Any one of us. If our emphasis remains there, on simply existing, we remain fully enlightened. It's that easy and that straightforward. It's not shamanic art. It's attention span and values.

Why not try it right now? Would you like to be enlightened. Does being enlightened sound worthy of your interest and time? Simply take off the big word enlightened and step through the smaller word being into the wordless space of existing as you are right now.

While you are doing that, and whenever you do that, you are enlightened. If you do that amid your activities in life, you are deeply enlightened. You are enlightened right now. But you have to value it to sustain it. Watch what takes it away until you don't let it anymore. See those things as the same source as you.

dwelling in nothingness

2007-11-21T10:23:00.000-08:00

Ironically, the best way to describe nothingness might be to leave this page blank, but ask those who see it to dwell in its blankness. The pure white space of the page, were it blank, would be an excellent representation of nothingness. Staring at it would be dwelling in it.

This possibility is not altogether different from how zen meditation proceeds. In Zen, unlike many other forms of meditation, we sit in a long hall with our backs to each other, and each of us keeps our eyes open, staring at a bare white wall. Our eyes dwell in nothingness.

Meditations usually last 40 minutes or more. For 40 minutes or more we sit with our eyes dwelling in nothingness, staring at the bare white wall. But not even staring. We loosen the focus of our eyes and let the nothingness remain nothingness, and dwell there.

The reason we value that exercise, and the reason I describe it on this page, is that most of our lives are spent doing the opposite. For the vast majority of our waking lives we tend to fix our eyes on the objects in awareness and dwell in a world defined by them.

A world defined by objects is not a world of nothingness. It's a world of something-ness. All the somethings in that world become the reality of that world. There's nothing wrong with noticing the somethings. Somethings are beautiful. Unless they take over.

When we live in a world dominated by something-based awareness, we give all the somethings an enormous amount of allegiance. We believe in them deeply. We shape our lives in response to them, often in reaction to them. We lose the nothingness part.

That's one reason zen meditation emphasizes nothingness, and asks us to dwell there. It works as a corrective measure against fixation on the objects of awareness. It offers the opportunity to return our attention, over and over, to the space between objects.

Over time we learn to extend our ability to dwell in that space. Objects come and go. Some of them distract us from the nothingness for long periods. Others for short periods. But overall the distracting nature of the object side of awareness diminishes.

We might wonder why this outcome is favorable. We are generally so accustomed to letting the object side of awareness have our attention that we operate from there in regard to the other options, and disparage them as pointless, escapist, or nihilistic.

That's how an awareness trained in objects might dismiss dwelling in nothingness instead. It might morph the word object into an objection. There's an interesting relationship between those words. Their similarity is a revelation about awareness.

Which mode of awareness are we operating in now? Are we objecting? Are we dwelling in an emphasis on the objects of awareness? Are objects such as thoughts and feelings snaring us enough to turn us into their owner? Yes, those are objects too.

The word object in this inquiry has a wider scope now. It refers not only to what you see and what comes in through all your other worldly senses, but also to every thought in your head, every feeling in your psychology, every notion, opinion, belief, objection.

We can let ourselves regard those things, and all things, as objects, and seriously ask ourselves how often we hand ourselves over to them as the essence of who we are, as opposed to being something else that isn't an object at all, as opposed to just being.

That's the big difference between the two modes of awareness. The awareness that puts its emphasis on objects is always becoming someone over them, such as a person, an identity, a solid sense of self. Dwelling in nothingness remains free of that.

It's the freedom side of dwelling in nothingness that gives it value. The reason we are drawn to it, even if habits of knocking it occasionally possess us, is that we yearn for the freedom that comes from dwelling in nothingness. Spiritually, we call it liberation.

Liberation from what? From all the inevitable heartache and unhappiness that arise when we persist in deriving identity among all the somethings in awareness. None of them will hold that tendency well. None will hold it very long. No something can.

The root something is the sense of self we call "I". We are constantly performing upkeep on that little letter if we associate it with each something, with any of the objects of awareness. If we let a thought or feeling or anything amount to "I", it eventually harms us.

Dwelling in nothingness becomes more compelling at that point. The intelligence of it becomes clearer with each disappointment in the world of emphasizing objects. None of them gives us what we want in terms of selfhood, and we let them go easier.

No one can force us to do that. No one wants to. An inquiry like this one is not a coercion, but rather an invitation to reflect on your experiences and hopefully take solace at being recognized for all the times you approach disappointment and feel disoriented by it.

The truth is we are not all the things that pass through awareness. We are the awareness itself, and we purify it greatly by dwelling in nothingness. The more consistently and often we dwell in nothingness regarding identity, the more freedom we move into.

Are we interested in freedom? The degree to which we are will determine to what degree our emphasis shifts from the world of object-based awareness to dwelling in nothingness. The shift occurs naturally. It is the unexpected reward for a sensitive life.

To encourage it, simply dwell in nothingness now, and whenever you can, especially in regard to all the objects, inner and outer, that claim temporary identification from you. Dwell in the nothingness instead. You can dwell there indefinitely. Try it. Try it again.

The more you do, the more freedom you will discover. Freedom is actually your nature. The nothingness is actually the real you, where the little letter "I" most belongs. When you direct it there repeatedly, you will find you never needed it much anyway, and don't.

Dwell in nothingness and ask yourself where that little letter really is. Is there really an "I" in the ways you used to imagine it? Conduct this inquiry for yourself. Where is the "I" you want so badly? Can you find any real evidence of it? Can you admit it's just a mental habit?

When we dwell in nothingness that deeply, we move into our first mature relationship with all the objects of awareness. Sensory experience, feelings, thoughts, all of these inner motions are more beautiful without investing self in them. They become jewels.

Everything we take to be ourselves is purely ornamental. We are not all those things, although we attempt to find ourselves in them with amazing determination. Their startling diversity is alluring, but you begin to enjoy it without becoming someone over any of it.

Now erase this page from your mind. Wipe it utterly clean. Sit before its blankness with your back to all the other readers in the room and loosen the sharp focus of your eyes and your mind. Let all objects go and be free in this life, dwelling in nothingness.

death and the deathless

2007-11-20T16:15:00.000-08:00

We're all going to die. I'm going to die. You're going to die. Everyone you know is going to die. It's a natural process. Death is a natural process. It doesn't favor or discriminate. It follows the inescapable logic of life. That which is born is on its way to death. All of it.

You might consider this news obvious. You might dismiss this news for being obvious in the extreme. You might say well of course to it. Yes, we are all going to die. You might say big deal. You might say you already know. It's not a brilliant insight, right?

But the key word in that response is dismissal. That which is living does not want to accept it will die so it says it already knows. It says the news is not important. It comes up with thousands of reasons why reflecting on it is not worth particular attention, and forgets.

Forgetting death is the only way to proceed with a life that asserts values incongruous to death. Most lives assert values incongruous to death. Most humans lives do. That's why we tend to dismiss death as irrelevant. So we don't have to change our guiding values.

But things die anyway. They die at the end of a human life or while it is proceeding. We've all been there or will. We are trying to hold something lifeless together against impossible odds and one day the odds simply play out and the lifeless thing falls to pieces.

We go into depression about it. We grieve. A terrible sense of loss and uncertainty sets it. The world turns over. We lose something and we malinger in the loss. We make an identity out of losing it. We hold onto what is lost by lamenting it long after it dies.

It's a wonderful thing when we go through this cycle enough times to get used to it, and we will. There's no way around it. So long as we derive our sense of who we are from something that is born, that something is going to die, and we'll die with it. All of it.

But repeated cycles teach us something. They show us the root of the problem. They make us more willing to see the great value in recognizing the death in all things. When we no longer dismiss that obvious quality, we come closer to finding the deathless.

The deathless is that which is never born and therefore never dies. It can't be put into words in any way that makes it obvious. It can't be. Words are born and they die. They come from the mind, which is also born and also dies. The deathless is not there.

The deathless is prior to mind. It is the part of you that mind takes place in. It is the part of you that everything takes place in once you get the hang of it, and live outside your tendency to overlook and dismiss it. That tendency was born and it will die too.

When it does, you begin valuing something more obvious than the death insight was. You move your focus to the obvious thing about yourself that never changes while everything else always does. It becomes a matter of life and death, and you favor life, not death.

That which was never born and never dies is your conscious awareness, your sense of simply being. That part never changes. It is always the same. It is not even individual, but exists on its own in all things, which come and go within it, including you.

I'm not swindling you here. I'm not performing sleight of hand. I'm not playing games with words, but words are games by their nature. What I'm telling you is what you already know if you look into it deeply. You are that which does not change.

Of course, you have to let go of illusions to the contrary to believe me. You want to let go of them, because you want to find what you are. But you also want to hold onto them, because you think they are important. You were trained to. They aren't.

Your name, your beliefs, your opinions, the content of your mind, the sum total of all your life experiences, the endless parade of sensory novelties, all change. The only thing that doesn't is the part in which they occur. The awareness. That's you.

The rest is death. The rest is born and therefore dies. But none of it is you. Like everyone else you may have a tendency to identify yourself with those things, but sufficient attempts at that approach reveal how unsustainable and exhausting it is.

Let yourself rest. Let yourself rest in the truth of your being. Let yourself mean awareness of awareness when you use the word "I". You don't need to chase all the objects in awareness to be yourself. To be yourself, you have to be aware of yourself as awareness.

this is it

2007-11-16T18:25:00.000-08:00

The simplest thing I can do right now is remind everyone this is it. This is it. This is your life. This is all life. This moment occurring right now is it. And always will be. No matter how we convince ourselves otherwise. This moment is it. It's nowhere else.

Take some time to enjoy it with me. Be here with it. Be here with this moment, because this moment is it. This moment is your life. This moment is all life. This moment occurring right now is it. And always will be. This moment outside customary notions of time.

Can you feel that about it? Can you touch this moment's timelessness? Can you settle into this moment so willingly that you completely let go of what lies ahead for a while? Be in this moment with me. This moment is your life. This moment is all life. This is it.

All life happens here in this moment. Want life? This is it. It's nowhere else. Life is here. In this moment. This is it. This is your life and all life. Life is here. Life is now. This moment that is occurring right now is life. And always will be. Nowhere else.

Slow down to the speed of these words. Slow down whenever this moment escapes you. This moment is always here, waiting for you. Life is always here. It isn't anywhere else. The rest is in your head. But your head is here too. Be here with your head.

Your thoughts seldom stay here. You don't have to follow them. You don't have to go elsewhere. Elsewhere is a fantasy. You don't have to go. You can stay in this moment. This moment is it. It doesn't need especial craftiness. Do the next simple thing.

the information age

2007-11-15T14:55:00.000-08:00

The reason we're having an information age is to move beyond information. It may sound paradoxical, but that's the bottom line. Our spiritual evolution currently requires of us that we move beyond our general habit of deriving identity through information.

