(Suffering as ancient rite of passage)
For whatever you are going through, others have also experienced it – perhaps not in the exact same circumstances, but certainly in the same pain. Loss, break-ups, disappointments, illness, death – these are not ‘yours’ but ancient rites of passage, cosmic rituals that all humans, if they are honest, have been through and must go through if they are to be human at all.
had returned to guide us through our own trials, reminding us, ‘however intense it becomes, know that you are not alone, and this is meant to happen, and many others have been here before.’
“Do not fear, child, this is only an ancient rite of passage, a natural part of the journey, to be expected and to be embraced, and all is well”? Through the eyes of this ancient universe, nothing in your life story is a small event, nothing is insignificant and unworthy of loving attention. There are zero ‘ordinary’ moments when seeing through these ancient eyes. Everything is ‘religious’, everything is sacred, everything has more significance than you could ever hope to imagine. And this way of seeing beyond the ‘I’ can help take us out of our self-pity and obsession with our own problems, and into a place of universal connection and deep compassion for all those brothers and sisters who, in their own unique ways, are on exactly the same journey as we are. We may live apart, but we do not go through life alone.
(Awakening as wide open space with no owner)
WIDE OPEN SPACE I would never say that I am ‘awakened’. I would never say that I am not. Why? Because I cannot find any solid, independent entity here that could ever be one or the other. No story about myself can stand here in the vastness. No story can take root, no conclusion can settle. All I find here, when I take a fresh look without prior assumptions, is a wide open space in which the dynamic scenery of life plays itself out – an alive space inseparable from that very scenery, a vast and unlimited ocean inseparable from its myriad waves, from thoughts, sensations, feelings as they arise and fall. And so any claim of enlightenment or awakening or their absence is wonderfully irrelevant here, in the already-awake vastness that belongs to nobody at all.
JUNE You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait. Become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. – Franz Kafka
A UNIQUE FLOWER You are a unique flower, with your own irreplaceable scent, your own way of moving in the world, your own uncopyable creative dance in the breeze. A rose does not say to a lily, “I wish I was you, I wish I had your scent, your curves, your colours, the way you attract the light…”, for it knows that in essence they are one and the same being, consciousness itself, one flowering as two, and that the unity of consciousness manifests as diversity and difference and astonishing variety, a variety which is itself a call to the remembrance of unity. A rose sees its own essence in the lily, and the lily in the rose, but they also know to honour their own uniqueness and irreplaceability, their temporary flowering in time and space. Be the essence, and love your flowering, love the taste of yourself, your unique flavour, your special dance that cannot be replicated, never feeling superior or inferior to another flowering, never longing to delete your own flowering, never blaming other flowerings for the way you flower or do not flower, for other flowerings are wildly uncontrollable too, forging their own path towards the light.
(Grief and the dissolution of the separate self)
Sinking deeper into the grief, you may discover that you haven’t actually lost something or someone ‘outside’ of yourself at all. You’ve actually lost a part of yourself, a part of you that made you feel fully yourself, and that’s why it hurts so much right now. You don’t feel fully yourself anymore. You feel broken, incomplete, like a fragment of ‘you’ is missing, like a piece is missing from the jigsaw of your heart. How can you be fully you, without them? How can son be son without father? How can wife be wife without husband? How can brother be brother without brother? You begin to wonder if, in fact, the part of yourself that you ‘lost’ was really ‘you’ at all. How can you truly lose a part of yourself? If you can lose a part of you, was it actually ‘you’ in the first place? You begin to wonder who you really are – or who you really were – beyond your dream of yourself.
The ghost of loss no longer frightens us – it is a friendly ghost after all. We have only been given the experience of knowing our loved one, feeling them, touching them, smelling them, feeding them, holding them, even witnessing their passing. What a privilege. Life cannot take that away – it has only given, and it continues to give, if we have eyes to see it. Perhaps their life and death unfolded in the only way it could have done. Perhaps they lived the path that was right for them, even at the end. Perhaps they died exactly on cue.
