The Unfolding Now

And we can also feel our resistance to that relaxation based on a deep fear of becoming passive, dependent, or helpless about our life. Our relaxation into exactly who and where we are is what allows us to stop defending and hiding who we truly are.

In simply being, we discover the implicit nature of Being, of our Being. We find that this Being is dynamic and intelligent.

THE UNFOLDING NOW is an introduction to a spiritual path that is based on being with your own immediate experience in an intimate and curious way. It is not about doing anything to your experience, but neither is it simply detaching from your experience.

If you choose to do the exercises with someone else, generally it is good to plan on an hour of time to explore together, but it could be less if need be. You can use the simple format of taking fifteen to twenty minutes each to do the exercise.

Most of us tend to look for quiet by changing our physical surroundings. We look outside of ourselves for this peace and ease of being. But much of the constant activity is actually inside our head. Even if we go away from the highways, from the supermarkets, from the TVs and telephones to sit and meditate—even in the quiet of our own room—it doesn’t mean that we are getting away from the noise inside. And why is there so much noise, so much activity? The answer, of course, comes to us as more noise—more activity in our mind. To explain, analyze, work with, or discuss why our minds are so busy can only increase the busyness inside. You have probably already noticed that yourself.

So our mind tends to be noisy and busy, just like the world we live in. We are hearing so much noise, that after a while we don’t know what we are doing here. There isn’t enough quiet space to feel ourselves in a simple, immediate way; we don’t have enough space to just be ourselves. All this extra stuff is competing for our attention. And if we do make the space to feel ourselves, what we find inside is mostly busyness, so the possibility of peace seems like a pipe dream. That is how our world is, how our life is, and how our mind is, too. Most of the time, we don’t even question it; we think that is just how it is. It is a noisy world, so we learn to live with it. No wonder that for some people, getting ready to leave this world is what it takes to quiet down. If the dying process is slow, by the time they finally leave, it has usually quieted down inside. You might have seen this in someone you know. Often it requires something that radical for us to be quiet, something like death. In this book, we want to learn how to let death quiet us while we live—how to be quiet in the midst of the noise before we reach the end of life.

Living in our minds is actually like that. Have you noticed how busy your mind is just reading these words? The mind is always occupied with reactions, judgments, questions, associations, desires, and attitudes. And we have become like teenagers who are used to all that noise. We think the noise is what reality is and no longer recognize what is truly real. We are not feeling ourselves in that intimate, simple, relaxed way that we like but may have forgotten exists—the feeling we would like to have when we go to a movie to relax and watch something interesting.

The spiritual journey is not about having experiences, interesting insights, or unusual perceptions, although those will often arise as part of it. I am not saying they don’t have their place and value, but they are not the point of the inner journey. Inner practice is basically a matter of settling and quieting. It is about settling into the simplicity of just being ourselves and feeling our realness—being in reality instead of in the echoes of reality.

We focus on what the noise is saying or else we are busy responding to it—defending, justifying, reacting, explaining, judging, thinking, planning, remembering. But those activities are just the reflections of what is real. Being real is what we are, what we truly are, and we experience it in the moment. And being real doesn’t require that we experience anything in particular. It is more about the way we are being, rather than what we are being.

Being real is what we are, what we truly are, and we experience it in the moment. And being real doesn’t require that we experience anything in particular. It is more about the way we are being, rather than what we are being.

Many people get caught up in spiritual experiences and perceptions and all kinds of interesting, subtle impressions, some of which can be exciting and uplifting. But there is nothing like the simplicity of being oneself—settling into yourself, just being there, recognizing what you are, and feeling the sense of intimacy and realness of that. All of the inner journey, all of spiritual practice, ultimately comes down to this: that we are able to be genuinely what we are.

It means learning how to recognize our agitated activity, our noise, and how not to go along with it. Instead we learn to simply settle, relax, and be.

LEARNING TO BE REAL IS a full-time job. It doesn’t work to just practice it at certain times. But to make that kind of commitment, you have to love and appreciate reality. You have to want to be real at any cost. You have to love being real—even if you don’t like what you’re feeling or who you think you are in any particular moment. That kind of love is the most powerful motive—the real inspiration—for our inner work. If your longing for reality is lukewarm or if it comes and goes, where will the passion and inner support come from to sustain yourself as you learn to be real? The more you are in touch with your love of being real, the more you will be inspired… and the more you will be fired up to do the work. But what does it mean to be real?

If I am bored, but I don’t know that I am bored, how will I ever know that meaninglessness underlies my boredom? If I am bored, but I think it’s just because the food I’m eating is tasteless, there is no chance to understand the situation. So the first thing I need to do is to attend to what is happening. Maybe the first thing that strikes me is not that I am bored, but that the food is tasteless. Maybe I am bored, but I don’t feel I am bored. Instead, I feel it’s me rather than the food that is tasteless. Or perhaps I am not paying attention to the fact that the food is tasteless because I’m on the phone talking to somebody because I don’t want to taste the tastelessness. And the food is tasteless because I am actually bored. And I am actually bored because life feels meaningless to me. And because I prefer not being aware of any of that, I end up talking on the phone about a movie or some family business.

I’ll give you a simple example. Let’s say you take a bite of a peach and discover that it is rotten. What is the teaching? Hands off! Hands off means that I take a bite, I experience the rotten taste, so I put the peach down, but I don’t put away my experience of the rotten taste. Many people misunderstand hands off, thinking it means that they should continue eating the peach. But that’s not what it means. The rotten taste is already in my mouth. I already have it as an inner sensation that is arising in my experience. If I try to put that sensation away, I am dividing myself; I am saying no to something in my experience. So when we say, “hands off,” we mean hands off whatever arises in our inner experience.

That is what True Nature teaches us. It doesn’t do anything to itself. It just is. So what we need to learn is how to be just like that. That is what the practice is. True Nature doesn’t say, “Do this or do that.” Rather, it tells us not to do things that interfere: “No pushing, don’t manipulate, that’s not it.” Whenever we want to do something to ourselves, it tells us, “No, hands off—leave your experience alone.”

We have always tried to make ourselves feel something that is different from how we actually feel, because we have it in our minds that however things are in our experience is not

True Nature does nothing, but it is naturally aware because it is pure awareness. If we just let things be—if we don’t control them or try to direct them—we are naturally, simply aware. And in this awareness, we are present to whatever is happening. True Nature is so loving, so kind—infinite in its kindness and compassion and intelligence—that it relates to each condition exactly according to what that condition needs. And it doesn’t give you an instruction that you cannot relate to. It doesn’t try to tell you to practice something you cannot practice. In our work, we discover that True Nature responds to our limitations—our stuckness, our lack of development, our reactivity—appropriately and with attunement and kindness.

that we enjoyed in the past and trying to shift our consciousness in that direction. As we continue our study, we will learn more about the various ways that we interfere with our experience. But however we interfere, it is always true that because we don’t have the infinite wisdom, intelligence, and awareness that True Nature has, we don’t know what should happen next in our inner experience. Doing anything to make our moment-to-moment experience different from what it is means we believe we are God; we believe we know how things should be. So you might think, “Now I am going to meditate so I can experience pure peace.” But who said that pure peace should be the next thing you experience?

Now if you catch yourself meddling, that doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong. Let’s establish that right away because for sure you are going to catch yourself doing just that.

The moment we take the posture of ego, of identification with our history, it implies resistance. There is no such thing as ego with no resistance, and the ultimate resistance is the resistance to simply being, the resistance to our True Nature. And that’s because ego is always trying to do one thing or another, and True Nature isn’t doing anything. It just is. It is nature. It is luminous presence.

we didn’t resist our nature we would instantly be our nature.

We believe instead that who we are is the one who is resisting, and we are attempting to preserve our identity. It might be that allowing ourselves to feel our True Nature would threaten us too much by bringing all kinds of vulnerabilities, fears, or insecurities into the open. In fact, truly being is a kind of death. I talk about things such as resistance and how to be allowing, but to really be without resistance means ego death, ultimately.

Explicit resistance occurs when some experience we don’t want arises or is about to arise, and we defend against it by thickening, contracting, dulling ourselves, or pushing against what is there. For example, a hurt is arising, and you say, “No, it’s too much; I don’t want to feel that.” Our consciousness then thickens to push it away, to close it down. There is a direct rejection, denial, or pushing against our experience or some element of it.

And so you continue to inquire into your experience. And inquiry does not necessarily mean you have to do something or ask a specific question. It is more like observing with curiosity, “I am feeling thick. I am so thick that I don’t even know what is going on. Who knows what this is? I really don’t like it. I wish I weren’t thick.” All of this is included in the inquiry. So if you recognize that you really don’t like it, that you’d rather feel delicate and fine, you are recognizing some kind of resistance that might be part of the thickness. That is okay, too. Everything needs to be included.

If we are able to allow our experience—to embrace it, hold it, and feel it fully, rather than rejecting it or trying to change it—we give it the space to be itself. Then it will naturally unfold because that is the nature of our True Nature.

That is because being completely aware would mean being aware of all the things that scare us or might hurt us or that we are ashamed of. So we defend against them and stop being aware. Much of the time, we are defending ourselves against reality; and it is not against reality as much as it is against our own experience.

That defensiveness is a barrier against our unconscious, but also against much of our potential, because it is a defense against experience, a defense against the expansion of awareness, a defense against being present, a defense against being real.

The wonderful thing is that vulnerability becomes the door to intimacy, to being ourselves, to being real, to being where we are. But for that to happen, we have to be willing to be vulnerable to what is. Being vulnerable means that our soul is open for things to arise in it. It is not defended.

But our vulnerability is also the quality of our humanness. It is a heart quality of openness, of gentleness, that is needed for us to recognize where we are and to abide there. We cannot truly recognize where we are without that gentleness, that humanness, that humility. But that means we will find ourselves in a vulnerable condition. Vulnerability in the face of danger feels frightening, but in the absence of danger, vulnerability can simply mean feeling naturally, undefendedly yourself. So we have a dilemma. We are scared, we want to protect ourselves, but at the same time we want to be real. How are we going to solve this paradox? How do we protect ourselves against danger and still

Only by opening ourselves to what is present in our experience—especially our tendency to defend ourselves—can we challenge our fear of being real. The more we see our defensiveness and understand it, the more we invite in the tender, intimate vulnerability of our souls that is hidden behind the walls. It is this vulnerability that allows our true humanness to reveal itself in the simplicity of being ourselves.

Understanding how these obstacles arise within your experience is a major factor in our practice. But there are additional factors that, once understood, can also make our practice simpler and easier.

The fact that many thoughts, feelings, activities, and impulses arise in us in response to the central event makes it difficult to see where we are. To know where we are, we need to find out what is centrally arising. What’s the primary component? Much of the time we are trapped in the secondary components, and we cannot separate those from the primary event. Is what I’m experiencing the primary event, or am I experiencing my fear or judgment of it or my thought process around it? Can I separate these responses from the event itself? The relationship of primary and secondary components in our experience can be likened to the phenomenon called a black hole. A black hole is an area in space that appears black or empty because in that location, a nuclear event of such mass and intensity is occurring that nothing can escape the gravitational pull of the event—no matter of any kind, and not even light.