What does it mean to derive identity through information? It means believing the content of our thoughts is somehow relevant to the core of who or what we are. It's a common belief. The world we live in today is the faithful expression of doggedly persisting in it.

Wars, greed, over-consumption, global climate crisis, the decimation of other species. All these things arise from deriving identity from the content of thinking. From mind-based identity. If we operate from there, the only possible result is the proliferation of problems.

Why is that? Because mind-based identity is not essentially what we are. Because the essence of what we are is not to be found in the mind, and can't be. The mind cannot apprehend it, and tends to dismiss it for that very reason. Don't identify with that tendency.

In fact, don't identify with any of your thoughts. Distrust them all if they want you to identify with them, or form an identity as a result of them. They are only information. They are not the essence of who you are. No information is or can be. Not your essence.

The information age is our attempt to conjure this insight collectively because our survival is at stake if we don't. Without collective comprehension that the essence of ourselves, our nature, is beyond mind and information, extinction is the only outcome for us.

So we inundate ourselves with information. We make an age of it. We create an Information Age. And once we have, once we take our subservience to information to its furthest limit, we begin to rise above information by seeing it's not primary to identity.

This is a normal sequence of events in the process of consciousness expansion. That which is operating unconsciously (in this case information-based identity) directs something to happen (the Information Age) and thereby unexpectedly bursts its own bubble.

That's how consciousness expands. It thinks it's going one way and it is, but by going there completely, the motivation for going there reveals its limitations and loses its influence. The going there stops. It transforms into operating from somewhere else entirely.

With the Information Age we dive headlong into the collection and dissemination of content. We spread it everywhere. We compile it like mad. We think we are primarily interested in the information itself, but discover that why we would be is precisely the problem.

We are malingering in the paradigm of information-based identity. Humans have been stuck there a very long time. But the price of it is high enough now, after industrialization and the spread of technology, that we have to shift paradigms, or perish to keep it.

The purpose of the Information Age is to reveal and eradicate the prevailing inner obstacle to survival for our species. Our next evolutionary leap is spiritual, and involves the transcendence of mind-based informational identity for the sake of all life.

what is happiness

2007-11-13T10:39:00.001-08:00

Believe it or not, even though the thing we want most is happiness, and even though almost all, if not all, our activity in life is about increasing our share of it, the strange fact is we know very little about it. We seldom reflect on it deeply. We seldom have it.

There are many things in life that purport to be happiness, but most of them are something else. We can easily experience ego gratification, pleasure, novelty, joy. But even that last one is not the same as being deeply and lastingly happy, if you want that.

Do you want that? Are you interested in being deeply and lastingly happy? The inquiry into what happiness is begins with that question. It's almost disconcerting how infrequently we ask it point blank of ourselves. Instead we tend to proceed blindly.

Our tendency, it seems to me, is to operate again and again from a conditioned sense of how to reach happiness. A conditioned sense. Meaning: there are ideas about happiness woven into the structure of the world around us and we align with them as our own.

It's perfectly natural to do that. It's a normal wish that maybe we can make it to happiness by following whatever our current inkling happens to be, and to leave it an inkling. We want the inkling to pan out with huge dividends, but in today's world it can't.

I know some of this information sounds harsh. I know a few of these paragraphs may raise some resistance in you that no way, bud, no conditioning here, or that the world doesn't work the way I'm describing, but don't let those objections sour you.

Stick around for a few examples of conditioned approaches to happiness. There are some very basic ones that many people are already seeing through as snake oil. For instance, excessive material wealth, fame, power, the surgical fountain of youth.

All these things will get you something: wealthy, famous, powerful, artificially young. But none of them will bring you deep and lasting happiness. In fact, most of them will disappoint you for not bringing it and then an avalanche of upkeep eats you alive.

If you think there's any real happiness in those starter examples, that's conditioning at work. In you. The world you live in is pitching those ideas at you as paths to real happiness, and you are buying into them deeply as your own. If you believe them.

You don't have to believe them. You won't be able to believe them. Not forever. They don't deliver what they promise to. They don't deliver real happiness. Because they don't, we all find them out as frauds eventually. By getting them, we sicken of them.

Trial and error is a big part of wisdom. We have to chase to stop chasing. We have to learn for ourselves, generally by getting what we thought we wanted, that we don't really want it that much if it doesn't amount to the real happiness we expected from it.

Not everyone needs to go through this process of discovery, but most people do. I did. I do. I do it over and over. I admit that behavior because I want it to lessen. I want to be lastingly happy, not lastingly snapping at the carrot before my nose. Whoa there!

That image of a horse chasing a carrot unearths the next examples of conditioning. The next examples are more subtle than the first batch. The nature of unmasking conditioning is that the layers become more and more subtle and mysterious as you go.

At the next layer in, for those of us interested in genuine happiness, the discussion changes its focus from specific examples to their shared methodology. What matters at this point is not what we're after, but the disposition of being after something at all.

It pays off to remind ourselves at this point, what are we after? We're after genuine happiness. How does genuine happiness work? Is it something you can arrive at by striving after it or is that disposition another level of conditioning, and equally untrue?

The world around us is showing an endless parade of specific things that we're supposed to confuse with happiness and pursue. But underneath the parade, and the reason it continues, is a notion we don't question enough that happiness involves pursuit.

Does it? Is pursuit really the path to happiness? Asking this question of ourselves is absolutely essential if we really mean it that we want to be genuinely happy. We have to be willing to think about how happiness works or we'll misunderstand it and miss it.

It's only conditioning that posits happiness as a pursuable. That's how conditioning perpetuates itself. That's how conditioning stays alive. By passing off the idea to inadvertent believers that in order to be happy there's something you have to do or become.

Amazingly, even those among us who know better tend nevertheless to give up our happiness in the driven pursuit of something. For better or worse, we lapse into letting the thing we are pursuing take the reins over us and coerce us into pursuit mode.

It's a slippery slope. You may think you know better, but once the pursuing begins, it's very easy, owing especially to deep and ubiquitous reinforcement from social conditioning, to mix up your happiness with the thing you are striving to accomplish.

But your happiness isn't there. That's not where you'll find it. Our happiness in this life is not bound up in what we can make happen and what more we can become. Our happiness in this life has nothing to do with emphasizing circumstances in any way.

On the contrary, the emphasis on circumstance is the surest way to perpetuate unhappiness in this life. It may sound counter-intuitive, but that's only from mixing up intuition with a history of conditioning. Be careful you don't call conditioning intuition.

When you don't call it intuition, you see for yourself that nothing you've ever done from your conditioning in today's world has amounted to the happiness you wish for, which is precisely why you're still doing those things, and always will until you expire.

You may even see, and I certainly hope you do, that your expiration, and by expiring I mean relenting in the happiness pursuit mode, is a sign of a true new intelligence dawning within you, that giving up the pursuit mode is your birth into real life.

The outcome of that birth is a new understanding of happiness. I call it a first understanding of happiness because all previous notions were misleading and wrong. But the understanding that comes after expiring from pursuit mode is the real thing.

At that point we are ready to see how happiness works. We're ready to understand it is not a pursuit, but a presence, that brings it about. We have to be present to be happy, and the more consistently present we are, the more happiness too.

In retrospect pursuit mode becomes funny because we see it could never have worked. We see that pursuing fosters a psychological orientation toward the future that is exactly the opposite of abiding deeply in the present, our new angle on happiness.

These insights are how we overcome the continuing momentum of former conditioning. They surface spontaneously to remind us we can never go back. We can never return to the old way of framing happiness. Each attempt to fails more quickly.

So here we are in the present, the only place where happiness is. Here we are in the present with a new understanding that happiness exists only here, as do we. Here we are with the sole requirement of not pursuing, not if we want to be lastingly happy.

Do you want to be lastingly happy? Join me here in the present experience of your life. Let it serve as your home. Never abandon it for anything. And every time you do, let yourself stop once you realize, over and over, that life carried you into pursuit mode.

We all have the grace and intelligence to reflect on our lives. We all have the right to and the sacred responsibility to. Think long and hard if you need to about the things you are chasing and why. If the reason is happiness, ask yourself has it worked.

experiencing being

2007-11-12T10:11:00.001-08:00

All spiritual teachings are aiming at one basic truth. It's really the only basic truth. That's why we call it a basic truth. Because it's the only one. Everything else is another way of saying it. The way I am going to say it now is another way of saying it. Another way of saying it is the only way it can be said because the basic truth is beyond words. It's before them actually.

The basic truth is you are nothing other than Being. I use a capital "B" in this instance because I want to communicate weight for a moment. By Being I mean the experience of existing. You are having it right now. Or rather, the experience of it is there for you to have right now, and always, but you may not be tuned into it very much. Your attention may be elsewhere.

That's how we tend to live our lives. We tend to take the experience of Being for granted while we go about other business, such as pursuing our goals, meeting the requirements of our bodies, and generally thinking our lives away. There's nothing wrong with those things in the abstract, I suppose, but on the whole they tend to eclipse our sense of experiencing Being.

That's a high price to pay for them. Worthwhile spiritual teaching reminds us that price is too high. It reminds us what we already know, but can't remember very easily, not yet anyway: that we are not primarily the busy person in pursuit of goals and fulfillment, but rather something personless that is prior to that perspective, animating and supporting it. We are its Being.

Can you forget all the words for a moment and tune into the experience of it with me? That's what counts. That's why you're reading this passage in the first place, whether you know it or not. That's why you're here, and on Earth. Even if you got here by serendipity instead of conscious intention, the fact is you got here for exactly this moment when the teaching changes from words into.....

Did you let it? Did you recline into the void at the end of the last paragraph, a place outside your mind and the chatter of words, a silent blank space? That's the experience of Being. Did you have it? Go ahead and let yourself. If you are, great. Keep at it. Never stop. If you're not, not a problem. Start from now. Whenever you lose the experience of Being or realize you don't have it, give up your reluctance and return to it now. It is always open for business.

Here's one way in: letting go. Try it now. Don't worry about any of your regular concerns. Temporarily suspend the demands of your mind and move its noise to the background. Now take a deep breath and release it. The outgoing breath carries away everything you no longer need. You no longer need any of it. It is sufficient just to be here, breathing. It is deeply satisfying. Enjoy it.

Keep at it for a while. Keep doing it as you go about other things. Don't trade it for other things. Try not to take it for granted to the point of forgetting its primary importance. Nothing else matters without it. Notice how unhappy you get when you let other things matter more than it does. Notice how lost and disconnected you feel, how fragmented and unhappy. See whenever you've become too solid and lost your vital sense of experiencing Being.