The device of our torture becomes our salvation. Remember Jesus on the cross. When faced, and not turned away from, our raw grief can serve as an ancient and timeless nondual spiritual teaching, a dynamic and alive teaching, a wake-up call to that heart-breaking compassion for all of humanity the likes of which we once could have only dreamed. The impermanence of things is natural and neutral, and everything passes, and that in itself is not wrong or bad – it is the way, and has always been the way, and will always be the way. Loss is only a rite of passage. It is when we forget or deny the impermanence of things, and dream of permanence and try to fix our future, and then our dreams are shattered by impermanence, that we suffer and fight the way of things.
INSTANT FORGIVENESS Everybody is doing their absolute best, from their own relative perspective. Because of what they believe, their worldview, their perceived limitations, their fears, their wounds, the extent to which they’ve forgotten their true nature, the unique way in which they are healing or trying to heal, or not healing at all, they have no choice but to be the way they are right now. Great forgiveness can arise from seeing that everybody is a slave to their own opinions until they wake from them. And you cannot wake someone until they are ready, and perhaps not even then. They know not what they do.
(Awareness welcoming every emotion without preference)
A HEALING CONVERSATION Sadness: “Sorry, awareness, I know I shouldn’t be here. I’m so sorry. I’ll be leaving soon. I know I’m a stain on your perfection…” Awareness: “No. Wait. It’s okay. You’re allowed to be here! Relax! Stay awhile! Invite your friends!” Sadness: “You mean, I’m not a stain on your perfection?” Awareness: “A stain? Perfection? Whoever gave you those words? How could I be stained by you, or anyone?” Sadness: “But they told me I shouldn’t be here!” Awareness: “Ah, they are all just afraid of you, because they don’t see that you are inseparable from me! They are trying to reach something called enlightenment in something called the future. It’s very endearing.” Sadness: “But I don’t understand. I thought you preferred happiness to me?” Awareness: “Preferred? What does that mean?” Sadness: “Oh…. Well I know how negative I am, and…” Awareness: “Negative? What’s that?” Sadness: “You know, positive and negative, light and dark, heaven and hell, you and me?” Awareness: “Nope. Never heard of those divisions. Hell, I don’t even know who I’m talking to right now!” Sadness: “Oh sorry. Let me introduce myself. I’m sadness…” Awareness: “Sadness. Sadness. Interesting. You know, it’s just that you’re so close I can’t see your boundaries, so it’s hard for me to call you anything at all.”
Awareness: “Yes, I know, it’s strange! They all do the same, for some reason. Fear, anger, even pain, I don’t understand why they are all scared of me. I have never asked them to leave. And happiness, joy, bliss, too – I have never asked them to stay. Everyone is either trying to stay, or trying to run away from me! It’s very peculiar.” Sadness: “So, they are all allowed to come and to go in you? I mean, you allow it all?” Awareness: “Well… More than that! You see, I can’t actually allow anything, or get rid of anything. It’s all just myself. Do you see? Even you….”
THE CALL OF BROKENNESS Friend, when you feel broken, lost, far away from home, when enlightenment seems like another country and the words of the saints and sages seem like fairy stories, when answers won’t come, and doubts rage like fire… Stop. Breathe. Remember, nothing has gone wrong. A dream is dying, that is all, a second-hand dream of how this moment ‘should’ have been. As the brokenness calls to you, as the doubts sing their crazy song, as stories cascade like oceans, remember that the very homesickness you try to push away is actually inviting you to your true Home, Here and Now, prior to all earthly homes. A problem is a situation that longs for kind attention. A crisis is a turning point. Dis-ease is a call for profound rest and release. Trauma is the invitation to the kind of acceptance you never even imagined. Raging doubts are explosions of supreme intelligence, calling you to deep trust in your own first-hand experience, and a fearless plunge into the constant embrace of the Unknown. Even when it all seems to be going wrong, stop and breathe and remember that nothing can go wrong in the vast field of your undying presence.
A PERFECT LOVE The things I should have said, The ways in which I turned away, Protecting an image I never was, For a salvation I never knew. But now I have learned, That salvation lies only in turning toward, In burning these images one by one, In letting go of these precious children, The ones I smothered with love, Out of fear of being nothing. This may be harder than letting go of my actual children. But whoever said unconditional love was easy? It is not easy. It is internal genocide. The flames ravage without discrimination. Leaving no part of me untouched. But I’d rather die than never know this love. So have no pity, dear friend. Sit by my side as I burn. Hold my hand this one last time. Let me feel your warm presence. Know that I always loved you in my own imperfect way. Through the thick and rancid smoke of my old self, Through the passing of all that we thought would never pass, Can you smell the unspeakable freedom? Do you understand now?