We have not yet reached the discovery of essential presence, so our journey is toward presence.

The next stage begins once we have discovered and recognized presence as an expression of our True Nature with its pure sense of here-ness, its authenticity, its is-ness, its immaculateness.

In the third stage, we are journeying in presence, not just with presence. Now presence has moved to center stage, and it is the field within which all of our experience arises. This is what we call nonduality, and our practice becomes nondual practice. Presence here is the ground, the nature, of everything in its essence and its manifestation.

As soon as we identify the primary component and can be fully present with it—recognize it completely, feel it fully, intimately hold it—what is arising begins to unfold and change. We might find out that it has become a secondary component to something more primary. Let’s say our primary component is terror.

All obstacles to being ourselves can be divided into three categories: ignorance, desire, and aggression.

Many people these days blame their insecurity on terrorism in the world. But the actual lack of safety is more a result of the terrorism that is inside our minds—the internal saboteurs.

We’re afraid that other people will do these things to us and sometimes that actually happens. But more often, we do these things to ourselves. Have you ever said to yourself, “If I really let myself be vulnerable, I feel so delicate, sweet, and innocent. If people notice that, they will judge me as good for nothing”? Or maybe you’ve thought, “If I feel that sweet innocence, I’m going to get embarrassed. I’m going to be humiliated. It means I’m not strong. Somebody is going to reject me or shame me.” These worries are usually a projection onto other people of our own inner terrorist that’s scaring us.

Somebody is going to reject me or shame me.” These worries are usually a projection onto other people of our own inner terrorist that’s scaring us.

defend against them.

As a matter of fact, in time, simply feeling our strength burns up the superego, without our doing anything to make it happen.

Because that’s what the inner journey is—going where we haven’t gone before.

And I have indicated that knowing where you are will lead you to knowing and being the deeper nature of what you are.

But it is useful to keep in mind that what you are is not separate from the deepest nature of reality itself. This true reality is a nondual oneness of pure Being.

This true reality is a nondual oneness of pure Being.

primordial and partial truth—

Let us start with the recognition that reality itself doesn’t actually have levels. Reality—everything that exists—is all True Nature. It is all one thing.

“I want to understand it in a way that is meaningful to my heart, that nourishes my heart and my soul; I don’t just want an explanation.”

the presence and the awareness that pervades our experience reveals itself to be that underlying truth, or True Nature, that we have been seeking.

Eventually, we are able to see how our individual experience is nothing but True Nature, and we move toward the realization of pure Being—the oneness that is nondual reality.

Presence is what exists, what is, and everything that exists is a form that presence takes.

“God is the unknowable transcendent unity of all.”

Thus, in this condition of nondual realization, one perceives a transparency and a luminosity of oneness and at the same time a seamless harmony in the manifestations of that oneness. Whatever the situation, what we would normally distinguish as bad or good is experienced as a seamless and graceful harmony that is simple but beautiful, aesthetically inspiring and uplifting.

Almost everyone is continually dealing with rejection in some form. Most people constantly reject their emotions: “I’m feeling anger now… I shouldn’t feel anger. I’m feeling weak… oh, that’s terrible. I’m feeling love… I definitely can’t feel that; that person’s married!” Whatever’s arising that we think we don’t want, we reject it—we don’t want to experience it. And we want to be casual about it, too; we’d like to deal with those feelings as though we were sweeping dirt off a floor. But what we think of as the dirt is us. That’s because nothing exists outside of our experience, our own consciousness. Your experience is not like the contents of a purse that you can throw away. Experience is the actual fabric of the purse—so if you try to throw part of your experience away, you are tearing yourself apart. The more you reject something in yourself, the more you tear yourself apart—because that something is you. It doesn’t matter what it is—hatred, or frustration, or love, or grandiosity, or anything else; if you’re trying to push it away, sweep it away, get rid of it, what results is a tremendous tearing apart of the soul. It affects you that way even though you don’t know it.

Rejection is remarkably painful in a way that is not easily understood. Do we know why we try so hard to avoid it? We know that being rejected by someone is humiliating. It is belittling. It’s diminishing. People feel distraught or destroyed when they feel rejected. Why is that? Why is the experience of rejection such a devastating thing? The first rejection most people were engaged in occurred in infancy, when they threw up milk. Even if you can’t remember that far back, you’ve probably had several experiences of throwing up something you ate or drank. The prototype of rejection is throwing something up. Something you’ve taken in doesn’t taste good—it doesn’t feel right—so you throw it up. That is rejection.

What’s the experience like of throwing something up? How are you feeling as you do that? Throwing up is not a neutral, easygoing activity. It’s not like a polite request: “Please leave the room now.” When you throw up, your whole body convulses. It is instinctual and violent. Rejection has within it this intense desire to get rid of something…

Now imagine that somebody is directing that kind of intense, violent, repulsive energy at you. It is humiliating. That’s why it hurts. That’s why it’s so…

The attitude of rejection is something we need to understand. It’s not just a mental orientation. When the soul is saying no and denying a part of itself, the attitude of rejection is a reflection of the same kind of…

Because we know how much we dislike something…

up, we can appreciate that we unconsciously fear such a violent reaction being aimed at us, and we avoid rejection internally (from our superego) as well as externally (from others). When we reject something in our experience, that’s what we’re doing—we’re trying to throw out part of ourselves. We’re not just getting rid of it by taking it out and throwing it away; we are trying to throw it away with an emotionally violent action similar to vomiting it out. You want to vomit…

Rejection, disapproval, or looking down on something that we think doesn’t measure up are not just detached positions we take about our experience; they are violent, destructive behaviors we use to harm ourselves. How does our soul react to this aggressive wounding attitude? In the same way you would react if you thought someone you were about to meet for a first date was going to reject you. What would you do? First, you’d get anxious. And if the anxiety got severe enough, you might chicken out. Your date arrives, is waiting for you,…

If we have a tendency to reject our experience, a part of us is going to feel the same as the person in this example: “I’m not going to show myself. I’m going to hide or cover myself up or pretend I’m like this or that I’m not like that.” After a while, if we keep doing this, we’re not aware anymore of what’s going on inside us. That awareness is not even possible for us because parts of our experience are so suppressed that they don’t even come up to be seen. Or, if they do arise, they’re so camouflaged or defended that we can’t become aware of what they really are. If we can’t be aware, we can’t understand. If we can’t understand, we can’t be fully there. If we can’t be there, present, we can’t be ourselves. If we can’t be ourselves, we can’t be real. We can’t be real if we reject ourselves. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t matter what comes up; we can’t reject anything that arises in ourselves and be real. Saints…

saint is that? But that’s how we think saints are. And we think they’ll disapprove of us if we have a bad…

Acceptance As Resignation

You might be thinking at this point that the best alternative to rejecting your experience is to do the opposite. What is the opposite of rejection? Acceptance. You see what’s arising—you see your weakness or your hatred or your vulnerability—and now you don’t reject it, you just accept it. But we need to look closer at this to uncover what may be underneath it. For most people, acceptance means, “What’s there is there. I might as well accept it since I can’t do anything about it.” But that implies, “I still don’t like it, but I can’t change it so I just have to accept it.” That kind of acceptance may seem to be the opposite of rejection, but it actually has rejection embedded in it. It means, “I’m just trying to do the right thing. Inside, I really am rejecting this experience, but I want to be a good practitioner, so I’m going to act as if I accept it.”

True acceptance doesn’t contain any kind of attitude of rejection. It is not a humiliating, violent throwing up, nor does it bring up any repulsion in the soul. It’s just there. Something arises, and you don’t respond with a moral or preferential invested judgment. You just recognize the feeling or experience for what it is, whether it’s something that feels good or doesn’t feel good. You experience it with presence and awareness. Your sense of satisfaction or contentment doesn’t depend on whether it meets a particular standard that you have set up for your experience.

So, when I say that rejection doesn’t work, that it’s an impediment to our practice, this doesn’t mean that the antidote—or what people call the antidote—is to accept it. Because that “antidote” has within in it an implicit rejection, as well as a judgmental attitude. And why is that? Because to accept instead of reject is really saying: “It’s better not to reject, so I’ll accept, which means I’m not going to push it away; I’m going to resign myself to it.”

Acceptance As Grasping

We think we are accepting, when what we are actually doing is grasping at or holding on to an experience that we like having. What happens when we judge our experience to be good or desirable? We say we accept it, and we can then say that acceptance is the opposite of rejection. But what does that really mean in this case? We generally do not reject the experiences and feelings that feel good. But is that true acceptance?

The acceptance of True Nature is quite a different thing. True acceptance does not grasp or hold on to anything. It says, “I’m happy being myself—it’s irrelevant whether what I’m eating right now is good food or bad food. I’m fine with it. I can be here with it. It’s interesting. It may taste terrible or it may taste delicious. I’m open to the situation.” In this case, there is no need to judge it one way or another.

If I truly accept my experience—without comparative moral judgment about it—then I am not disappointed about it. Neither am I happy about it. I’m neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. I don’t need to feel anything in particular about it. I’m just fine with it the way it is. So, most of the time, when people think they are in acceptance, they are either wanting to hold on to something they feel good about or they have become resigned to something that they don’t feel good about, because they don’t know what else to do.

True acceptance isn’t a judgment that my weight should be different from what it is. True acceptance says, “Since this is how it is, I’m interested in experiencing it and fully being with it; I am totally present and I’m being here with energy, with interest, with enthusiasm about life.”

What we call true acceptance is more of a contented awareness—an awareness that’s content with itself. It’s not busy judging and rejecting what’s arising in it. True acceptance is not invested. It is not attached to any desire or need for things to be different from how they are.

It is this kind of acceptance that is necessary for us to handle the peach correctly. Do you remember the peach that we talked about in chapter 3? The peach is no good, so you put it away, but you don’t reject your feeling. You don’t reject the taste. It doesn’t matter what the taste is like. It could be rotten or sweet. You take note of the sensations of taste, but being yourself—being who you are—doesn’t change; your inner balance remains. You do not engage in any pushing or pulling that will divide you. Rejection divides the soul within itself. It says, “I am here, and I am rejecting this experience in me and making it into something other than me.” That’s what rejection is: making something in us be an “other” that is not part of us.

EXPLORATION SESSION Discerning True Acceptance of Your Experience This exercise will help you to explore how acceptance and rejection function in your experience. In this session, you will be following your moment-to-moment process in present time. The aim is to be where you are—whatever you are experiencing—and follow your experience as it unfolds for at least fifteen minutes. You are not trying to have a particular experience of acceptance. You can see things, compare them, and understand them, but you don’t need to do anything at all about them. You are simply experiencing. After you have finished, go back and review what happened. As you remember your experience, notice when and how the different elements arose. Was rejection active? When did you experience resigned acceptance? When did grasping acceptance show up? What kinds of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions led to the experience of rejection? Did you shift into true acceptance at certain points? How did that happen? Which element did you find yourself most often engaged in? What kinds of patterns do you observe about your process in the area of acceptance and rejection?