I'm not making these things up. Connect the dots for yourself. The picture always comes out the same, and here's how it looks. All your problems and unhappiness, and all the suffering that ever was, is, or shall be, in your life and everyone else's, is the result of one thing. There's only one basic truth. Don't overlook, neglect, or murder the experience of Being, not if you want to be happy and fulfilled. You won't find those things apart from it. You can't.

about worrying

2007-11-11T09:02:00.000-08:00

Let's talk about worrying. Let's talk about its pros and its cons. Frankly, I can't think of any pros, but that's because I'm very aware of the cons. The point of this inquiry is to make you aware of the cons also. Then you can reassess the pros, and truly benefit from them.

The big down side of worrying is that while you're doing it you have to be worried. Your garden variety worrier is very good at dismissing this fact as a truism. That kind of dismissal is the same as saying the point is so true that it no longer bears any significance. Huh?

I'd like to suggest it does bear significance. If you have a tendency to worry, or you worry much at all, you are losing that many hours of your life to that state of being. Imagine you could see your entire life as a pie chart and worry figures in as a big, greedy slice.

The other slices are fun, love, work, play, and whatever else you are up to in this brief affair we call living. But there's the worry slice bullying all the others to the side. Each one of them shrinks as the worry slice grows. That's how the pie chart and your life works.

The pie chart metaphor is handy because it shows us where our values are. We might pay a lot of lip service to our preferred values, and wish to embody them, but our actual values, the ones we devoted real time to over the years, are the pie's biggest slices.

That's hard news. That's tough love. We have to look at our actions and see they are the only actual expression of our values. We have to admit that all the rest is talk. Talk-ity talk. Blah blah blah. Yap yap yap. I love you. I didn't mean to. Et cetera.

Worrying is not only talk. Worrying is primarily action. When you worry, you have to spend your time at it. You devote your time to it. You invest in it. You bake up that pie of your life and make worrying a bigger and bigger slice with each episode.

The psychological meaning of these reminders is that the more you worry, the more time of your life you give over to states of stress and darkness. You actually dwell in unhappiness in order to worry. Does that sound like a fair trade to you?

When life asks you if you'd like to be happy or worry, which one do you choose? It's that simple. You can tell yourself you are worrying in order to be happy, but the plain fact is you are worrying and therefore you are not happy. Period.

It's a question of living in the present or the future. Which one is more real? If you think the future is more real, you'll squander your happiness in the present for it. If you think the present is more real, you won't. Truism: the present is more real.

The present is the only thing that's ever real. It's always been the present and always will. Your whole life happens in the present and nowhere else. It's the same for all life. That's what makes it a truism. But significant as hell for being happy.

Let's face it. All the things we are trying to control by worrying about the future are really peanuts compared to the things we can't control. We want to be safe, comfortable, healthy, warm, what have you, and death comes for us regardless.

Be those things now. They're available to you if you stop worrying about them. And they won't be in the future if you don't stop worrying about them. When you get there, when the future comes, any unresolved habit of worrying will continue.

Can't you see it? People spend their whole lives worried about something, believing this and that something needs to occur, and the habit of living that way in the present, always fixated on the future, dominates that future when it finally arrives.

We get where we thought we were trying to and we don't enjoy it at all. Why? Because the main relationship we developed toward the present experience of living is to disregard the present experience of living out of concern for the future.

How can that relationship to the present possibly change overnight when we get where we thought we were going? It can't. It won't. You're lying to yourself if you disagree. Don't put an emphasis on future circumstances. Emphasize the gift of now.

When you emphasize the gift of now, you discover an unexpected secret about it: it likes to take care of you. If you really dwell there, in the present experience of your life, although now and again you will face hard things, life will also provide for you.

That's the unexpected secret. That's what worry can't see. Life will take care of you, in many cases better than you can by worrying, if only you trust it to. Plus, you get the brilliant perk from that approach that trust is your regular state of being.

I dare say, that regular state of being actually creates the trustworthy outcome . I dare say, the worried state of being creates the worrisome outcome. It's all, in great measure, self-fulfilling prophecy. That sounds like mysticism, which isn't a dirty word.

The mystical truth is the plain truth. The plainest truth of all is the most mystical truth. The truism is a great mystical revelation. Learn to heed it. If you worry, you're worried, and you'll prove that you should have been. You prove what you want to.

If you want to prove you can trust, you will. You can. Set out to prove it and it will come true simply from your devotion to it. Then all the things you used to worry about will become needless on the one hand and sound comic planning on the other.

inclusiveness

2007-11-09T08:24:00.000-08:00

These days the word inclusiveness is a buzz word for proper outward behavior. We like to set up discrete environments safe enough in their shared agenda that everyone involved can practice inclusiveness toward everyone else. There's nothing wrong with this arrangement. It's actually a fine model for how the world might some day work.

The thing is, the world will never work that way unless we practice inclusiveness inwardly first. It doesn't matter how much you honor outer inclusiveness, and it doesn't matter how much you accept your neighbor, if you're relying on an outward rule as your moral compass. That's only the starting point. You have to internalize the rule for yourself. It has to go inward.

That's how rules become freedom and transcendence of the need for rules. That's how the outward behavior of inclusiveness becomes true inclusiveness without any buzz around the word itself, without any self-congratulating hype that inclusiveness is going on. Are we aiming for the real thing here or are we indulging our vanity?

Let's start with the latter possibility for the sake of demonstrating the former, shall we? Let's say we are, for better or worse, on one or two occasions, indulging ourselves, that we overly like it how inclusive we are. Let's say we're vain. Good gravy! Can it really be true? Are we able to admit that sometimes our openness is narcissistic?

It may not be that way on every occasion. Of course it isn't. And it may not be that way, in total, when narcissism creeps into the mix at all. But let's go ahead and admit that narcissism creeps in now and then, to some small degree, on some rare occasion, and at those times we take a secret hint of pride in our lovely reflection as agents of morally-savory inclusiveness.

If you can do that, if you can admit it, especially as the twinge of narcissism is occurring, but also any time afterwards, even now, then you are no longer practicing outward rule-bound inclusiveness, but real inclusiveness, the internalized kind. You are going from a follower of rules to a free spirit and a lover of wisdom. You are practicing what you preach. You are walking the talk.

For real inclusiveness to occur you have to begin with yourself. You have to turn the spiritual eye inward and acceptingly observe everything that eye sees. The more you let it see, the wider you open it, the more inclusive you are. Period. So include everything. Look right and left, near and far. Leave no inner stone unturned.

On this page I have noted narcissistic lapses as an example of something you might dislike seeing when you look inward, but narcissistic lapses are only the tip of the iceberg. You have to keep that spiritual eye open and aware as the entire parade of unwanted and disowned inner material goes by. That is, if you aspire to be inclusive. Do you? You do, right?

What might that inner eye see? Frankly, it will need to see everything. There won't be anything it doesn't see if you really keep it open. How could there be? Your humanity derives from the same bedrock as everyone's, and everything anyone can think or feel, ever, the good and the bad, the bad and the bad, the bad and the worst, it's all your inheritance too. In full. Every bit of it. Every single bit. No exceptions. Inclusiveness. Yes!

Of course, there are things you won't like to see. There are things you will try to see without entitlement to them. There are things you will repeatedly run away from. There are things you will blame on other people. However you respond becomes the next call to true inclusiveness. Did you blame someone for something? Now include that sometimes you blame.

That's how true inclusiveness works. If, in the example of blaming others, you practice true inclusiveness, seeing and accepting about yourself that you're that human, that you lapse into the blame game in spite of yourself, at least now and then, like everyone else, the most wonderful thing happens: you don't lapse that way as often. Your inclusiveness spontaneously externalizes.

Afterwards someone might do something truly blameworthy to you and you won't feel as much resentment or affront on account of it. You may not feel any. Maybe never again. Why? Because you own your own capacity and tendency to behave the same way as the blamer. You have included that tendency, first internally, and now somewhat effortlessly on the outside as well. That part takes care of itself, and graces you. You don't need a rule for it.

But only if you commit yourself to the inner work of true inclusiveness, only if you turn the spiritual eye inward whenever you need to, as often as you can, and try your best not to blanch at the view. I tell you from direct experience your response to hard material inside you will become the opposite of blanching. It will turn into satisfaction and you won't hate it so much that your inner world presents regular, sometimes repeated inconveniences in the name of true inclusiveness. You'll grow to like those inconveniences as growth moments. You'll participate in them more and more promptly until you never put them off, not to elude them anyway.

This transformation won't occur overnight, but it will occur—overnight. You won't change right away, but you will change—right away. On the outside you might continue to practice inclusiveness as you have been, or as you wanted to all along, but it won't be a practice anymore. You won't be practicing in the sense of getting ready for the real thing. You'll be the real thing. Your inclusiveness will be second nature. As long as you turn inward with it. If you do, it will grow on the outside without the need for buzzing about it, fanfare, particular effort, or rules.

the world mirror

2007-11-06T09:53:00.000-08:00

Today I'm going to give you an opportunity. It's an opportunity that never stops giving. It's the most generous spiritual teaching in the world. It is the world. The world is the teaching. Not the world as an external situation, but the world as a mirror. Of you.

Whenever you notice something in the world, you are getting a reflection of yourself. That's precisely why you noticed it. You could have noticed absolutely anything, but you singled out one thing and you gave it attention. The one thing is always you.

More precisely, the one thing is always something unresolved in you. That's why you noticed it. That's why it compels you and commands your attention. You are looking in the mirror at something you need to work out in yourself. You projected it outside.

Do I need to pause here momentarily to explain that human beings are projectors and the world is their projection screen? Will that metaphor help? Does it clarify that the world's true essence is a simple pristine blankness? That the human mind is showing home movies? That mine is and yours is?

Those questions might appear too simplistic to some people. But I ask those people to look in the mirror of that evaluation. If you see too simplistic, you are seeing yourself. You could have seen many other things. But that's the thing you singled out.

Why? Because you have something to work out in regard to that quality. You do. Not the person you're pointing at about it. Not me. You. You have an unresolved issue about oversimplification and that's why you stopped there to fuss over it.

You could have stopped anywhere, or not stopped at all. You could have been into the idea. You could have been open to it. But if you balked at it, your balking is your reflection. The same is true if you loved it. Your loving is your reflection. It's always you.

For a while you may resist this teaching because a lot of what you notice in the world is how cruel and precarious it is. I don't blame you. It's difficult to look in that mirror and admit that you singled out those aspects because they operate in you.

It's even harder to look in that mirror if you tend to be critical of what you see. For instance, if you call people stupid now and then, if you blame them for your problems, if you pass judgment and think you know better. Better than what? Reflection!