THE FREEDOM TO NOT BE PRESENT We are encouraged to ‘be in the Now’ and ‘be present’, and perhaps that is a useful practice, for a while. But then you go deeper, and ask, “What is this me that can be present, or not be present?” – and soon you discover that you are that very presence, ever-present in the midst of being present or not being present, in the midst of every thought, sensation and feeling, unchanging, indestructible and so very intimate. You are the common denominator throughout every experience of your life. You are the unchanging ground of all experience. So give yourself the greatest present of all – the freedom to be present or not be present!
God cannot be anything less than the totality, than all that is touched, tasted, heard, smelled, known, imagined and dreamed, and whether we dream of the God of a personal religion or of God’s non-existence, God is a word, a metaphor for That which gives rise to all of it, prior to human belief and knowledge and even faith. Yes, this God is so vast that even our faith is too small to contain it, and our science cannot touch it, and yet it is as intimate and obvious and present as the very next breath…
(The body’s intelligence at the edge of dissolution)
TOO MUCH LIFE? Existence can feel overwhelming sometimes; the waves in life’s ocean can be so intense that it feels like we will be destroyed if we go any further, and the only ‘solution’ seems to be to shut down and distract ourselves from present experience, and then dream of a future freedom or awakening. Pain, fear, sadness, joy and bliss, can feel so huge, so unmanageably colossal, so intense, it’s almost as if you’re about to die, about to be crushed by the weight of life, or burnt in its fire, and it can be terrifying, to be on the verge of death like that, to be on the precipice of total dissolution. Perhaps it’s not death we are afraid of, but too much life.
A wave cannot overwhelm the water, a storm cannot destroy the sea, a tornado cannot damage the air, a teardrop cannot cry itself, and grounded in this knowing, we can expand rather than contract, we can relax rather than tense up, we can allow ourselves to feel totally overwhelmed beyond reason, whilst knowing deeply that we can never be truly overwhelmed in our essence, and that if we ever did reach that elusive point of ‘too much’, the vast and creative and loving intelligence of the body would render us unconscious instantly. We are always spared from ‘too much’.
“stop seeking, child, rest deeply in yourself, and ye are found…”
OUR WOUNDS, ILLUMINED Don’t hide your wounds, friend. Let them into this last candlelight. I won’t judge you. See, we are all broken. There’s no shame in being wounded. You have fought many battles. Your wounds are not your faults. Illumined, they are reminders of a deeper healing. Illumined, they are invitations to the Unbroken. Right there at the heart of your wounds, infinitely deeper than enlightenment, a silent Hallelujah stirs to wake. You are only a ‘screwed up mess’ compared to some second-hand image of perfection.
Yes, these teachings of Presence and Being Here Now and Present Moment Awareness can seem so over-simplistic, even naive, to the mind. They are so easy to misunderstand and dismiss. After all, who wants to let go of their dreams of past and future and face a mysterious moment? Who wants to admit the fragility and preciousness of life, its fleeting nature, the bitter-sweet gift of it? Who wants to confront their own powerlessness and recognise a deep cosmic humility? Who wants to die to time? Who wants to give up the idea of control? Whose heart could take such grace? The most profound truth of existence is simple, but never simplistic. Is acceptance of ‘what is’ the same as giving up on the possibility of change? No. Never. Does acceptance mean tolerating or “putting up with” things? Does it mean blindly following violent impulses? Not at all. Does acceptance mean becoming detached and passive, turning a blind eye to violence and letting others walk all over us and our loved ones? No way. Does acceptance mean playing a new role, the role of the “very spiritually evolved, deeply accepting, utterly peaceful person who is never affected by anything”? No. Acceptance is not a role, and it’s not personal.
THE ‘I’ OF THE STORM Rest as the great storm nears. Relax as all you know comes to an end. In the storm’s eye, In the centre of the madness, You will only lose your imagination of yourself. You will only lose definitions. The storm will not destroy your capacity to love, Nor your sense of being alive. It will only remind you of what you knew long ago. So stand now in the calm before the storm and wait and choicelessly fall into its infinitely calm centre.