CHAPTER 9 Hatred and the Power to Be

True Nature manifests everything, but in its purity, it is totally settled, unruffled, undivided—it is complete stillness and peace. If we don’t engage in trying to change ourselves and instead allow ourselves to be where we are, where we are will spontaneously manifest this True Nature in our experience.

Our True Nature is simply there-ness. So, by being internally active, we dissociate, we become something different than what we are, we leave our place of abiding. In some sense, we abandon our self, our nature, to become this active entity that is always trying to change itself.

The Trap Of Inner Activity

We have also seen how inner and outer activity are related. Remember the peach? When you discover that it is rotten, you can either just put it away or you can put it away with a lot of internal activity going on. You may already recognize from your own experience that whenever we engage in an external activity, an inner activity usually goes along with it. Even when we are just sitting, continuous activity is almost always going on. We experience this mostly as incessant thinking, planning, trying to figure things out. But what we are doing is more fundamental than just being immersed in thoughts; we are in an energetic movement in which the dynamism of Being becomes contracted and dissociated. There is hesitation and a kind of inner stuttering. This inner busyness is what we mean by ego activity—an inner activity with a mental flavor and an agitated energetic quality. It lacks the smooth, spontaneous, effortless flow that is the manifestation of Being.

Identifying The Power Behind Obsessive Activity

You may have observed, for example, that when you are feeling insecure, when your desire to reach a particular state or outcome intensifies, or when you challenge the inner activity directly, the activity begins to take on a feverish quality. It can become quite rapid, incessant, even obsessive.

may even feel that you can’t stop it—it is an energy that runs on its own, always thinking, doing, planning. This can occur as you engage in various efforts to get to a place other than where you actually are, including: Making explicit, repeated attempts to improve yourself in a particular area of your outer life Pushing yourself to create or maintain a specific inner state that you have hypothesized as desirable Striving to be different according to an ideal, an idea, a memory, a comparison with others, or a spiritual instruction Struggling to stop a particular feeling or thought from arising Experiencing continuous, rapid, agitated thinking, planning, and emotional activity around a particular topic or person Being driven toward a specific goal with increasing effort applied to achieve it Feeling constant dissatisfaction with yourself and a sense of failure or insufficiency When one or more of these patterns begins to dominate your experience, it becomes possible to recognize something very important that you may not have seen before—something that can transform your inner state: the intensity of the experience itself can begin to expose the central energy that powers this obsessive, driven inner activity. We have seen that the most effective motivation for our practice is kindness, which is compassionate in the sense that it is helpful, but which also has a quality of appreciativeness, a lovingness that reflects the energy of True Nature as it manifests its possibilities. We can see that the natural flow of our experience is fueled by love. In contrast, ego activity—especially when it gets obsessive—reveals an energy powering it that is very different in nature. If we observe carefully, we discover that the incessant, obsessive attempt to change ourselves, to improve ourselves, to be something different, is actually powered by self-hatred.

What is behind it? Why would we want to be so violent…

The more we see the violence, the more we come to realize that it won’t stop until we are willing to recognize a particular truth that most of the time we don’t want to see. Some of us are aware of it, some are not. Either way, we probably don’t want to believe it, but the truth is that we would…

Recognizing…

If we are not yet certain that hatred is the fuel, the driving force, we can ask ourselves, “How could I reject myself if I didn’t have that kind of heartless disregard for who I am? How could I reject my experience—try to push it away, resist it, twist it, and manipulate it—if somewhere in me I didn’t have an unfeeling,…

Let’s say that somebody has emotionally wounded you. You will probably find yourself obsessing, thinking, “What am I going to do? How am I going to get that person?” All kinds of images go through your mind, and you can’t stop trying to figure out the most damaging thing you could do to that person or to imagine the worst thing that could happen to them. Or maybe you keep obsessing about fairness, justice, and retribution in the situation. If you look underneath all those thoughts and schemes, what you will find is hatred.

And if we see this as the hatred that powers the inner activity fundamental to ego, then it is evident that it is actually hatred of life—the uncontrollable, dynamic flow of life. In the realm of inner work, this hatred is directed toward our own experience, toward ourselves.

Before we try to understand what this hatred actually is, it’s important to be aware of how we are influenced by the way hatred is generally viewed in our society. Almost everyone has been taught that hatred is bad, wrong, or evil—something to be avoided because it harms others and ourselves. But as we have seen, being with ourselves as we are requires a more open and accepting attitude toward all of our experience. This is not a matter of endorsing any particular way of being, feeling, or acting. It is a matter of encouraging exploration.

Discerning What Hatred Is

Hatred is an attempt to get back at what hurts us, what obstructs us, what prevents us from getting what we want. It is an effort to remove the impediment, the frustration, and the source of that frustration. So hatred is inherently vengeful, but it is also an attempt to redress the situation. You want to balance things out, and you think that will happen only if you can remove the source that hurt you.

The Myth Of Ego Annihilation

We can see this loss of awareness in the way hatred arises in the context of our inner work. As we go deeper in our inner practice, we begin to recognize that what stands in the way of our spiritual realization are our ego manifestations—our issues, our contractions, our resistances, our conflicts, our identifications—in short, our ego-self. We have learned enough to recognize that it is the self that is keeping us from simply being. Now our hatred manifests as an attempt to destroy that self—and we think that doing so is serving a spiritual truth!

What does ego death mean? It usually means to us, “Eliminate the ego; annihilate it. Destroy the self, because for us, as spiritual seekers, it is the enemy.”

enemy that is in the way? We do whatever we can to take the enemy out, to get it out of the way so we can reach the nirvana that we want. We are looking for the final release, because we believe that once the impediment is gone—once the contractions are gone, the frustrations are gone, the issues are

gone, the ignorance is gone, the ego is gone, the self is gone—then we will be happy, we will be enlightened, we will be at peace.

When that tendency is extreme, people consciously hate themselves to the point of depression or even suicide. But inherent in all ego activity—whether we’re dealing with daily challenges, a serious psychological crisis, or our spiritual practice—is a subtle hatred driving the inner activity that is always attempting to bring about happiness and “the final release.”

Think about it. Why do we want to change ourselves? To feel good, to feel better, to finally be at rest. Consider all the movies that focus on eliminating the bad guys or getting revenge. What happens when the hero finally kills the bad guy or puts him in jail? Peace and relaxation. But it is only at the end of the movie, in the last couple of minutes, that the hero can stop all his incessant activity and finally rest. The whole movie is about getting to the point where he can just let go and relax—put his feet up and drink a beer. Before that, he is obsessed with the enemy: “I have to get rid of him. I have to finish what I set out to do; otherwise, I can’t have any peace.” This is the perfect expression of our inner conviction about how we arrive at peace and rest.

We want to annihilate them so that we will no longer experience these feelings. This means that we actually hate our own feelings that we believe are caused by that person.

At a deeper place, hatred implies self-hatred because hatred itself already reflects a duality: There is me and the other or me and what I hate, which is bound to be a duality within the self as well. Since in truth we are not a duality—we are an expression of the beingness of everything—if we hate anything, we are dividing ourselves, our awareness; we are hating part of our own consciousness. And we are separating ourselves from the oneness of our nature. It cannot be any other way.

Discovering…

It is only at the deeper stages of inner practice that we come to recognize that we hate ourselves explicitly. See if you can identify where you are and what is true for you in relation to the following statements. Some are sequential, and some overlap. I am disregarding or shutting someone out for slighting me, but do not believe that I actually hate him. My thoughts about not acknowledging this person are becoming obsessive, and I recognize that I actually do hate him. I recognize my hatred for this person, but do not recognize that in hating him, I am also hating myself. I cannot see my self-hatred in explicit ways, but I can notice my tendency to reject myself, judge myself, attack myself, criticize myself, and try to modify, change, and improve myself. I notice that my inner activity has become obsessive; that I can’t stop rejecting, judging, criticizing,…

I begin to recognize that a primary result of my inner activity is that a certain feverish inner state is maintained, and that dynamic feels unstoppable. I see the incessant activity of my ego as the central impediment to my peace. It is my enemy; I wish I could get rid of it. I believe that my spiritual practice can help me eliminate my ego so I can be free. I get so frustrated with my constant agitation, with the fact that I am always doing something to myself. I can’t do anything to stop that, so I can never settle down and have peace. I hate the unstoppable activity that goes on inside me…

The Causes Of…

Generally speaking, the causes of hatred originate on two levels. The first level, which I call the psychodynamic, relates to our personal history. From the time of our childhood, we have not been sufficiently loved. Maybe we have been hated, disregarded, humiliated, or treated as though we didn’t exist; maybe we’ve felt guilty or bad, or hated ourselves for things that were done to us or that we have done. The frustration that develops in…

The second level is our lack of understanding, our ignorance about how consciousness works. We can recognize that there are obstacles to our freedom, barriers to our inner peace that make it seem impossible…

We start to see that the inner activity we are engaging in to remove obstacles actually imitates a power in our True Nature that can eliminate obstacles. This power is needed because obstacles such as ignorance, identifications, barriers, and resistances definitely exist. But we need to learn that the way of the ego doesn’t work, because ultimately it is based on hatred, and hatred is divisive.

If we are being there with immediacy of feeling and not doing anything, at some point that not doing reveals its power. This power is not just that we refrain from taking action, but that we experience the presence of total stillness. This is the essence of nondoing, which is peace. Just the fact of stillness, the presence of peace, annihilates ignorance. But this annihilation is the action of appreciation and love in pure nondoing and stillness. Hatred wants to annihilate, but it annihilates by destroying, by making our awareness dull, by suppressing, by dividing. True Nature does not really annihilate, because something is not wiping out something else—there is no duality. The kind of annihilation that True Nature makes possible is more of a recognition, a precise understanding that Being reveals in us. We have no inner agitation in our attitude; we see and understand whatever impediment is arising, but we do not give it energy in the form of reaction, and thus it becomes still on its own and does

not reappear. We experience this as a dissolving or a melting, but what is actually happening is that the energy fueling the obstacle disappears, the obstacle loses its dynamism, and it simply stops arising.

We are ignorant of our Being and its power, but it still exists somewhere inside us, so on some level we do know what it is. Because we are ignorant of this power, we set about creating another power—hatred—which is a distortion and an imitation of the true power. The aim of hatred is to remove our suffering, to remove the impediment. And we believe that it will eliminate the obstacles between us and the riches of our Being. But as we have seen, when we try to do that by fighting, by…

So how do you cease this destructive inner activity? First, you need to recognize your resistance and your rejection, and the hatred that is implicit in these attitudes. Because the hatred is the energy that drives the rejection, the rejection won’t stop as long as that energy is there; so you need to become aware of the hatred. Thus you need to relate to your hatred and self-hatred in the same way you relate to rejection, resistance, or defensiveness when they arise: You don’t reject the hatred; you recognize it for what it is. Rather than acting it out or having it dominate you, you become the awareness that holds it. Learn to hold your hatred, be with it, feel it as much as possible from the inside and from the outside. Seek to know hatred, to feel the energy of it, to feel the power of it, and recognize all the associations that come up in relation to it. See into the history that created it and understand that, too. Continue in your inquiry until you are finally able to feel…

Learn to hold your hatred, be with it, feel it as much as possible from the inside and from the outside. Seek to know hatred, to feel the energy of it, to feel the power of it, and recognize all the associations that come up in relation to it. See into the history that created it and understand that, too.