But let's say you click with the opportunity side of things. Let's say, perhaps after the normal amount of denial and avoidance, you arrive at acceptance that the world is a mirror and you'd benefit from giving it a good honest look. How do you do it?

The good news is you can't not do it. It's all that you do. It's everything you see. The world mirror bears that title for a very good reason. The entire world is the mirror. There is nothing outside it. You can't side-step your reflection. Don't try.

Not trying is step one. Do not try to side-step your reflection. See it for what it is. See it as reflection. See what you see is yourself. You may not know what to do with it in that context, but permitting that context is step one. Repeat it many times.

Step one is enormous. It's where illusion gives way to truth. It's where wandering becomes homecoming. It's where spirituality becomes fact, not fancy. It's where all the gold waits, for anyone willing to embrace the tricky word "mine" in "gold mine".

What you observe about the world is yours. It's your reflection. It's material inside of you that you need to spend time with, investigate, look into, take responsibility for, own. Those are the subsequent steps after recognizing the world mirror.

When you do them, when you do them over and over, with each thing you see, the things you notice about the world will evolve and change, because you did. Otherwise, you'll see the same old things and a thick crust of cynicism will form.

Let your cynicism be a starting point. Are you cynical? Is everything always the same? Is that how you regard the world? If so, let the world mirror help you. It's trying to tell you that you are always the same, that you aren't changing for the better.

Now reckon with that reflection. Do the subsequent steps. Spend time with the trait, whatever it is. Peel open its layers. Look inside of it. Get to know what's at stake for you, about you, both positively and negatively. Only you can do it. No one else.

It's time to decide. Are you going to persist in your belief that the world is external, for you to observe at a distance with introspective immunity, or are you going to see your observations for what they are, perfect reflections from the world mirror?

I invite you to benefit from the second approach. It does what the first approach never can: it makes the world completely dependable. You can count on it absolutely. It is always reflecting exactly what you need to know for your next cycle of growth.

making problems

2007-11-04T10:10:00.000-08:00

The sole purpose of the human being is to make problems. I know I'll put a few readers off with that remark, but maybe they'll come to share the humor of it with me instead of seeing it as, well, a problem. It's all a matter of how you take the news.

The reason I suggest the human being's sole purpose is to make problems is that once the human being stops making problems, the human being disappears. This odd turn of events is something you have to experience to confirm, and you can.

It's really quite simple. All you have to do is admit that everything is already perfect, that you and the world are already perfect. If it's hard for you to see things that way, that's the human being part of you doing its primary job: making problems.

If, on the other hand, you can access that perspective, if you can temporarily entertain the idea that the wisdom of life knows better than you do, and that maybe that wisdom is always moving all things in the best possible direction, you begin to disappear.

Disappear is a strong word. I like it because it's a strong word. But I understand if the human being part of you is objecting to it as too strong a word. That would mean the human being part of you is doing its job: making problems. Objecting.

Where is the human being part of you if you suspend that function for a moment? What if you don't object? What if you don't have a problem? What if you don't make any? Where is the human being part of you if you suspend that function forever? It's gone.

Imagine yourself sitting perfectly still. Imagine the world going about its hectic and fathomless business and regardless of what you see, you remain perfectly still, not only on the outside, but on the inside, where it actually counts. Imagine it.

You can do it. You can bring that state of tranquility into the life you are leading right now, right here, starting from the very next breath. If you want to be at peace and to promote peace in the world, that's the only way. By being that peace.

Do you think the world will become peaceful without each of us individually being peace? How can that result be possible? We've already tried it the other way. We've already tried everyone thinking they're right and campaigning against wrong.

It doesn't work. It perpetuates the very mind set it wants to eliminate: right v. wrong. If you ever think you're right, you're the same as the one you make wrong. If you ever think someone's wrong, you're the same, you're wrong too. It doesn't work.

Yet that's the human purpose in a nutshell: making problems. Never does that purpose play out more effectively than when it is able to mask itself as its opposite. Never are we making more problems than when we are making solutions.

But what else can human beings do? They can admit to themselves that they're sole purpose is to make problems. They can catch themselves doing it pretty much all the time, whenever they decide the world needs their improvements.

They can also learn to laugh that their sole purpose is absurd. They can laugh at the absurdity of it every time the purpose takes hold. I'm making problems again. You can say that to yourself in the middle of doing it. You can laugh.

Then you can try something else. Try accepting things as they are for a moment. Try feeling perfectly all right. Really feel it. Then operate from there. Exclusively. If you have anything to give, what could be more helpful than that? Not another solution.

the extra layer

2007-11-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

There are many layers to the thinking and feeling process. We all know it to some extent. We all know that underneath the surface of a thought or feeling there is something else there too, but we don't always know what.

I'd like to turn things over for a moment and look at the process the other way around. I'd like to say that not underneath the feeling or thought, but superimposed over it there is something else there too, and we benefit from reckoning with it.

I'll also suggest that most of us don't reckon with it, but rather succumb to it. I'll set up a little duality for the length of this inquiry that reckoning and succumbing are opposite poles in how you might relate to the subject at hand: yourself.

Yourself is the extra layer. When a thought or feeling occurs, it comes with an additional piece over and above the raw experience of feeling or thinking. The additional piece happens very quickly, so quickly we seldom see it as additional. Try to now.

You can have a sensation, an emotion, or a thought without adding a senser, emoter, or thinker to any of them. They don't need an owner. All they require is complete acceptance of them as they occur. The owner is a form of resistance to them.

As I said, it all happens quickly, the thought occurs and before you know what's going on, the thought has successfully manufactured a sense of ownership and full belief in a self who is the agent, the one thinking. The thought produces that illusion.

It's a great revelation the first time you permit yourself to see this process for what it is: the extra layer. You become a witness of it for a while. You see that thoughts and feelings are going on and you don't need to become anyone on account of them.

You see they come and go whether you believe in yourself in relation to them or not. You see that believing in yourself in relation to them is succumbing, while suspending belief in yourself in relation to them is reckoning, and reckoning works better.

Why does reckoning work better? Because reckoning is acceptance. The thought or feeling comes and it wants you to believe in a self in relation to it. You don't do that, but rather you watch the thought, or feel the feeling, and they pass with that treatment.

If, on the other hand, you become the self they want, the thought or feeling persists until that self weakens and lets go. Until then, the thought or feeling rules your world view and your behavior, especially if you pretend or insist it doesn't.

Imagine what that means if the thought or feeling is negative or unpleasant. Imagine it's anger or judgment. If you become the self that is dormant in those passing experiences, they don't pass quickly at all, but malinger. You hate and judge.

If you don't become the self that is dormant in those passing experiences, they do pass quickly. The unpleasant vibration of anger is going on and you permit it to, but you don't lapse into the self it tries to create. You just feel it and let it be.

A lot of this information is counter-intuitive. You'd think becoming someone over a feeling or thought is the best way to relate to it most deeply, but the opposite is true. It's the means of avoiding it, not feeling it. It's adding an extra layer.

Your thoughts and feelings don't need an owner. They certainly want one and they push every button to manufacture one. It seems to be part of their life function to materialize an owner and hold onto it tightly. In fact, that's how they survive.

But you don't have to sustain them against your better interests. Your job isn't to martyr yourself to your feelings, thoughts, and sensations. Your job is to find your way back to the source of what you are and learn to abide there.

If you want that job, if that spiritual calling resonates for you, you'll hear what I'm saying in this inquiry and hopefully use it to see for yourself. You'll stop becoming someone just because a hard thought or feeling is occurring. Or a cherished one.

You'll reckon with that notion of self, the one that arises in relation to all the passing blips on the radar screen of your inner world. You'll see the blips as blips, not as you. You won't succumb to them in that way anymore. You won't add the extra layer.

The rest will take care of itself. You have to believe me on that one. If you stop adding the extra layer, you create a special kind of empty space in which the truth of who you are arises and blossoms without any further effort on your part.

Your job is not to make effort at that point, but rather to nurture the empty space. That's your job starting now. Nurture the empty space. Let thoughts and feelings come and go inside it and don't slow their passage by becoming their owner.

Feel the feelings, feel the sensations, but don't become their owner, the one who is feeling them. Think the thoughts, but don't become their champion, the one who is having them. They don't need a champion or owner. They just want one for survival.

Now what do you want? If you want to abide in the deepest truth of who you are, which isn't a who, you have to start questioning all the who's. If you'd rather be a who, you'll do that until your attitude changes. Whose attitude? Exactly!

i don't mind

2007-10-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

Let's take a closer look at those three little words. The ones in the title. I don't mind. If you do mind, and you say that you don't, you're lying. That's no good to anyone. You may think you're doing someone a favor, you may want to believe what you're saying, but if what you're saying isn't true, you're creating more harm than peace.

We might call that approach to those words Californian, not because there's anything wrong with California, but because a lot of great stuff is happening on that frontier and wherever great stuff happens, the artificial side of things shakes out too. I want you to remember, as you read the next paragraphs, that we're headed to the great stuff.

Using the words "I don't mind" to tell someone everything's okay, there's nothing to worry about, you're perfectly safe, go ahead and do what you're doing, is a terrific intention. We all wish to live in a world where we send and receive that message and mean it. We all can. But we never will if we say it as a mask.

When we say it as a mask, the phrase has a forced hippie quality about it. Can you imagine it that way? Try to say it that way out loud right now. "Hey, I don't mind." Pretend you're an actor for a moment to get the real feel of saying it as a lie. Imagine you do mind, but for reasons x and y and probably z too, you want to pretend you don't.

Did you try it? No? Why not? Try it. If you already did, try it again. Say it out loud at least once and preferably several times, modulating how you say it so you really find the place where you're lying and the words mean their opposite.

For instance, if you find my persistence about making you try it annoying in some way, pretend I just asked you if you mind about that. Do you mind? Now tell me you don't. Lie to me, baby! Out loud. At least once. Preferably a few times. Get the feel of it.

What is the feel of it? It feels lousy, right? Why is that? You would think what's most lousy about it is that someone gets hurt, someone else. But I'm all the way over here on the other side of this essay, which I wrote in the past. It doesn't matter one lick to me that you're lying about minding my requests while you read it. So what if you don't mind? So what if you do? What do I care if you mind or don't mind? I don't mind.

Now here's the big difference. Here's the great stuff. Here's what makes this essay spiritual in the deepest sense. When I said those words a few moments ago, when I told you I don't mind, I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to myself. I was reminding myself of something that those words really mean. So are you. Whenever you say them.

They don't mean what you think. Nothing means what you think. That's what those words are trying to say. That's why they sneak into language in the first place. That's how spirit asserts itself surreptitiously in words, which otherwise betray it. For spirit, that process of unmasking words is a great deal of fun, and inevitable.

The real meaning of "I don't mind" is not that something has happened and now you need to state your acceptance of it with equanimity, but rather that you are not dwelling in mind. Do you mind? No, dwelling in mind is not something I do. I don't mind. I don't dwell there. My dwelling place is not the mind. I do not mind.

That's the only way not to mind. Everything else is a lie. If you dwell in your mind and you say you don't mind, you're lying. If, on the other hand, you practice those words as reminders that your mind is not where you dwell, if that's what you mean whenever you say those words, that you don't dwell in your mind, you begin to tell the truth. To be the truth. It's the only way.

The truth is you aren't your mind. The truth is you don't dwell there. The truth is if you're mind can come up with something, the something can't be you, not the real you. When we dwell in our minds, we believe that all the somethings, or at least a few cherished ones among them, are actually who we are. But they aren't. They can't be. Not one of them can. Not one. No, not that one either.

When we permit this impossibility, the truth of who we are receives an invitation, and accepts it spontaneously. It grows in us and flourishes. You can't force this experience. All you can do is remember you don't mind. Whenever life puts you in a position of identifying with your mental noise, you remind yourself that no, you don't mind. Dwelling in mind and believing its content pertains to you is not what you do. You know better. You don't mind.

Truth being circular, your devoted reminders to yourself will eventually qualify you to use the words the old way. Once you stabilize in the understanding that you don't dwell in your mind, you can tell people "I don't mind" and you won't be lying anymore. Whenever you're saying it to yourself as a reminder, and only then, it transforms naturally into wider acceptance.

the resonance function

2007-10-29T12:01:00.001-07:00

The only reason for a spiritual teacher to tell you what your true self is, to tell you who you are underneath all the surface identity, is because you might want to hear it. The surface part of you seldom does, but a resonance occurs in the layers beneath that part, and eventually the resonance asserts higher value than the things in its way.

I'd like to tell you what your true self is, to tell you who you are underneath all the surface identity. I really would. I'd like you to want to hear it too. I'd like you to open up momentarily to the real possibility of resonating with what you hear. Maybe if you do, you'll discover the things in the way are not in the way after all, but beautiful channels for more true self to shine through.

The real you, the one underneath all the surface identity, is very different than all the surface identity. It's different because it isn't a thing. Unlike everything else you might call yourself and as which you might think of yourself, the real you is not something you can capture by calling it something or conceiving of it in any way. That's why it's so difficult to grasp. Grasping it doesn't work. It can't be grasped, manually or mentally.

Your surface identity will often check out at this news. It's ridiculously easy for a surface identity accustomed to thing-ing and concept-ing to disqualify information that won't permit a thing or a concept to win the day. What else can that part of you do? Opening up to a world beyond things and concepts is threatening to it. What I'm trying to tell you is not opening up to that world is more threatening to it for creating discord and dysfunction.

The place of resonance is where your true values are. You discover the greater authority of those values precisely because you neglect them and pay the price. The price is the teacher who tells you to get the values in the right order already. The spiritual teacher is the one who reminds you that you want to, because you already know.

The part of you that wants to, the part of you that already knows, is seeking a reminder on the outside, from the teacher. The teacher is happy enough to give one. But giving one takes the form of a steadfast refusal to overly indulge the surface identity. That's something you can do on your own, and generally have to.

So without further ado, let me remind you what you are, not because it's actually possible to put it in words, but because you who are listening are ready to go where the words suggest without taking the words along with you. Are you ready to do that? Is your resonance function coming to the surface?

The real you is that function. There you go. It's not more complicated than that. The real you is the ability to be open and resonate. The rest of you is all the scrambling to get there that gets in the way of its own goal. That's the surface identity. That's where the words become an issue and you wrestle with them instead of resonating.

claiming you know

2007-10-28T22:30:00.000-07:00

The only time you're really honest is when you admit you don't know. Let's face it: you don't. Not about the things that matter most. I'm talking about spiritual questions now. What's the meaning of your life, of all life? What's your purpose in the grand scheme of things? These may seem like grandiose concerns, and they are. But they bear directly on a question aimed straight and simple into the heart of every human being: how to be happy. The only time you're really honest is when you admit you don't know.

Sure, you've figured a few things out. Trial and error has served you, if sometimes led you astray to do it. You know, for example, that going into the woods and communing with nature is uplifting in some way, grounding in another. You know you lapse into plenty of habits that clearly drop your joy. Everyone does. It's a starting point anyway. But what about being genuinely happy? The only time you're really honest is when you admit you don't know. It's also the only time you're genuinely happy.

How can that be? If you really want to understand how, you have to be willing to look at what it means to think you know something, to claim you know. You have to be willing to ask what you're up to underneath the claim. You have to look at the mechanics of claiming in the first place. What does it mean to claim you know how to be happy? Does it mean you're right? That's the first thing you'd like to believe. That's mechanics number one. You'd like to believe you know what it means to be happy. You'd like to. We all would. In fact, most of us think that the grand outcome of all our sleuthing on the subject is finally to know.

But what goes on when you know something? You put the flow of life into a box. Let me give you a pedestrian example. In school you learn that the unfathomable mystery we refer to as water is made up of two atoms hydrogen and one atom oxygen and together those three atoms repeat over and over and fill your glass, hopefully half full not empty. That's a fine explanation of water, I suppose, but it's also reductionist. It's purpose, in fact, is to reduce. Why? Because reduction of complex things into more basic things gives us mastery over the more complex thing. Mastery. We want mastery. We want to be able to say that now we understand water, and by understand we mean own.

Water laughs and let's us proceed with this idiot notion. Happiness doesn't. Go ahead and tell yourself that you know how to be happy and connect the dots. The second you make the claim, or not very long after, the happiness is nowhere to be found. The act of making the claim begins to scatter the happiness. The effort to sustain belief in the claim insures the prolonged disappearance of the happiness. The happiness wants you to have it, but it's not something you can have, and by have we mean own. Your claim that you know how to be happy is the same as saying you own something that doesn't permit an owner. You can get away with this clumsiness with water (well, actually you can't, but water flows with everything anyway, including nonsense), but you can't get away with it with happiness. Happiness is not something you can put in a box, and by box we mean brain.

The point is there's a profound difference between knowledge and happiness. Knowledge is a reductionist exercise to gain a sense of leverage or mastery over an aspect of the world, while happiness is not. The former has as many holes as a swiss cheese, speaking metaphysically, while the latter is the holes. When's the last time you put down the wheel of cheese and walked away with one of the holes? That's the last time you were happy! Or it might be better to say that yes, you are trying to gain mastery over an aspect of the world when you try to nail down what happiness is, but the aspect you're interested in is yourself, and that makes the effort too direct and reflexive to permit the illusion of objectivity.

Without that illusion, knowledge falls apart. The law of associative leaping (also known as high creativity) therefore reveals that self-knowledge is actually an impossibility. Once you know what yourself is, you know it's something you can't know. Knowing it isn't how you relate to it. Direct experience is its only handle. Handle is the wrong word. There's nothing to grab onto. No words will do. Only direct experience. Your true self is direct experience. Those are more words, but context momentarily suspends their word nature. I'm asking you to do the same. I'm asking you to suspend your word nature, and by word nature we mean knowledge. Take yourself out of the box, and by box we mean person.

The only time you are honest is when you admit you don't know. Are you a person? Be honest. You don't know. Are you a knower? Be honest. You don't know. Are you a wheel of swiss cheese? Be exceptionally honest. You don't know. You might be. In fact, you are. If you see you are, you'll see you aren't only a wheel of swiss cheese, but all the holes too, and the big hole all around it (known as empty space) that makes it seem to all the knowers as if a wheel of swiss cheese is an independent entity. It isn't. That's only language and knowing. Without those you have one big everything that's self to us all.

But more to the point, without language and knowing, you have happiness. You don't "have it" have it, but you experience it directly, as yourself, as the one self of us all. Divide that one self up again by knowing it, by reducing it for the sake of mastering it, and the nuttiest thing takes place. You don't master anything, but generate problems. Problems that didn't exist until you meddled with perfection and plucked out all its feathers. So what's the meaning of your life? Do you have a life? Be honest. You don't know. You're just generating problems. Here's another: what's your purpose in the grand scheme of things? Be honest. You don't know. You're just generating problems. What a purpose! It's the only one.

being uninspired

2007-10-27T09:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it helps to turn things upside down. How do you feel about being uninspired? Is it like you're waiting for something better to happen, for life to resume again? What if I told you it's the greatest state of all, this lack of inspiration? That's where you'll meet your true self! That's when your lesser selves are finally off their game enough for true emptiness to shine.

It's hard to see things this way. It's upside down. We're accustomed to thinking of inspiration as a time of valuable harvest in our lives, and of the periods between the harvest as a drag. Some of us mature enough to look at the in-betweens as a necessary part of the overall process, as gestation. But that outlook is only more covert worship of the mighty god Inspiration. It posits the periods away from inspiration as nothing more than the means to future inspiration. It gets away with calling those periods in-betweens!

They're so much more. They're the pith and essence. They're the shining crown on the big bloated head of inspiration, bowed at last. When the tingling rush of inspiration wanes and we settle into the doldrums and purposelessness that come afterwards, we are entering new territory in which we don't know who we are anymore. Our inspired confidence for expanding our sense of self has played out, begins to shrink, returns to its normal proportions, but won't stay put! It keeps shrinking. We collapse on the couch. We put on the TV. We can't sit still to save our lives, but we can't focus much either. Often for days. Sometimes for weeks.

This sorry state of affairs is when the journey into truth really gets going. It's when you have to deal with all your worst struggles against yourself, see all the worst things you spend lifetimes avoiding, surrender to feelings you don't want to feel. It's the purpose of inspiration that it ends, and that it drops you like a sack of rocks. The crash is the gold, the reward, the beginning. It's where you have to decide are you a hero, do you want to wear that word as a badge with a capital H, or can you drop your expiring ideas about yourself cold turkey now that it's time to be uninspired? That's when the true evolution is going to happen, spiritually speaking, right there at that moment of change, and in the period that follows.

Why? Because the letting go into lack of inspiration is a big letting go. It's generally bigger than any triumphant letting go that precedes it while you are inspired. While you are inspired, for all the risks you might take, you take them from a sense of daring and well-being. You take them in confidence. You take them with security, even if you take them into insecure places. Take is absolutely the word for it. Even when letting go is what's occurring, the inspired stretches in your life are all about taking. You take a risk. You take a chance. You take a bite out of life. You may be letting go of things to do it, but the taking is the emphasis. Take take take.