And that truth turns out to be essential power—it is the power of truth and peace and stillness. This is the immense and silent power to be—to be undisturbed and unruffled by the…

EXPLORATION SESSION Identifying Self-Hatred The purpose of this exercise is to open up your curiosity and willingness to see the hatred that may be operating unconsciously in your inner practice. To do this, you want to explore the ways you attempt to change, modify, improve, or enlighten yourself. Consider the whole range of internal activities you engage in, such as comparing yourself to standards, analyzing your behavior, managing your emotional reactions, stopping your inner process, and limiting your awareness. Reflect on the underlying best intentions that you may have, as well as your convictions about what it takes for you to change or grow. Notice the degree to which you are either willing to be open to yourself as you actually are or trying to make yourself fit your ideals of how you should be. Pay attention to any inner sense of ruthlessness or viciousness or coldness in the process of inquiring. Also note any discomfort, fear, or shame that may arise as you explore. The more you are willing to see the manipulations, judgments, attacks, and rejections—whatever manifestations of aggression are part of your inner process—the more you can recognize the energy that is the driving force that powers them. Be aware that hatred may manifest as rejection, disregard, violence, obsessiveness, agitation, withdrawal, coldness, or lack of feeling, as well as the direct…

CHAPTER 10 Ignorance and…

What may not be clear yet is that none of these activities can be understood fully until we recognize their relation to ignorance. For example, when hatred arises, there are psychodynamic or historical learned reasons for it, but they are not the only causes. Hatred also arises simply because we are ignorant.…

This brings us to the necessity of examining the primary root of the ego, of all ego…

When we discover how ignorance underlies all these inner activities and related attitudes, we realize that it is the fundamental…

Enlightenment means waking up to reality, recognizing it as it really is and being there with it as it is. That is why enlightenment is usually understood as…

Learned Ignorance

There are two kinds of ignorance that we need to recognize and understand so that we are no longer controlled and defined by them. Once we see them for what they are, they stop being obstacles. The first kind is called learned ignorance. It can also be referred to as developed ignorance or accumulated ignorance. Sometimes the term conceptual ignorance is used, which means that as our mind develops and we acquire the capacity to conceptualize, we develop a certain kind of ignorance that is specifically human. Generally speaking, animals and other beings don’t have that type of ignorance, because it is something that you have to learn in order for it to develop. Usually this ignorance develops as knowledge. That is to say, much of our knowledge about ourselves and about the world is actually learned ignorance. It is ignorant because it is simply wrong; it does not reflect how reality

Even our experimentally verified scientific knowledge is part of this learned ignorance. Although it is useful and in some sense correct, it is not a true picture of how things are. But generally speaking, our problems are not related to the accuracy of scientific knowledge; they concern our personal knowledge about who we are and what we are, what reality is, what relationships are, how things happen, how the mind works, and so on. For example, a lot of people believe that hatred, power, and aggression will bring us peace and freedom—but it…

So our learned ignorance underlies much of our inner activity and our external actions. A common example is comparative judgment. We think we know what is good, what is bad. We imagine that this is what should happen or that is what should have happened.…

So, to summarize the characteristics of learned ignorance, we can say that: It is our accumulated knowledge about reality. It is what we take to be true, and so it forms the basis for our inner and outer activity. It is also called conceptual ignorance. We conceptualize things in our mind, and these things become knowledge, and that knowledge becomes the learned ignorance. Even though much of it is scientifically accurate, it is not how reality is. This doesn’t mean it contradicts reality, but rather it is an approximation of it. When it comes to our knowledge about ourselves and our consciousness, how the soul and awareness work, what we take to be real is simply not true. Often, it’s the opposite of the truth. As you have seen, much of the inner work consists of seeing through all our identifications, our structures, our beliefs, our positions, and our self-images that we have taken to be real. For example, we believe that we are…

Innate…

The other level of ignorance is more fundamental, more subtle, and more difficult to deal with. It is called innate ignorance. But we cannot even recognize it as ignorance until…

But at some point, it becomes clear that no matter how much of our learned ignorance we work through, the realization arising from that process does not bring us to the clarity, openness, and immediacy that we have experienced when we are more directly in touch with reality. This is when we begin to recognize what is called innate ignorance, which is also referred to as primordial ignorance.…

But the development of that learned ignorance is based on a more fundamental ignorance—the…

So to clarify the relationship between learned ignorance, innate ignorance, and our True Nature, we can say: Learned ignorance is based on innate ignorance; without that innate ignorance, we cannot develop learned ignorance. We have to develop learned ignorance before we can recognize our innate or fundamental ignorance. The reason we form an idea of who we are—which becomes part of our learned ignorance—is because we don’t know our True Nature; we are innately ignorant. If we knew from the beginning who and what we are, we would not need to develop a sense of self in order to know who we are. But we don’t know who we

are, so we do develop a sense of self and we believe it and we take it to be true because of our innate ignorance. As we work through the learned ignorance, we begin to experience our True Nature. To understand our True Nature fully, we have to go through our innate ignorance. To go through our innate ignorance requires that we fully understand True Nature.

You don’t realize the significance of what you are seeing. For example, people from temperate climates who visit far northern areas see snow as simply snow. The natives, however, live with snow most of the time and are familiar with many variations of coldness, dryness, texture, and density and thus see many different forms of snow, hardly considering them all to be one thing called snow. Only over time, and with the demands of experience, would the newcomer be able to recognize snow in all those variations. As an adult, you won’t know what True Nature is without guidance or a true curiosity to learn. If you’re too young, you won’t know what it is because you don’t yet have the capacity to recognize it. The capacity to discriminate and understand requires a certain level of mind development. However, as the mind develops, it develops with learned ignorance.

Developing Our Capacity For Discrimination

The ego develops with the mind, and as that happens, our discriminating capacity grows. Babies already have some discrimination, but it is far more rudimentary than our adult capacity to tell things apart, to know what they are, and to recognize their significance and their relationship to other things.

How do we come to understand our True Nature? And what does it even mean to understand it? There are three aspects to understanding our True Nature. First, we need to know what True Nature is. Second, we have to recognize it as our own nature, not as something outside of ourselves or as an abstraction. And third, we need to understand the relationship of our True Nature to the rest of manifestation—to the thoughts, the feelings, the body, the objects we see, and so on. To know what True Nature is, to know that it is what we are, and to know its relationship to everything in manifestation—that is full understanding. That is illumination. That is enlightenment.

The first step is to recognize what True Nature is. This means to distinguish it from more familiar elements in our experience such as thoughts and feelings, sensations and energy. We need to see how it impacts our perception and affects our relationship to our experience. We must know that True Nature is the fundamental nature of experience and understand what that means in order to recognize it as True Nature.

The second step is to understand yourself as True Nature. This means having full discrimination and insight, at the adult level, into who and what you are. It is possible to recognize True Nature—the first step—but not know that it is you. You might think it’s God. Or that it’s an angel who has descended into the room. You experience that this presence is empty and light and luminous, and it feels so different from how you know “yourself” that you think it must be some kind of wonderful angel. You recognize that presence, but you don’t know that it’s you. To…

The third step is to see that True Nature is the nature of everything and to know how it manifests everything. We don’t know how things work because we don’t…

Seeing the relationship of True Nature to everything else will help us recognize and understand how things work. How do things happen? What is action? How does action occur? How are action and inaction related? Understanding these things is essential to the wisdom of living. If you’re just sitting and meditating, you don’t need to know True Nature’s relation to everything else. But we don’t just sit, we live. Our mind functions with…

What is the process by which this occurs? We always begin our inquiry by seeing what is true in our experience. I might recognize, for example, that what is true is that I don’t like the way a friend is ignoring me. By exploring that truth, I might come to see that I don’t like it because it is similar to the way my mother ignored me, which made me feel worthless. So I believe, in relation to this friend, that I am a hurt child and she is my mother. So, we can see in some detail what accounts for our feeling one way or another.…

on my friend, it becomes clear that neither is really true. She is not my mother, and I am not that image of a worthless child. I am actually something more alive and immediate, a presence that has inherent value because it is what is real. This brings us then to recognizing the truth—recognizing what we are actually experiencing and recognizing that…

And love of the truth must be our guide. Ultimately, by staying with the process, we arrive at the third level of understanding, where we see and know that True Nature, our True Nature, is what…

Immediate…

Your consciousness of what you are experiencing has to fill the entire field of your awareness. It has to feel whatever is there, without veils or filters. Whatever you are feeling—hatred, rejection, resistance, anger, happiness, spaciousness—you allow it to fill all of your awareness, so that you feel it directly and completely. And the feeling of that, the experience of whatever is arising, is inseparable from the knowingness of it—because you cannot know True Nature conceptually, through the discursive mind. Nevertheless, the development of the discursive mind is a necessary stage in developing the discriminating capacity of our inherent awareness. And it is useful

for performing the tasks of life. But it is not the kind of knowing that is needed for realization. That kind of knowing has to be more of a felt knowing, an experiential knowing. I call it immediate or direct knowledge.

By seeing the nature of gnosis—the direct knowing that confronts our ignorance—we can appreciate that it is nondual knowing. We move beyond the duality that pervades our perception and our usual knowing of the mind. This in turn makes it more possible to see and recognize True Nature.

EXPLORATION SESSION Recognizing Learned Ignorance and Direct Knowing

Find a quiet place to consider the world around you. First open yourself to an immediate awareness of reality both outside and inside, with a focus on sensation and perception. Just notice colors, shapes, textures, sensations, and patterns in your experience. Be aware of your usual way of recognizing all the objects in your experience, but refrain from getting involved with the content and stay attuned to your perceptual awareness. Then consider how your ideas, beliefs, and knowledge about that reality impact your direct experience of it. When you focus on the content of what you are aware of, what happens? Do mental concepts enhance your experience? Do they fill in detail? Do they shape or focus your attention in a particular direction? Do they distance you from the immediacy? When you stay with the direct perceptual experience, what happens to your knowing and understanding of your experience? Does it disappear without the ideas? Does it manifest in a different way than the knowing in your mind? Consider the difference in quality between your familiar mental knowing (the learned ignorance) and this more direct experiential knowing.

CHAPTER 11 Freedom from the Filters of the Mind

Rather than focusing on the specific ways that we react to our experience, we will be examining the obstacles that are inherent in the way that we experience. These obstacles are not the specific activities of rejection, interference, manipulation, and other secondary manifestations we have observed that comprise our reactions to the main event. Rather, they are misunderstandings or misperceptions of what it is we are actually experiencing—of where we are and who we are and of reality itself.

We have continually pointed to “not doing anything” and “being where we are.” These are two different ways of saying the same thing. Each one clarifies something about ourselves. “Not doing anything” means not engaging in inner activity of any kind. “Being where we are” points to the fact that the absence of this inner self-centered activity is what we mean by presence, or Being.