When the inspiration passes, you don't take anything. Rather, the things that you take are no longer romantic. You take a nap. You take medication. You take a beating. Taking felt so good while inspired that we try to force language to distill the feeling again by persisting in the words that go along with that state. It becomes funny, because the period after inspiration is not about taking. It's about releasing. It's about letting go. And it trumps the letting go of the inspired state because this kind of letting go happens not in the great light of wonder, but in the murky darkness of confusion. It's a terrible blow to the expanded sense of self to realize its time in the spotlight is over. So soon? Our inner life reels at the news.

But that reeling motion is what shakes out the truth. You don't have a leg to stand on anymore. You don't know who you are. You don't like not knowing. You want back that feeling of being bold and inspired, purposeful and pliant, but you can't have it. Your attempts to manufacture it artificially eventually fail also, and collapse into deeper darkness. If only, while you were in it, you could see this chain of events for what it is. If only you could see that now, after all the little warm ups (also known as the fruits of inspiration), you are finally getting what you really want, the great hammer blows of truth. Ask any inspired person, while inspired, what they are after at that time, what they most want to encounter, most demand from experience. They'll say the words: the truth! Then ask during the down times. They'll say the truth has gone away. But it can't. If it can come and go, it isn't the Truth. It's something else.

What they wanted wasn't the truth, not the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God. What they wanted was a comfortable portion of the truth, a portion of truth they could assimilate on their own terms, not on the terms dictated by the truth itself. But the truth eventually states those terms and you can't avoid them. That's the greater opportunity at the heart of feeling uninspired. You're stuck with your worst self on truth's terms. You're face to face with the hardest parts of yourself. Learn to recognize them.

That encounter is so valuable because you want what can come from it. Anyone who enjoyed inspiration in the first place, anyone who squirms when inspiration recedes, is not really looking for the standard fruits of inspiration in the first place. It's not the physical products of our work that we're looking for. That point of view is a common myopia, but not correct for all its ubiquity. What we're looking for is not the products at all, but the thing they're supposed to make happen: we're looking to be happy. And the best way to do it is to start taking stock of the things you least want to know about yourself. If you really mean it. If you really want to be happy. If so, accept that version of yourself in its entirety that you think of as uninspired. The one who is waiting for something better to happen. All that one's flaws.

That's where the real you is waiting also. The real you is everything. It already knows that nothing better can happen, because better is a game. It already knows that inspiration is a game too and leads to happiness by accident only, never directly, but rather by playing itself out repeatedly until its own silliness and futility come forward. I'm not saying you should sit around being uninspired all the time. But if you inhabit those stretches as if they are wisdom, curious to know yourself in the midst of them, you'll discover and expand who you are much more deeply than you did in the inspired stretches. You'll find out you're both, and you're much more besides.

Give it a try. The next time you're not as inspired as you wish you were, realize that wishing you were more inspired crushes the wisdom of not being that way. Wouldn't you rather get to know your deepest self instead? Then take the state you've got. Take it. Do you hear me? I'm calling it something to take. Take it!

the trance state

2007-10-26T19:35:00.001-07:00

Everything personal is a trance state. Not the savory kind of trance, but the obtuse one. You're probably in it right now. I wish you weren't. You don't. You pay lip service to wishing you weren't, but that's usually another way to stay in it.

The trance state is tenacious. It protects itself brilliantly. It summons every defense. The best ones masquerade as anti-trance so you don't even see them for what they are. That's more trance on top of trance. It's almost airtight.

The only way out of the trance is to admit the core horror covered over by the trance. What's the one thing the trance least wants to accept? You have to figure that out and accept that thing anyway, despite the horror. I know you can do it.

Are you afraid to find out you're a failure? But you are one. I'm one too, but I like that. I failed at every intention cooked up during my trance. You will too. You have to. The things we come up with in the trance oppose reality and as a result they fail, if not on the surface, then underneath, where the real motivations operate.

Are you afraid to discover you're not very important at all, that you won't change the world or make any particular difference in the grand scheme of things? Of course you won't, not if you operate from there and convince yourself otherwise. Why not pull that useless thorn from your paw already and get over yourself?

Or would you rather persist in the trance? Most people would. They do it every day. They're doing it right now and they aren't letting up. That's the surest sign of trancing. You never have time to step back from it. You claim there's no choice.

learning and mastery

2007-10-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

Learning is reiterative. What that means is, you have to revisit what you learn several times to master it. This quality of learning is not a failure on the part of the one who is learning. You aren't the worst learner who ever lived when you think you understand something and find out, in the lesson's next unexpected iteration, that no, you hadn't mastered things after all. Not yet. Try again please. This discovery is not bad news. It's how learning works.

Appreciating how learning works is especially important on the spiritual path. Nowhere will life hand you more unwanted reminders that you don't have things mastered yet than there. That's what the spiritual path is actually about, one reminder after another that you aren't a master. The road to mastery is paved with bulldozed masters. At the far end of the road, where each trampled master believed he was heading, is the bulldozer itself, coming right at you again. See your reflection in the blade? Smile! Squish.

The tricky part of mastery is there isn't a master. How do you become a master? You realize you can't. How do you remain a master? You remember there isn't a master. All the time. This may sound like a lot of hocus pocus, but it needs to be stated. I don't want you fighting that bulldozer forever, only long enough to admit defeat, and thereby gain victory. You are on a path of learning, friend spirit, and the learning never stops. The truth of your being is fathomlessly deep and mysterious. Admitting how completely outside the realm of mental comprehension it is is just the beginning, although a fine one at that.

I want you to cut yourself a break. I want you to see what you're getting into and after a moment or two of understandable rationalist vertigo about it, open up to the deeper response of appreciation and eagerness. What you're getting into (and there's no choice anymore, there's no lasting retreat to sustainable aloofness about these things) is a way of life that leads unendingly into the unknown. You will never know again. Everything you thought you knew and still think you know, whether you recognize those things yet or not, will come deeply into question, one after another in the perfect sequence for release from them all.

I can't put enough stress on the first word in the previous sentence: everything. Friend spirit, they wouldn't call it the unknown if you were allowed to keep bits and pieces of what you think you know already and go in there anyway. That would be called, well, it already has a name: bullshit. You've heard of that before, yes? We're all sooooo full of it. There's not one of us who isn't. I am too. Awfully eager to agree with me on that point, eh? If so, that's your initial burst of rationalist vertigo operating. It will pass. You'll surrender. What the hell else can you do besides surrendering that isn't more bullshit? Everything we know is plain old B.S.

Now before you write me off as a nihilist, allow me to clarify a few things. First, the word nihilist rhymes with stylist. That doesn't mean anything really, but I thought it was cool. Second, there is obviously a place for knowledge, for the known. I don't want to freak you out that nothing we know, such as scientific insight or how to tie a shoe, is without its beautiful place in the whole of existence. How could things be otherwise? All I'm trying to say is those things, the ones we call knowledge, just don't cut it on the spiritual path. They freeze life into a false conceptual stasis, from which all the real quote-unquote "life" drains away.

You are "life". Everything you think you know about who you are is the false conceptual stasis. Do you want to be yourself or your conceptual discomfort zone? As life I'm asking you. Life to life. It's an intimate conversation here, addressed at you: Life, do you want to be life and live, or is a false sense of comfort and security so important to you that you'd rather die keeping it? That's what keeping it is: it's your death, Life. Every moment. The known is perpetual suicide to you. You are cutting your magnificent throat with every stubborn concept and idea of who you are. And you know it. I know you do. Better yet, you can feel it. Feel the concepts betray you. Feel them flick their serpent tongues. They're at your heels, Life. Run!

Run to the unknown, where they don't exist. They can't. It's the definition of them not to. They can't go where definitions are impossible. But you can, and must. You thrive there. You gain freedom there. You discover that happiness is so ridiculously easy there that you don't know what took you so long to accept it on its own terms. You don't care that it took you so long because you remembered again, and that's enough. You're enough without knowing anything. You don't know anything and you're enough. You overflow. You enchant.

Lose yourself and gain the world. That's what a great teacher once said on this subject, but we have to refresh the teaching so we hear it right again. Will you do that with me? Here's how: tuck the little phrase "all your concepts of" between the words "lose" and "yourself". Go ahead and say it that way to make sure you've got it down. Then trade the word "world" for "Truth" with a capital T. But that word is up to you also. Use whatever word is transparent enough to indicate that which is so sacred to you that you'd be silent in the presence of it. Absolutely inevitably silent. Silent to the point of beholding it and forgetting you. Completely forgetting you. That silent.

Imagine that. Silent in the presence of it. Have you ever been out walking and suddenly you encountered a deer or any wild animal? Do you remember how quiet you got, not wanting to scare it away, but quieter than that really? You were quiet before your mind could even churn out a reason for being quiet? That quiet. That silent. The quiet and silence that precedes the thought process. That was the quiet you experienced then. That's the unknown. That place before your mind. That's what's sacred in this life. That's what life is. That's what you are. Lose all your concepts of yourself and gain that.

your uniqueness

2007-10-22T13:11:00.000-07:00

After life puts enough cracks in your assumed sense of identity, you start to see more clearly by the light that shines through them. The light is you, of course, the real you. But for now let's point it back onto your original notions of who you are, or who you were.

Let's give a name to all those notions as one lump sum. Let's group all those concepts into one final concept and call them the personal self. Let's say, when we use the term personal self, what we're talking about is everything you mean when you refer to yourself as someone or something that is individual and distinct from all other things. Your uniqueness.

There's nothing wrong with uniqueness. In fact, it's quite beautiful. No one is trying to take that away from you necessarily, but rather to offer you a vantage point from which it becomes that much more spectacular. We must question it to arrive there.

The crucial question is when does that sense of uniqueness occur? This will be a lot to take in, but give it a try. You put an emphasis on the importance of your individuality only when the inner phenomenon of psychological resistance is happening. I'd like to say that again. Maybe more than once. It's a biggie.

As soon as we resist the flow of life in any way our individuality occurs. As soon as we don't want something that is happening (that is, we resist it) the sense of being separate and distinct is the direct result. The personal self is a resistance pattern.

How can that be true? We prize the personal self. We invest everything in it. We chart the entire course of our lives perfecting it, listening for it. I dare say inventing it. Let me ask you this question: how can it really be you if it requires all that adjustment, refinement, devotion, and attention? The real you is much less needy than that. It is never in any danger.

But in case you're not convinced, here's another way to look at things. What happens when you refuse to feel something difficult? You become someone. You know exactly who you are suddenly, or for a while you need to pretend you do, and you go about clarifying the details to everyone else, including yourself. That's the personal self. It appears because resistance to something difficult is winning the day and expressing itself as your precious identity. Once you permit yourself to feel the difficult thing instead of resisting it, all the insistent personal selfing evaporates.