We have discussed how our learned ignorance, which is what we believe we know, forms the basis for all of our interference. We have seen how our activities and relationships are based on ideas and beliefs and identifications—what we think is true, what we think is reality, what we think will work. But all of these activities that we have examined are of a certain type. They tend to be more explicit and more easily identifiable—although, as we have seen, they often can be subtle. And they are also secondary manifestations—various reactions to what we perceive our experience to be. But there is another category of interference with our experience that is much more difficult to see. It is interference within and inseparable from the primary manifestation, that is, in the way we perceive what is immediately occurring. It is the second major way that our accumulated knowledge becomes an obstacle to being ourselves—through a much more subtle way that we interfere with our experience by trying, consciously or unconsciously, to direct it, and thus prevent it from emerging spontaneously on its own. What I am referring to is an implicit, inner activity that we may become aware of as we become increasingly skilled at not going along with the more explicit, grosser inner activities that we have identified. It is the way that our mind or consciousness influences and molds our experience, just because it is involved in that experience.

Veils Of The Past

We can see the movement of projection or judgment. We can hear, feel, sense our hate and our rejection. But this other category of activity cannot be as easily identified. At first, as we engage in it, we will think that we are just being where we are and are not doing anything. But as we notice and observe our reactions in different situations, it becomes possible to begin to see that much of “being where we are” is still the result of interference. Why is this kind of interference so difficult to perceive? Partly because the more explicit activities of interference occur intermittently, and thus are easier to notice when they arise. This other kind of interference is a more subliminal, sometimes even unconscious, inner activity that occurs all the time.

You won’t see yourself as trying to be a certain way. You will think, “I’m just being who I am,” but it is not truly a spontaneously and freely arising experience. It is determined by your historical knowledge, your learned knowledge—all the beliefs and ideas about who you are and what other people are like and what reality is. It is influenced by your ordinary accumulated knowledge.

So, looking at this situation of interference with all its subtle activity, we can see that: Our experience doesn’t freely arise. We interfere with the spontaneity of our experience by perceiving it through our accumulated beliefs and understandings. Specifically, our experiences are molded and formed by a subliminal mental process—the incessant activity of remembering, thinking, and reacting according to information from the past. In any interaction with another individual, we impose on our experience an image of who we are, an image of the other person, and a particular feeling tone

on the relationship itself. The result is an experience of reality created, at least in part, by past conditioning. We don’t see our activity as an interference because we are not explicitly rejecting a particular experience. But what we are actually rejecting is the spontaneity of our arising experiences. This is exactly the difficulty we have in being where we are: we try to direct our experience. But here we are not just trying to direct our experience, we are actually directing it. We are shaping it by looking at it through the past. Our experience is partly formed by it emerging through the filter of past knowledge. This is a subtler inner activity to observe because it is an almost continuous, subliminal, or unconscious mental process with many parts: remembering, imagining, imposing a particular image or form, filtering, projecting, and a host of other subliminal mental and emotional operations.

Let’s say you are feeling, “I am furious at my partner; that is where I really am.” It seems to be the truth, and it probably is. But being furious at this person may also imply that you have imposed on the situation a relationship from someone else in your past. You dragged that out of your memory, carried it on your shoulders, and have attached it to the moment. You forced it on the moment, and you keep forcing it on, keep trying to make it stay, so that it conforms to the past that you are still carrying.

We will start to see that our thoughts about a person we are angry at involves a mental operation, a projection, a transference, and an imaging of ourselves. In other words, in order for that experience of our being furious to happen, we must believe that we are a certain person and our partner is a certain person.

Let’s review, then, how we move toward a transparent understanding of our experience and toward being who and what we really are. As we experience an event or interaction, we are generally reacting to what we experience happening (secondary manifestation). This involves judgment, resistance, denial, manipulation, and so forth. When we can stop this interference, we become more aware of what is actually arising (the primary manifestation) and begin to understand it. We see that it is not a full, immediate experience of the now. We recognize that we have layers and layers of veils over our experience that make it not completely palpable, not completely alive, not immediate. We think we are being where we are, but we are actually engaged in an inner activity that is at first not obvious. We are unconsciously disconnected, dissociated from our Being, or we might have some sense of disconnection but feel that we have no volition in the matter. If we just stay present with our experience and do not fight it, it begins to reveal itself, and we start to see how our mind is meddling with our experience in the moment. As we see how our beliefs and ideas are involved, we begin to see the mental quality of our experience, its emptiness and its lack of reality.

We superimpose on the moment what we believe we are. In other words, whenever something happens, we react in a certain way based on a certain projection from the past that makes us be a certain kind of person at the moment. As greater clarity, greater understanding, and greater awareness of presence arise, we begin to recognize that when we think we are being where we are, we are not being ourselves yet. We begin to see that what we are engaged in is a reaction, a projection of our mind onto the moment. We begin to see more specifically the inner activities of primary-manifestation meddling, which we have been accustomed to believing are the real content of the moment. We become aware of our self-images, our identities, our ego structures, the programming from our personal history, and our projections. All of these are interferences. As we come to understand what is happening—by recognizing that the content of the experience is a projection and a position we are taking in the moment—the light of awareness transforms our experience into the actual reality of that moment. At the same time, it will transform us into what we really are, not what we believe ourselves to be.

Exposing The Lack Of Immediacy

As we work through these issues, it becomes clear that our ignorance perpetuates itself because we don’t know who we are. So how do we understand and work with this kind of inner activity that keeps us from really being ourselves?

One traditional method we use is to sit in meditation, which means to not engage intentionally with any inner activity. Eventually, the mind will quiet down, the agitation will settle, and that settling, that quietness, will begin to bring more immediacy to our experience.

“Oh, how I’m feeling right now is similar to how I reacted to my mother when she used to tell me that I’m stupid.” In making this kind of connection, we recognize something common to all our experiences—that they are not truly of the moment; they are colored by our past. We can see the veil, the wrapping that our consciousness has put around itself, which has become an interference.

haven’t really landed in the truth of what is here, the truth of the now. I’m just hovering over the experience. I am someplace in my mind, in a mental reality.

Reifying Our Experience

A simpler but more profound way to say this is that our experience is composed mostly of reifications. A reification refers to something that we have experienced or thought about that has become an object in our mind, a mental construct. For instance, the body image that we rely on to experience ourselves is a reification of the body. When you see somebody that you know walking by, you see them as a particular physical time/space entity, identified by a certain label called a name. This is a reification—an encapsulated idea of what a person is. But a person is not a time/space entity. He or she is a manifestation, a form that reality assumes that we first experience at a specific point in time. Our mind remembers that impression, abstracts it out of the oneness of Being from which it is inseparable, and makes it into an object, putting a wrapping around it and labeling it.

Let’s say that you are having a meal and you lift your spoon. What is this spoon? The spoon that you are experiencing is not the real spoon. What you are experiencing is the reification of the spoon—that is, something that your mind is imposing on the situation. You are mentally creating an object that we call a spoon and projecting it onto the form that reality is taking in the now. If you could see this form without the reification, without that mental operation, you would recognize it as presence assuming that particular shape and color at that location.

But if you see the spoon without any mental operation, it will be more like the appearance of a spoon, a hologram of a spoon. Actually, without reifications you will see that it is light. It is a form of light with shadows and colors, stripped of its familiar mental-image identity as a spoon.

Extending the example of the spoon to the rest of our experience, we can see how our learned knowledge becomes an obstacle to being ourselves. Our entire experience is composed of reifications—abstracted concepts and impressions that have become mentally created objects. We keep imposing our belief in those entities on our experience. This is how we interfere with the moment, making it appear as though these entities were real, when it is really our mind that has made them into entities.

We do not see the now; rather we experience a reified moment, which means that we are superimposing previously created reifications—images, representations, and mental constructs of what we think is the self, other people, and various objects, on the now. Because we are tightly wrapping the moment with these constructs, the dynamism of Being is not free to manifest itself in us.

It is important to remember here that whatever constructs we identify are not to be treated as the enemy and rejected. Just as in any other part of our practice, we are called to understand our mental operations and recognize our lack of immediacy and the reifications that create it. This occurs simply by being present and aware of what is happening and inquiring into it. Even when we recognize how we are limiting our immediacy, we don’t have to fall into the trap of judgment.

And then the realization arises: “Not only am I free to just be, free to not act; I am the aware medium, the conscious medium itself.” That fact, and the recognition of that fact, is what makes it possible for us to be truly where we are—which turns out to be what we are. We also come to understand what immediacy is. That is, we experience things directly. But we also recognize that we are experiencing ourselves in that immediacy. We do not just experience the content of the experience; we are experiencing our awareness as well. So if I am experiencing my sadness in some moment, and I am able to do that with immediacy, totally, I then recognize that I am this presence, this fullness, this awareness, this luminosity, that is pervaded at some location within it by the affect of sadness. I am that self-existing awareness that is aware of that sadness. And we recognize that this self-existing awareness is now the primary arising in our experience. It is an actual true manifestation of reality in this moment. Everything else—including all of our feelings—is secondary and is always changing.

We can recognize that “where I am” means that I—my true self, my awareness, my presence, my very existence, what at this very moment is in this moment—am aware of and am the awareness of all the details that are arising within the content of my experience. And I am aware of all of that with immediacy, with an awareness that pervades it completely.

EXPLORATION SESSION Observing What Enhances or Limits the Immediacy of Your Experience You can do this exercise by looking at the way you respond to other people you are relating to, by examining your inner experience when you are not interacting with another person, or some of both. Take some time to reflect on the following questions: What makes your experience more immediate? What are the ways that you limit the immediacy of your experience? What causes you to limit the immediacy of your experience? What’s right about limiting the immediacy of your experience? That is, what benefit do you believe you gain by doing that? In exploring this question, you are addressing your unconscious, not your logical mind. How are you limiting the immediacy of your experience right at this moment?

CHAPTER 12 The Trap of Identification

IN THE PRECEDING CHAPTER, we saw that all our ordinary knowledge is based on the subtle mental operation that we call reification: taking an experience, a perception, an impression, or a concept and objectifying it, storing it, and then using it in various situations as a lens or filter for our experience.

For our reified knowledge—our learned ignorance—to form our primary experience or our secondary reaction to it, a specific mental process needs to be in operation.

Identification Is The Obstacle

The fact that we have reifications in our mind does not in itself create an obstacle to being where we are. Our reactions, our associations, or even our rejection of a feeling or experience, are not in themselves obstacles to being ourselves. We have to use our reifications in a particular way for them to become impediments. An example from everyday life will reveal why this is so.

Let’s say you are at a party with your husband or wife and you notice out of the corner of your eye that across the room, someone is flirting with your spouse. Your spouse is warming up to that person, obviously enjoying the attention, laughing and behaving in ways that don’t happen with you. You find yourself having the reaction we call jealousy.