What happens when you like something you feel? You want more. You want it to go on indefinitely if it can, or recur frequently. You want it to last. But life doesn't work that way. Your attempts to arrange for sustained or maximum goodness, while shrewd planning on one hand, are also an expression of resistance to how life really proceeds. Nothing goes on indefinitely. It can't. Nor do familiar pleasures recur easily over long periods without unpredictable factors altering them. Your attempts to have it otherwise are resistance to life's nature. The personal self you set up to deny change and nail down lasting good is an expression of this resistance. It is the resistance expressing itself as you.

Are you willing to see that? Maybe not. A resistance pattern as entrenched as the personal self is not quick to cough itself up as a hairball. Instead it resists attempts to reveal it, such as this one. It calls the writer crazy. It says he writes poorly, incomprehensibly. Accuses him of being on a soap box.

Were the writer identified strongly with his own personal self, he would resist that resistance by telling you he isn't crazy, he doesn't write poorly, he isn't on a soap box. Then he'd climb onto the closest one anyway and plead for you to understand how what he's saying is in your best interest, the only road to real happiness for you, an opportunity to know who you are for a change, to drop all the false notions that you take as real by accident and at the expense of spiritual well-being.

But the author isn't going to do that because he can't. He isn't really the author any more than you are really the reader. Those are personal selves. They occur because of resistance. They aren't worth the quantity of belief that makes conflict over them possible. They are spirit having fun, pretending to be people.

That's all the personal self is. It is spirit having fun, pretending to be a person. You. You are spirit having fun, pretending to be a person. You only put it the other way around and believe you are a person and not spirit, or a person before spirit, because that's what spirit wants for the sake of having more fun.

For a limited amount of time, spirit takes increased joy in seeing how well it can fall for its own ruse, and believe in itself primarily as a person. In many cases, it takes this phase of the fun all the way to denying spirit exists at all. Then the next phase begins, wherein spirit rediscovers itself, because nothing is more fun for it than that. That's Enlightenment! That's good fun!

I promise you, from that vantage point, your uniqueness is more beautiful, natural, precious, and, believe it or not, effective than you ever dreamed possible in your wildest, most daring aspirations as a personal self. You are ever so much more. You are spirit being everything. Look at that glorious wisp you singled out as you! It can see itself everywhere.

the fountain

2007-10-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

Let's play sculptor. Let's imagine city planners in a spiritual utopia have asked us to design an installation for the center of town. The intended location for the piece is right in the middle of the main square, where citizens congregate for free social discourse. When we ask the city planners why they chose us, they say something artists will only hear in a true spiritual utopia and maybe nowhere else: "You have a history of being daring!"

After scouting the location several times and enjoying its energy, we decide on a piece and set to work right away. We are going to make a fountain. In the center of the fountain, we are going to put a single person, forged from bronze, surrounded by water, standing upright on a slight rise in the fountain's tile base. The rise is so slight that one of the person's feet is on the surface of the water, lapped by little waves, possibly afloat. The other foot extends forward onto the top of a large bronze hourglass with functioning chambers.

A small platform beneath the hourglass keeps its dry and also conceals the fountain's powerful pump, which periodically sends water into the topmost chamber. The water collects there in a swirling fashion and drains downward through a tiny opening in the iridescent glass. We have crafted the opening so that water going through it alternates from a thin steady stream to a trickle of individual droplets and back again unpredictably, a natural property of flowing liquids. Watching the water behave that way is pleasing and we smile as we proceed. The bottom chamber fills up, the water flushes into the base, and the pump recirculates the water.

The pump also sends water through the forward leg of the person in a secret pipe. The person stands with its hands extended forward, as if holding an invisible globe. The person's mouth is open. The person appears to be explaining something. The person is finishing a word or beginning a new one. It's hard to say which. The person's eyes are wide open and alive. An epiphany is occurring behind them and the person is trying to express it. The power and brilliance of it literally floods the person's head. We have taken special pains to assure that.

The water travels up the person's leg, through the person's chest cavity and neck, and into the person's skull. The skull is open on top like the petals of a flower. The rising water becomes visible there, emerging in thick vertical surges, ranging from two to six inches high. The lapping sound they emit is a substitute for the person's missing speech. The surges collect in a pool formed by the person's open skull and drain over the edge, running down the person's head on all sides, forming thin rivulets that intertwine on their way down the full length of the person's body before returning to the surrounding water below.

Now for the daring part: the person is us. We have molded the person in a perfect likeness of ourself, the sculptor. The dimensions are identical, as is the appearance. But owing to our enormous mastery at our trade, everyone who looks at the statue feels exactly as we do, that the person in question is none other than oneself. It doesn't matter if the onlooker is male, female, short, tall, young, old, heavy, thin. The effect is always the same. Whoever lays eyes on the statue sees oneself, and becomes momentarily mesmerized.

The unveiling of the statue is a great success, with plenty of surrounding fanfare. A large crowd gathers in the main square and watches the hydraulics commence. The hourglass loads its first chamber of liquid. The person begins bubbling over at the crown of the head. Everyone there beholds their own inspired likeness in the middle of expressing something magnificent, words forming on the lips, the fountain gurgling for the voice. In moments the shallow pool surrounding the person becomes choppy and stays that way forever. Little waves lap at the person's lower foot, possibly afloat. What exactly is the person saying? You do know. It's your epiphany too.

unraveling hard times

2007-10-19T19:59:00.000-07:00

You may not believe it, but all your problems, if you have any, really boil down to one. Whatever may seem to be wrong, it's always the result of the same thing, spiritually speaking. That one thing is resistance. If there's a problem, there's resistance. If there isn't resistance, there isn't a problem. This is a helpful bottom line for unraveling hard times.

If you pay attention at those times, you develop an eye, or really more of a feel, for the role of resistance. Are you suffering? You must be resisting something. It's perfectly natural. After all, who wants to feel something painful? You lapse into resistance before you know what you're doing. But as long as you persist in it, that's where the suffering comes from.

The suffering is the problem. The actual pain underneath it is not. You have to train yourself to understand this distinction. Suffering equals problem. Pain equals natural. Pain and suffering are not the same thing, although suffering is also painful. Once you understand the difference, you can leverage a new relationship to pain, and put an end to suffering.

The new relationship to pain is to cut out your the resistance to it. If you catch yourself suffering, you know you are resisting. Try not to. Try not to deny pain when it occurs in you. Remind yourself at those times that resisting pain keeps it around indefinitely, while not resisting it is the only way it will pass. Make it your new intention to feel it for the sake of moving through it and past it.

The reward for this intention, if you practice it earnestly, is a surprising discovery: pain isn't so bad. You'll have to try for yourself to believe me unless you already know. Pain is pain. It isn't worth all the heartache of suffering over it. It isn't worthy of plunging yourself into a personal hell. Not when the other alternative is simply to feel it and recover your wits, no heartache, no hell. Why add those dark dimensions if you have another choice?

You'll be amazed how much time you save if you don't add them. If you learn to cut out your resistance, the pain passes in a very short time. It lasts no longer than pleasure once you get the hang of it, and we all know quickly pleasure disappears. The pain comes, the pain goes. In between those events you permit yourself to feel it, which is why the second event happens. Then you reflect on the whole thing and marvel at how quickly things transitioned. You will probably ask yourself afterwards why you never handled your problems this way before.

no one gets it

2007-10-19T06:42:00.000-07:00

No one gets it. When you are no one, you will get it. But you'll also be no one. It won't matter so much that you get it, not how it mattered when you thought you were someone. In order to matter, there needs to be a someone to whom getting it is important.

Whenever you are no one, you will get it again. Whenever you are someone, you will no longer get it, and eventually return to wishing you did. The wishing is your doorway back into being no one, and getting it again. You can step through any time, and you will.

The experience of being awake is moment to moment. At any moment you can be someone or you can be no one and you'll come to see the difference clearly. Then the main function of being someone will be to realize you are no one, whenever you forget.

How will know you forgot? You will think you are someone again. Thinking you are someone is a state of forgetting. Understanding you are no one is a state of remembering. But no one will be there to remember, and that means you are getting it.

When getting it becomes regular, the difference between a someone and a no one will go away, because all differences belong to a someone. To a no one there are no differences. To a no one everything is absolutely the same underneath the diversity.

It is mostly as a no one that the deepest beauty of the world becomes evident. To a someone the recognition of that beauty tends to bring out a sense of being no one. Beauty humbles the someone into a state we call awe. Do you feel it? You really awe to.

sustaining spiritual clarity

2007-10-16T10:56:00.001-07:00

Spiritual clarity diminishes whenever personal self kicks in. The main concern, therefore, for anyone hoping to sustain spiritual clarity is how to minimize personal self. This objective is not only tricky, but contradicts many basic assumptions.

Another word for basic assumptions is conditioning. We are all conditioned to behave in certain ways and we attach to that behavior as if it defines us. The conditioning is so deep and so habitual that we generally defend it before letting it go.

Learning to let it go is what the spiritual life is all about. You are not your conditioning. You are not anything that turns out to be conditioning. Are you willing to find out exactly how much that is? The part of you that isn't is the first example of more conditioning.

What happens when that part takes over? The personal self appears. One moment you are free and the next you are not. One moment you are open and the next you are closed. It can happen that quickly, and usually does. No one wins races against the personal self.

Luckily, you don't have to. All you have to do is pay attention. To anything. Simply focus your attention on anything at all and you vanquish the personal self for as long as you like. The length and sincerity of the attention determines the results.

And now for the tricky part. The best results come from paying attention to the very thing you are trying to vanquish. Hold the personal self in your undivided attention and find out directly. That's how you vanquish it forever, by observing every piece.

the inner "of course"

2007-10-15T10:10:00.000-07:00

Spiritual seekers often yearn for a simple tidbit of wisdom that will bring them clarity whenever they implement it. The wish for it is the only reason it doesn't come true. But here's a pretty good one for the sake of experiment. It's called the inner "Of course".

Whatever stirs in you, say, "Of course". As soon as you notice the slightest hint of it, rather than telling yourself it's not there or reacting against it strongly, practice a different response and tell yourself, "Of course". Make it a habit and see what develops.

The inner "Of course" will never be necessary for the things you like feeling, because you already welcome those without reservation. The purpose of the inner "Of course" is primarily to address the things you don't want to feel, and tend to refuse to.

But consider them a moment. Are they not occurring anyway? Is your effort to keep them away really working? Does it serve your best interests? The unfortunate truth about denying or avoiding your feelings is they own you that way. Every single one you exclude.

Your excluded feelings create a false self out of you. You become their greatest champion by refusing to accept them. No one means to be judgmental. No one means to be unkind. These things happen in spite of us because excluded feelings are present.