Usually, people are totally taken over by the experience of jealousy, but it is actually possible for jealousy to arise without it influencing you in a way that hooks you. If you pay attention, you will see that jealousy can arise as an image, as a thought, as a feeling, or as certain physiological responses in the body. So you could recognize jealousy to be simply the arising of a particular state that you are experiencing. It is possible to be aware of whatever manifestations of jealousy are arising and choose to experience them fully, allowing your awareness to make them transparent.…

We are not just experiencing jealousy; we are burying ourselves in it. We define ourselves by it: “I am a jealous person and I know that is who I am.” Sometimes we recognize that jealousy is controlling us and determining our feelings and actions, and other times we are taken over so much by it we don’t even…

We call this identification. It’s not just that jealousy is happening; it is that we are identifying with the state of jealousy. The feeling is actually just…

But when we are inside the wave and defined by it, we forget about the ocean; we even forget about the water. Thus, it is this process of identification that is necessary for any piece of old knowledge—any reification—to become an obstacle. Of course, many mental processes are involved in identification, including remembering, integrating, comparing, projecting, representing,…

All Ego Experience Is…

All ego experience includes identification; we are always identifying with one kind of content or another. So the first thing to notice is that we can identify ourselves with just about anything. It could be an ego structure or a self-image, a projection or a particular emotion, habitual feelings or thoughts, a desire or an attachment, a…

or something concrete. The identification can be a gross, obvious entrapment or it can be very…

Identification As Present-Time Activity

The word “identification” as it is used in psychological literature is taken to mean the use of an image, impression, or representation to define our sense of who we are or our sense of reality.

This is part of the process of the development of the ego—internalizing impressions, stabilizing them inside the mind, and using them to define who we are and what the world is.

Identification With The Body

We act as if we were the body, and so our identification with it is ongoing, almost totally continuous. The body is happening this very moment; it is not just a memory, and it is not static. But we identify with it as if it were fixed.

we are really identifying with is a body image—the image of our body that we have constructed in our mind. This is something from the past that is remembered and brought to bear in each moment.

So it is with our body, not with our clothes, that we tend to have the strongest, deepest identification.

In that sense, your style does define you. For example, a woman may be attached to wearing baggy old clothes. If her friends suggest, “Why don’t you wear something more fashionable and that fits you better?” she won’t do it because it doesn’t fit her self-identity; she is identified with her casual, loosely fitted style. Other people always have to wear the latest fashion—that’s part of their identity—while others love to dress with a studied eccentricity that makes them feel unique.

So, now we can see the basic principles of identification: To identify means that we define ourselves with something—who we believe we are is not separate from that particular impression or manifestation. To identify can also mean that we are emotionally and energetically invested in that impression. It is our relationship to what arises that defines whether or not identification happens and what form it takes.

Identifying With The Present Moment

Identification most often happens in relation to events, structures, images, and beliefs from the past, but we can also identify with present-moment manifestations that are not reifications. Suppose you experience your True Nature and feel the presence of it as clarity and lightness. Simply being that spacious, clear presence is not the same as identifying with it. That’s because being your True Nature…

To identify with that pure presence implies a reifying process, that is, turning the experience into an “object” that can be identified with in some way. Our mind recognizes True Nature, but it doesn’t stop there. It wants to put True Nature in some kind of package. Then it attaches itself to that experience in a…

Identification always implies reification. If we don’t reify our experience, the mind can’t identify with it. Identification can occur whether the reifying process is the result of something from the past or of a new experience happening in the present moment. Identification happens…

Consider that when you are being True Nature, you are also taken over—but you are taken over and free. You as you usually conceive yourself to be no longer exists. There is just True Nature. In identification, on the other hand, an ego identity—a sense of self—is attaching itself to or defining itself with some kind of an experience or the content of that experience. And the identification is always with a reified content. This is not to say, however, that you are not supposed to feel things. If you are sad, for example, instead of rejecting your experience, you could welcome the feeling, experience the immediate fullness of sadness, without identifying with it. And the only thing that can do…

Identification Supports False…

Because the verb is “to be,” “I am being” implies that I am doing being. But that is not what the phrase means. It means that I am not doing anything to be myself. I am just myself. I don’t need anything to be it. I am it. However, when I am it, there is nobody, no I, that is being it. There is no separation. I and it are one thing; there is no I to claim it. So, when I say I am the light, I am the presence, I don’t mean that there is an I that is…

In contrast to being, identification is an activity, a mental action that I engage in to connect myself with something. If I identify with what I am, I first have to believe that I am separate from what I am in order to enact identification. So, this is one of the central dangers on the spiritual path: whenever we experience something new, we want…

We can become aware of the tendency to want to freeze-frame our experience so that it can be known. Having all these snapshots is how we reify, but reality is more like a movie than a still picture. When you are being, everything is flowing.

If It’S You, You Can’T Lose It

Some people are identified with being the Absolute, and if somebody tells them they are not the Absolute, they feel wounded. “Can’t you see that I am? Everybody should see that I am the Absolute!” That can happen to spiritually advanced adults. But this means that there is an identification.

Every kind of identification is a mental operation that traps us into a particular form.

can experience myself as God, but if I am identified with being God, I am lost, I am not free. Then I have to be God and everybody had better know it.

Disidentification As Part Of Spiritual Practice

Many people think that disidentification is an activity: “I see my identification, and I do something to it—I disidentify. In the same way that I identify, I can disidentify.” But this is not the case. Identification is an activity, and true disidentification is the absence of that activity. Disidentification means: Recognizing the inner gluing of my identity or consciousness to a specific content Seeing this adherence to the content for what it is—an identification Not believing the identification or going along with it Not pushing it away Understanding it and letting it dissolve or reveal itself as True Nature If we try to push an identification away, we end up identifying with something else. True Nature doesn’t push anything away. When it sees identification, True Nature says, “Hmm, that’s a very interesting manifestation. I didn’t know I could do that! I can actually trap myself. And sometimes I even forget that I trap myself. I am good at trapping myself.”

Identification Is Not Your Nemesis

Identification is not your nemesis; it is not something you have to fight. It is something to be aware of, to recognize. Because if you fight, if you make it your nemesis, then you are engaging in the same activity—you are just identifying with something else. If you’re angry, you can get trapped in thinking, “I am not that; I am my True Nature. I shouldn’t get angry in the first place. And I definitely shouldn’t be identified with my anger now that I am feeling it.”

Or we reject other people. Let’s say you and your best friend are talking and you end up in an argument. You say to him, “I think you’re identified with your anger.”

When you say that, you are most likely not saying, “I’m aware of your identification and offering you this information to help you liberate yourself.” What you are really telling him is, “You’d better not keep this up; I don’t like it. I want you to get away from me because I want to liberate myself from your anger.”

EXPLORATION SESSION Recognizing Identification in Your Experience Take about fifteen minutes to make an open inquiry into whatever is happening to you, moment to moment. At any given time, you are likely to be identified with

some element of what is going on. As you inquire into your experience to see where

you are, consider how identification may be shaping that experience. In order to recognize your identification, you need to see where you are coming from or who you take yourself to be in the midst of your experience. Being aware of reactions, attitudes, desires, preferences, and attachments provides clues that can help you recognize the way you are identified. If you become aware of an identification, notice how you feel when you recognize it. Do you judge it, reject it, feel relieved, get curious? If you are able to explore it, notice if it shifts, dissolves, or transforms…

CHAPTER 13 Lighting Up…

We are beings of light in the fluid state—completely frictionless, completely luminous, totally radiant and free. Now, everybody knows that because light has no mass and no weight, gravity does not affect it. So, in our True Nature, we have no heaviness, no thickness, no weight. We are substantial only in the sense that fluid light has a fullness, a sense of body to it. But that fullness, that substantiality, is completely light and smooth. That…

Even as beings of light, we see ourselves as a physical body, with its parts and activities, having mass and operating under the influence of gravity. We think that we are entities in space and time, and that our…

What are the properties of light and time that can help us understand more about…

LIGHT AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME Science tells us that light moves at the maximum speed possible in the universe, which endows light with certain properties that differentiate it from everything else. One of the principles within Einstein’s theory of relativity is that the faster one travels, the slower time passes. Time slows down for somebody who is going…

That means that the closer we come to being light, the slower that…

What are the implications of this for understanding what it means…

This seems to be a law of time—not that linear time is being altered, but more time becomes experientially “available” to us. Thus, the slowing down of our experience of time will place us more and more in the present. The more we are the presence, the more we are in the…

The actual manifestation—what is arising in our experience—is always arising right now. This is also true of light. For light there is only now; there is nothing else. This fact is another consequence of the…

We never travel in space without time passing. Physics has determined that the faster you go in space, the slower you go in time. As we travel at normal speeds, that is not apparent to us. But as objects accelerate and approach the speed of light, it becomes apparent that speed in time slows down the more speed in space increases—the maximum point being the speed of light. In our universe, nothing can exceed the…

Light And The Eternal Now

What is the experience of light? Time does not pass for light—light does not go through time. It travels at the maximum speed in space—the speed of light. So what is its speed in time? Zero. That is, since its speed in space is the speed of light, and the speed of light is the maximum speed, its speed in time is zero.

So for humans, who are operating outside of light, time passes, and things get old. For the light, there is no such thing. Light travels through space at a certain speed, but it has no experience of getting old. It is always new, always fresh, and so it is always itself; it doesn’t change. It is always, always, its very nature.

Now Without Future

True Nature is the now-ness of time, but the now-ness of time is not just the present time, the particular moment you are in. When you experience the actual now-ness, it is not an instant in time; it does not have a beginning or an end. If you notice an event happening, you can say that it has a beginning and it has an end, but all of it is actually experienced in the now. So the now itself doesn’t start with the beginning of the event and it doesn’t end with the end of the event. It is always now.

What does that mean for us as human beings having experiences? If there is no history, no future, then nothing affects me. How can I be affected if it is only the now that is real, that is present? And if I recognize that there is only the now, what is the point of trying to change my experience? Any attempt to alter your experience, to improve it means that you believe that there is a future and you are living for that future. You are saying no to the now out of hope for some better future. But for light, that better future never comes. Whenever we want to advance to a better future, we disconnect, we cut off from the path of light.

Even if you just look at this logically, what else is there but now? The rest of it is really just stories in our mind. If you believe the stories of your mind, you believe in past and future as possibilities.

Living In The Now

If there is future in our life, it is true that we need to consider it for the sake of practical matters. When you are doing your budgeting or choosing insurance policies or making travel arrangements, you will have to include the future in your planning. But what does that have to do with your experience of yourself in the moment? Your experience in the moment is your own consciousness, which is a fluid body of light. Why can’t you experience that even as you are planning?

It is true that it will be a shock to the system, but the fear that most people in our culture have about death is about more than that. It is our fear of being totally in the moment, any moment—without past or future—that makes us afraid to face the particular moment that we call death. Death is a moment with no future.

Why is that? Because totally letting go of the past and the future is a death of the familiar self.

How do you experience now? How do you get a taste, a flavor, of now? This flavor, this texture of the now, is the immediacy of the experience of awareness, consciousness, presence. It is like trying to find out what fluid light is made of. It is made out of now, out of now-ness. It is an unchanging, condensed now, a full, indestructible now. It is a now that is at all times, for it is the now that is the present of all times—past, present, and future. And it doesn’t change from an instant in the past to an instant in the future. It is the same now—always fresh. Time doesn’t have an impact on the now.

When you settle into the moment, you realize that there is not much happening—a few things here and there. The primary awareness is of the immediacy of the moment. This is because presence—being in the now—is characterized by beingness, simply being here now. In contrast, our familiar self is based on doing, going, making things happen. We do not trust that action can arise and proceed from inner stillness; we do not recognize that Being is the ground of everything. To be in the now connects you with that quiet beingness that underlies all changes, all activity—the simple hereness where what is most basic is not activity but presence.

When people talk about being in the here and now, it is a more profound experience than simply being aware of the content of the experience of the moment. It begins with that awareness because the content of the moment is what is arising now. So, we are aware of the content of the moment—the physical attributes, the feelings, and the thoughts that are arising in the moment. But the more we are attuned to what is arising in the moment, the more time slows down as we become more present to the moment. And when we become more present to the moment, we begin to recognize the now-ness itself, which turns out to be the presence that is present to the moment.

Caught In The Flow Of Time

In some sense, all the obstacles to being ourselves that we have observed and explored so far are basically in time; they are a function of the passage of time perceived in the linear sense. They come from the past and move into the future. If our center of consciousness is operating within a linear time framework—in the passage from the past to the future—it will be engaged in these obstacles. Our judgments and rejections and hopes and desires and expectations all happen in time. Even our inner practice becomes a practice in time. We are going from one point of time to another for a process that has a beginning and an end. There is a cause and a result: something we do now will result in a change in the future. That kind of time orientation will dislocate us, will take us outside the presence of what we are and into the ephemeral mental world of time, which is where most people live.

People are living in the bardo—in the passage, in the transitional. That is what the bardo really is: continuous transitioning from one thing to another, which is the

product of the experience of a time-bound mind. So, when we say to be present and to be aware of where we are, we simply mean to attend to the moment, to be in the moment, to be here, to be now, to be aware of what is happening right this moment.

Even if I am remembering and reliving something that happened to me in my childhood, I can do that in the moment. In fact, the more I am in the moment, the more real, the more alive, that reliving is. If I relive an incident in my mind, it is more like a thought, a memory; but if I am really in my body, in my sensations, in my presence, in the immediacy, I am in a sense experiencing the now-ness of that past because I am in the now-ness now. But it is the same now-ness.

This is one reason the practice of presence is often referred to as self-remembering, or simply as remembering. We do not mean remembering in the ordinary, cerebral way that memory usually functions. We mean the remembering of our presence, remembering it in the sense of reliving the presence—which is reliving the now, which is the now of the present moment.

Past, Future, And Presence

Thus far in our considerations, we have seen how our past knowledge—what I call learned ignorance—impinges on our experience by mentally overlaying the past on the present. This affects both the central component of our present experience—what we have called the primary manifestation—and the reactions, associations, and judgments about that central component—what we have called the secondary manifestations. If we look at learned ignorance in terms of these two manifestations, we see that the primary component is mainly bound by the past.

Think about it. You still believe that you know there is going to be a tomorrow and that expectation becomes a controlling aspect of your experience. Perhaps you have an appointment tomorrow, so you do need to consider the future in that sense. But that is not the same thing as your consciousness levitating out of the now and jumping to the future. We don’t need to do that in order to be efficient. We can still reside in the present, enjoying the moment—because really, that is all that we have. The future might never come—who knows? So just like anything else that may arise in our experience, we don’t have to go along with our future orientation.

But not identifying doesn’t mean pushing away. Instead, we can recognize, “Who I truly am is a being of light.” When we know this, we don’t get caught up in all the obstacles we encounter. Not because we are avoiding them or denying them or pushing them away, but because those obstacles actually don’t exist for beings of light. For a being of light, what you are right this very moment is all you have. It is in the presence of this moment, and only in the presence of this moment, that we can be where we are, that we can be ourselves, that we can be real. It is as simple as that.

EXPLORATION SESSION The Influence of Future Thinking on Your Experience We have worked a lot so far on the influence of the past, so here the focus is more on your future orientation. This inquiry is to explore the particular way your mind dissociates you from the presence of this moment by looking toward the future. Be aware that future orientation happens when you engage in any of the following activities: hoping for something, expecting an outcome, fearing that something might happen, planning for the future, having a goal, anticipating accomplishment, or seeking pleasure.

Spend about fifteen minutes observing and following your present experience. Notice what happens to your experience of the present moment. Does a future orientation arise? If so, how does that affect your presence now and how does it affect your experience? What relevance does the future have to yourself as a being of light?

CHAPTER 14 A Mercurial Sense of Self

But that state rarely remains for long. Before you know it, it starts to slip away. Whenever this happens, the tendency is to become alarmed: “Uh-oh, I’ve lost it! I have to find where I am again… and it’s going to take me a while to find myself.” We’re right back in time, and we can easily get caught in trying to preserve where we are, trying to keep everything in place, trying to keep things the same.

If you consider this, the question naturally arises: If everything is changing, what does it mean to be where we are? In this chapter, we want to bring into focus a property of experience that is always there—the fact of change. This constant change is a natural, universal law. All experience and perception imply change. If there is no change, there is simply no experience. The phenomenon of constant change is part of awareness, is part of consciousness, is part of life.

What does that tell us about what it means to be ourselves? What we will discover is that because everything keeps changing and change is a constant, to be where we are means always leaving where we were. This does not mean leaving in the sense of dissociation or becoming disconnected from ourselves, but leaving where we were in order to be with the constantly changing reality of our experience in the moment.

Our Resistance To Change

We have many reasons for trying to keep our experience from changing. We just don’t want to lose what we like about what we are experiencing, what we have, what we know about ourselves, or what we take to be reality. When we begin to do inner work, we have a certain view of reality and who we think we are.

Change is difficult for the ego. Ego wants stability, sameness. We believe that our sense of self cannot find or keep its mooring if things keep shifting. But the fact is that reality is always a shifting ground. And our consciousness, our awareness, is more like mercury—very slippery, very fluid, easily changing and flowing.

Our tendency is to want to stay the same and have our experience remain the same, especially when we like it. And that becomes a rigidity in our consciousness, an inflexibility that is not natural. How can we approach this situation and understand what is at work here?

The Attempt To Preserve

For instance, whenever we are trying to improve our experience, we are preserving a certain ideal or goal. By shaping our experience to be a particular way instead of letting it unfold the way it wants to, we are really trying to maintain a certain image of ourselves, an identity that we don’t want to change.

So everything we find ourselves doing—even our attempts to change or stay the same—is included in that. Everything is welcomed.

We can divide into two types the human tendency to hold on to the present in order to stay the same. The first type is the ego manifestation of trying to preserve a posture and identity. The second type is identification with and attachment to particular experiences.

In the first type, we might find ourselves in a situation where we want to feel better, or we might want our experience to feel freer and more positive—but that doesn’t mean we want to change who we are. We still want to preserve our identity as we know

So ego experience inherently implies rigidity because we are identified with inner structures that are already defined and packaged. The fact that we are identifying with a self-image or an impression of ourselves or a pattern from the past means that we are repeating the same thing. We are not allowing space, we are not open for something different to arise.

A point does come during the inner journey when our transformation is so profound that we are unrecognizable to ourselves. It’s not that we don’t recognize what is happening; it’s that we realize that what is happening is not familiar. This can be disconcerting, but it is also freeing. We are no longer an extension of how we felt, what we did, how we behaved. Sometimes the change is so fundamental that we don’t just feel like a different person—we don’t remember ourselves as a person at all! We experience ourselves as just a mass of light that has taken the shape of a person for a while. There is an indescribable freedom when you can say, “I recognize my original nature… this timeless light.”

Each moment is. The moment it has happened, it is gone, and another moment arises that might be similar—or it might be entirely different.

So what is freedom? Freedom is, “I know that whatever happens in each moment is, and always will be, fine.” We are comfortable with whatever is, because we don’t have a rigid sense of what we are, who we are, what kind…

What can we recognize, then, about our ego-created sense of self that limits our freedom to be ourselves and to live truly in the moment? The following is a list of things we know about our identity, which we are so attached to preserving: The ego sets structures in place that need to continue as they are so we can maintain our identity. We have always depended on our ego for our general sense of identity and self-image and for self-recognition, orientation, familiarity, and knowing how to function in the world. Our ego-created identity is an implicit constancy that we have become accustomed to. We think we need this identity to know who we are, to feel on familiar ground, to feel secure. This identity defines the ways we generally think and feel and includes momentary states that we identify with in a particular way, such as occasional flare-ups of anger that we feel guilty about afterward. Though we grow and transform in many ways, the basics that comprise our ego identity—how we think about things, our range of moods, how we do things, our preferences, the kinds of relationships and projections we have, and so on—tend not to fundamentally change. Even when we have…

The second category of resistance to change is our attachment to our experiences. We can identify with any kind of experience, but we tend to get most attached to new experiences that we find pleasurable or freeing. Identifying with an experience means that we don’t want it to go away. We like it the way it is and will be…

Even when we get to the nondual condition where everything is presence, nothing about that is static. Yes, it is always presence, but everything is flowing and unfolding, and that presence can be of so many colors and flavors. Presence sometimes becomes denser, sometimes lighter. And sometimes, the presence is not like presence at all but more of a nothingness or an absence. Our soul needs to have completely slippery hands so she is prevented from holding on to anything. Velcro is not a condition of realization!

Preserving Our Concept Of Time

All our concepts of change tend to be time bound. Why? Because time indicates change; it is basically a measurement of change. So if we are focused on creating change or on resisting change, we will be operating in time.

How can we understand this? As we discovered in the last chapter, time slows down the more we are being presence. When we are fully present in the presence, there is no time—no time passes. What does that mean in terms of our experience? Expressing this experience as “I am in timelessness, in the now; no time is passing for me” implies a still frame in which I am not moving. Does this mean that our experience doesn’t change? Does it mean that we don’t really have experiences and are just an unchanging blankness?

So how could change be perceived without the passage of time? To answer this, we need to understand more about our True Nature as the presence of ever-fresh light. When I am my True Nature as a being of light, I am like a field, a presence, an effulgence. This doesn’t mean that I am like the steady bright light we experience coming from the sun. Our True Nature is not just a medium of light, a transparent, luminous presence. It is magical light—light that continues to be a light but is always changing. It changes its color, its shape, its density, its texture. It can actually take on the forms of emotions, thoughts, images, and sensations. This light that I am is always forming itself into one thing or another. And this forming itself into one thing or another I recognize as the various experiences that I have. If the light is sometimes a white light and sometimes a green light, we might think this means that first it was white and then it became green and therefore some time must have passed. But if we are in the light, if we are the light, the change from white to green is not from the past to the future.

not occur in a progression from the past to the present to the future, which is how we usually think of it and experience it. The change, instead, is more of an outflow: The forms just appear, they arise out of nowhere. The source of our experience is not the past as our mind understands it, but some mysterious immediacy of the moment. So the movement is from no form to the presence of form, from nothing to something, and it is instantaneous. Our eyes see a constancy of forms, but our actual experience is of an ever-fresh arising of those forms in an unfolding now. And perceived changes are simply the patterns in the outflowing of the forms.