The remedy is to include them. Let your hardest feelings exist. Greet them with the inner "Of course" and do nothing else about them. Remember: this is an experiment. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, admit you feel that way and repeat the magic words.

bare spirit in communion

2007-10-13T10:07:00.001-07:00

I would like to take your hand and communicate the absolute truth to you. I would like to sit with you and look each other in the eyes and be done with pretending once and for all. There is nothing more beautiful than bare spirit in communion. Nothing.

Bare spirit in communion is what these words are for. It's what everything is for. It's what my life and your life and everyone's life has ever been for. Did you think it was something else? Did you believe in a different purpose and chase after it like mad?

You can give that up now. All of it. You can give it up forever. You don't need it anymore. You've seen through it and you're all right. The pretending is over. That was not the real world. That was not the real you. Let them go. Move along.

The real you was never anything you could name or define. Whenever you tried, you fell short, and you had to keep at it. If you stopped, you disappeared. You were afraid to disappear. But the one who disappeared was not really who you are.

Is there any of that one left? Look me in the eyes and let's drop our final crumbs. We are not the ones who look. There is no one who looks. There is looking, but looking is doing it, not you and not me. You and me are fictitious, extra. The looking is enough.

You can exist that way now. You can drop all the noise and move into pure experience. It's been waiting for you from the start, enjoying your delays. It's the smile that happens when you aren't forcing one to. It's the look in your eyes when you aren't thinking "me".

the most valid use of mind

2007-10-11T13:02:00.000-07:00

On the spiritual path the most valid use of mind is to bring itself into question. A mind that brings itself into question regularly is a mind you can trust. All other functions of mind, on the spiritual path, lead into delusion and divisiveness if you aren't very careful, and often if you are.

How does a mind bring itself into question? By recognizing why it wants to. Until it sees why it wants to and resonates with what it sees, a mind will never be able to give itself up. It may comply with the recital of a thousand daily mantras and make a good show of how modest it is, but these activities are a smokescreen if the why is not clear.

The why is quite simple: to make room for spirit. Once a mind comprehends its own dominance as an impediment to spirit, it becomes much more supple in regard to moving over. This doesn't mean the mind goes away or the mind has no intrinsic value, but rather that spirit's value becomes more compelling to mind than its own. In this sense, mind is maturing. At last. It is fulfilling its highest purpose of service to the source of life.

For mind, the first phases of this transition can be disorienting. Mind is so accustomed to being in charge and commanding absolute allegiance from you about locating your identity there, that you may not know who you are as that bloated bubble bursts. You may lapse into fitful cycles of attempting to repair and re-inflate it. But all the king's horses and all the king's men. No, you can't put Humpty Dumpty together again, not without a bad conscience.

Which is when the fun starts. You are ready for honing the most valid use of mind, because you want to honor spirit. You are ready to hand your whole life to spirit and thereby discover your life, which was never other than spirit. Spirit is what you are, not mind in isolation from spirit. You are mind only insofar as mind is also a manifestation of spirit. Everything is.

So teach your beloved mind how to see through its domineering tendencies. Teach it to question everything it believes and everything it convinces you to believe. Because none of it is true. Not a single opinion or thought, not if they goad you into strong identification with them as a person named "me", which is also a thought, nothing more. It has no more substance than spirit, because spirit is what it is.

striving and happiness

2007-10-10T10:44:00.001-07:00

We spend a lot of time striving. Some of us spend our whole lives striving and never stop. What are we striving for really? We are striving to be happy. The problem is we go about it, for the most part, in a way that doesn't work. None of us is immune to this behavior. The only way you learn what does work is to exhaust yourself about what doesn't.

Happiness is not something you can arrive at later. That's not how happiness works. As long as you persist in the opinion that happiness is something you may not have now, but intend to have later, you will never be happy, not now, and not later. You may end up more comfortable, wealthier, famous, or friendlier, but you will not be happy, not in the sense of being completely at peace with yourself and your life.

Why is that? Why doesn't success in the area of striving pan out how it ought to with an end result of happiness? Mostly because of you. Once you get where you thought the happiness would be, once the striving pans out, you are still the same person who believed very deeply that you weren't happy enough yet, and that habit dies hard. It dreams up the next need before the last one is out of the box, or not long after.

Addressing that habit is the royal road to happiness. Only don't let that intention become another form of striving. There is nothing to strive for. You don't need to sort out every detail of how you have been striving previously and why it didn't serve you and what you ought to do next as a result. The fact is it did serve you, but not how you expected. It served you by teaching you it doesn't amount to happiness. If you don't know that for certain, you will do some more striving, and then you'll find out. Until you find out.

Once you do, you can let go of effort and finally be happy. You can laugh from deep inside that you made so much effort and did so much striving only to discover that effort and striving contradict what you were after. You'll laugh about this discovery because it's genuinely funny. If you find it genuinely funny now, you are well on the way to releasing yourself from striving and its perpetual disappointments. Let them go. Take a breath.

Good. Take another one. Breathe in; breathe out. That's all there is to it. Give it a try. Do it right now. Release yourself momentarily from your goals, concerns, ambitions. Put your striving aside and relax into the present experience of being where you are, as you are. There is nothing to change. You are already there. You are dwelling in perfect peace. Happiness is letting yourself.

the two kinds of spiritual teaching

2007-10-09T10:48:00.000-07:00

Once you pare it all down, there are basically two kinds of spiritual teaching. There is spiritual teaching that speaks directly about spirit and there is spiritual teaching that speaks indirectly about spirit. The purpose of both kinds is to clarify that everything is spirit, including you. We need this clarification because we tend to forget.

We tend to forget we are spirit, even after we awaken to this awareness. The habit of being asleep about it and going back to sleep about it is very strong. There is something mysterious about sleeping that spirit seems to enjoy immensely, as if it's playing a cherished game by doing it. Unfortunately for the sleeper, the game always leads to personal pain.

Personal pain is the reason for both kinds of spiritual teaching. If we never experienced any personal pain, we would no longer need spiritual teaching of any kind. We would no longer have any. Personal pain and spiritual teaching are inseparable. By addressing the causes of personal pain, all worthwhile spiritual teaching is attempting to put itself out of business.

It goes about this charitable mission in two ways. The first is to say what we are without qualification. We are spirit. We are spirit as it manifests into specific shapes and forms. The human being is precisely such a shape and form. Everything is. But beneath the shape and form is the source from which it sprang, and that's what we are.

The second way is to point out what we're not. This angle is completely context-specific. It always occurs in the context of questioning superficial notions of self for the sake of greater spiritual awareness. A superficial notion of self is any lasting conviction that we are primarily something other than spirit. Whatever that something happens to be, this form of spiritual teaching aims to release us from it. In that sense, this form of spiritual teaching is indirect, because it spends its time on illusion in order to dispel it.

The intention in both cases is exactly the same. The intention is always and only to bring you back to what you already are, to remind you and reinforce for you that you are originally spirit, and as spirit you are temporarily taking shape as everything else. Sometimes you take shape as direct teaching, sometimes you take shape as indirect teaching. You aren't the one or the other. Speaking indirectly, you aren't the person hearing them either.

refusing to feel

2007-10-08T17:45:00.000-07:00

The biggest spiritual blunder, in my opinion, is refusing to feel. It's also the most popular. It's the place where spiritual life and personal psychology reach a crossroads. If you want to advance in the first, you have to get real about the second.

What would it mean to get real about your personal psychology? It would mean coming clean. You don't have to admit any deep, dark secrets, which confirm your worst fear that you are somehow less acceptable than others. Quite the contrary. What you have to admit is that all people are the same, and you're undeniably one of them.

In terms of coming clean, this approach levels the playing field. It makes room for common sense. It's amazing we have to remind ourselves of it. After all, if there's anything a human being can feel, and you are a human being, isn't it pretty obvious when you think about it that you are going to feel it too? It couldn't be otherwise.

If you think you can get through this human life without feeling any of the harder things that all human beings feel, such as anger, sadness, despair, or fear, you are wrong. No, you are wrong. You will have to feel them just like everyone else does. The enlightened sage is not immune to this bad news, but fully open to it. Fully.

You can be too. It's simply a matter of practice. It's simply a matter of reversing any present tendencies against feeling whatever comes up for you. At all times. If you generally close off to anger, you have to admit you feel angry whenever it is happening. If it's sadness, be sad. If it's anxiety, feel the anxiety. You don't need to stew in these hard areas indulgently. The point is to be aware of them whenever they set in. That's enough. That's a lot.

Over time you'll discover they aren't as hard anymore. Their difficulty drops considerably as you respond to them repeatedly with awareness and acceptance. If you're also willing to feel them, their difficulty bottoms out and may eventually go away altogether. The hard feelings come, the hard feelings go. You don't have to inflate them with drama and lose yourself in it.

It turns out that's what the difficulty was in the first place. It wasn't the feeling itself, which is perfectly normal and natural and occurs universally. It was something else that was difficult. It was something else and on its behalf you were seriously risking precious resources of energy and intelligence. Those are the price tag for sustaining the refusal to feel. You have to fool yourself ceaselessly that you aren't really fooling yourself.

when spirit pretends

2007-10-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

What is suffering? Why do we suffer? The answer is simple, but difficult to hear. Suffering is spirit insisting on being aware of itself. We suffer because, as spirit, we are tired of pretending we aren't spirit.

How do we pretend we aren't spirit? The question might be restated as follows: how don't we? It seems that pretending we aren't spirit is most of what we do. The whole world is a great theater in which spirit is pretending not to be itself, and generally believing the charade. This can even be true in spiritual matters. As soon as you think you are a "someone" more than you remember you are spirit, the pretending begins.

But nobody really likes the pretending. There is tremendous attachment to it, but the attachment gives rise to every sorrow, heartache, and difficult emotion in your life. And eventually you have to get sick of those. That is, notice them. They happen so you'll notice them. They are all forms of suffering and they serve to get your attention.

Your attention. Whose attention? Who are you? Are you really the person who is lost in the suffering? That's what the suffering eventually makes clear: that you aren't. That it's been a big mistake all along to consider yourself that person, any person. That prior to your "personhood" there is something more basic and essential, and that something is the real you, and has been all along. You were mistaken not to realize it.

In other words, sufficient suffering serves to disrupt you from your identification with your outer form, which is not your most essential self. Go ahead and disagree with me and observe the recurrence of suffering in your life. It won't go away. You can bury it under pills, distract yourself from it with a frantic lifestyle, and talk your mind into countless airtight dismissals of the facts, but they don't go away, not forever, not for very long at all.

Why wait? Why wait anymore? Haven't you waited enough? Once you hear the truth about your suffering, don't you want to release yourself from it? Simply admit to yourself what you've known all along. Admit you are spirit and always have been. Admit you are pretending not to be. Admit it now and repeatedly.

Or go on suffering.