When we experience things as an outflow in this way—as consciousness continuously flowing out and bringing forth different forms of experience—then the sense of time is gone. There is no awareness of time passing. We feel that we are in the now, but the now is always manifesting itself in different ways. It is in constant transformation, even though it is the same. It is always the now and it is clearly the presence of the now, the constantly renewing light of True Nature. It is the timeless moment that is always transforming its form.

When we don’t recognize light as being the medium, we just see the objects that arise. And when we see forms and notice that they change, we immediately bring in something we call time to account for the change.

So even though we try to hold on to a particular form or a particular way of experiencing, ultimately it is not possible. When we do this, we are trying to stop the dynamism. We are trying to keep that fluid, slippery presence confined in a particular box, stopping it from being dynamic and doing its thing. In doing that, we disconnect from ourselves. To be where we are, then, we need to recognize the changeable, slippery, transforming, morphing quality of our Being and of reality. That means we have to recognize our attachments, our identifications, the ways we try to hold on, which requires appreciating what we have taken to be permanent features of reality. Have you ever thought about what things you believe to be permanent? For example, don’t you think that you are always going to be you? Almost everyone believes, “I can change, but it is always going to be me who is experiencing those changes.” We can’t imagine waking up one morning and discovering that somebody else is experiencing them!

Recognizing this, we finally shed that which has always possessed us—we throw it off. We have been exorcised. We are freed from something that was imposed on us, that got into us and took over, that we introjected and identified with and thought was who we were. Now we are no longer identifying with anything; we are being ourselves.

Being ourselves means not holding on to ourselves. Because Being doesn’t need to hold on to itself. It is itself. Since it is itself and knows that it is itself—without thinking about it or doing anything to keep it that way—it is not concerned with holding on or grasping or attaching or hoping or expecting that it, or any particular experience, will come or leave or stay.

When we are our True Nature, the fact that we don’t know whether the next moment will be the same or not is no longer something to contend with. We are completely unconcerned about whether it is going to be the same or not. We have no need to hold on to the past or to get attached to the fresh and new. We recognize that whatever arises in each moment in the play of light in all its luminous forms is none of our business. We become a dynamic flowing, free presence. And that is true freedom.

EXPLORATION SESSION Exploring Beliefs about Not Changing In this exercise, you will have the opportunity to explore your experiences and your beliefs about what doesn’t change in yourself. The objective is not so much to evaluate the correctness of your perceptions but to allow the whole range of your beliefs, attitudes, and positions to be revealed. Begin by making a list of things about yourself that don’t change. Don’t get involved in the distinction in your mind about whether certain things can change or not. The important thing is to see the part of your experience that stays constant and unchanging for whatever reason. When you have finished, take a moment to look over your list. Next, explore your beliefs and assumptions about what is unchangeable in your experience. Consider these questions: What benefit do you get from having things that don’t change? How does it serve you or support you? What do you believe would happen if everything were fluid and nothing in your experience remained fixed, stable, or unchanging? What do you believe is keeping the unchanging elements in place? Don’t assume it’s your genes or God or fate. Maybe it is one of those, or something else—this is a chance to find out for yourself.

CHAPTER 15 The Personal Thread of Meaning

But have you noticed that it is never a disconnected succession? As long as we are awake, our experience is continuous. It is always a flow of experience. It’s not that we have one particular experience and then there is a gap followed by another experience and then another gap. There are no gaps, really. Our experience is a seamless flow.

So “being where we are” does not mean finding where we are and staying there and that’s it. Being where we are is a continuous practice in the sense that as we continue to be where we are, where we are changes and transforms. Thus, being ourselves, being who we are, being where we are, becomes a continuity of being—the flow of being.

In other words, we are not present at each moment to directly experience the continuity. To truly be where we are combines having the awareness of where we are, being the presence of where we are, and understanding the truth of where we are. When we bring those three elements together, being where we are becomes a practice that is necessary to become aware of the flow of being. You see, we are always someplace—one way or another, we are where we are—but we’re usually not aware of what that place is. We don’t get it; we don’t see it. Our attention, our awareness is scattered and distracted, involved with all kinds of peripheral, secondary manifestations.

When we’re not practicing, when we’re not aware of where we are, our experience does not have that kind of meaning. It seems disconnected: “I did this and I did that, and this happened and I felt that.” We don’t know how all of these events relate, because we are not really there. We are not being where we are, so the continuity of meaning is not present.

When we arrive at the third stage, the meaning of our experience continues to be the presence, but now everything else is inseparable from that presence, so all manifestation is imbued with the meaningfulness of presence. And that meaning is the recognition, the comprehension, the direct knowing of what reality is—how it appears, how it works, and how it is manifesting at this moment, in this situation.

The Personal Thread

This continuity of meaning I call the personal thread. A lot is happening in the universe. The universe itself is flowing and moving and changing, and everybody and everything that composes it is moving and changing as well. Within that shared reality, each one of us is having our own personal experience in terms of where we are—our personal thread.

Of course, our experiential universe has many more dimensions than just four: the spatial dimension, the time dimension, the feeling dimension, the knowing dimension, the thinking dimension, the color dimension, the sound dimension, the taste dimension, the kinesthetic dimension, the texture dimension, the viscosity dimension, the density dimension, the presence dimension, and so on. All these are dimensions of experience, and we can locate ourselves in each of these dimensions at any given moment. So at each point, at each instant, where we are can be described as a particular intersection point of all these dimensions. This would be where we are in the experiential universe.

THE MEANING OF LIFE As human beings, we ask, “What is the meaning of life?” From the perspective of the spiritual journey, the answer can only come from where we are. Thus the meaning of life is revealed in the unfolding thread of each person. Because of that, the meaning changes as each of us moves through life.

The more we are present where we are, the greater the sense of flow, the sense that there is a meaning to our experience, that a continuum, an unfolding, is at play. So our life becomes meaningful because not only are we in touch with the meaning of our life, we are being the meaning of our life. We are at the place where this meaning is unfolding.

EXPLORATION SESSION Considering Your Own Lifeline One of the most powerful potentials of the practice of inquiry is the revelation of our personal thread. Consider your experience in the past week. Can you identify what your unfolding thread has been? To do this you need to revisit where you have been—what you know about where you were at various points during the week. Include as much as you can about what you were experiencing physically, mentally, and emotionally. Identify the secondary and primary manifestations you were aware of in yourself. Reflect on what you can see about the deeper nature of what was happening. As you consider these various moments in time, can you see a flow or a progression between them? What do you understand about how these various experiences might be related? Do you find a thread of meaning? Can you also see the gaps where you have no sense of what connects one experience with another? Continue your exploration all the way to the present moment. The thread is there, but you may not be able to recognize it yet. It is not something you can figure out with your mind. Do not be discouraged if this continuity of your soul’s subtle unfoldment is not apparent. Simply opening yourself to the possibility will make more space for it to make itself known.

CHAPTER 16 Being without Mind

However, this capacity to know and be who we are is not based on what we understand conceptually about manifestations and how they all fit together. Being ourselves is not the outcome of mentally arranging all the pieces of a puzzle correctly to get the complete picture. It arises—or you could say it is evoked—by seeing through the beliefs we have about who we are and letting go of all the ways we stop ourselves from being who we are. And as this being who we are is revealed, we simultaneously come to know it directly without relying on our mind. In this chapter, we will be exploring a new dimension of Being that is the ground for this nonconceptual self-knowing.

The mind, then, is a mixed blessing, a double-edged sword. And that is the condition of humanity: Our intelligence, our mind, can liberate us but it can also ensnare us. Our learning, our maturation, and even our realization and enlightenment, require the capacity for discernment, for clear discrimination, of what is true and what is not true. But it is this capacity for discernment that also becomes the basis for reification. Reification cannot begin without the recognition of something, without discriminating it as distinct from everything else.

When we recognize something, we usually encapsulate it, we make it into an object, reify it, remember it, and then project it onto the present—all of which excludes the immediacy of our experience. We are, as a result, perceiving our experience through the reifications. No longer are we recognizing reality freshly. When we first recognize something—before the reification happens—the recognition is immediate. It is a felt, full sense of experiential knowing of what

Perceptual Versus Cognitive Awareness

This capacity is what I call perceptual, or pure, awareness, in contrast to knowing awareness or cognitive awareness. From the time we are born, we perceive. We might not know that we perceive, but we definitely have perception. We don’t have the cognitive awareness that develops later, but we have the perceptual awareness. As the cognitive components of awareness develop, some beginning quite early in life, we gradually lose touch with or forget about the purely perceptual awareness. We get accustomed to our awareness always being a knowing awareness, a cognitive awareness. You see an object and either you know what it is or you don’t. If you have never seen a light bulb and then you come across one, you recognize that something is there, but you know that you don’t know what it is—you don’t have a name for it—because you have never seen one.

But as the cognitive capacity develops its reifying capacity, we lose touch with the pure, perceptual awareness—the sensitivity itself without the cognitive knowing.

But the labeling also becomes the ground upon which reification can be built and regardless of how smart and aware you are, your mind works so fast that it will reify things before you are aware of it. Before you know it, you are encapsulated in the reification. It’s as though you had been shrink-wrapped by one of those machines that seal up objects. You are sitting there wrapped in cellophane that has a label with your name on it! Labeling is only useful in clarifying our experience up to a point because it is so closely linked with reification and objectification.

This is what is traditionally known as gnosis—knowing by being what we know. When we are secure in this more basic level of knowing, we feel relaxed about knowing. We feel that we do not need to hold on to knowing in order to be ourselves, for knowing is part of our inherent potential, a facet of our being. Then it becomes possible to relax to the point where the knowing capacity itself dissolves.

But it is not a going back in time, it is a “going back” ontologically, in the moment, in the sense that we have let go of one layer and now are perceiving from the underlying layer of perceptual awareness. And that layer has been and always is there; otherwise we could not perceive.

Pure Awareness

But if we look at it with pure awareness, it is as though we had never seen it before. It is fresh and new—everything is glistening, just being born. Everything is clean, transparent, light, crisp—it is just as it is—because the mind is not doing anything to it. And the mind is not doing anything because it is simply not there. Mind enters with knowing, but this is before knowing, when there is just pure perception.

It is important to recognize that what we mean by “nonconceptual” here is not what most people, including philosophers, mean by this term. Usually, nonconceptual describes something that is not mental, but is rather immediate experience, like a feeling or sensation. So the scent of a flower will be seen as nonconceptual, the texture of the orange is nonconceptual. I refer to this level of experience as basic knowing, not as nonconceptual perception.

What I am calling nonconceptual here is beyond immediate and nonrepresentational knowing. It is beyond basic knowing or gnosis. It is not a knowing at all, and there is no recognition of anything; it is total innocence of mind, perceiving but not recognizing what we are perceiving. So, we see that we have the possibility of being where we are—to be in such nakedness, such purity, that we just are and that is that.

No explanation is possible because there is nothing to explain, because there is nothing to discern—or, the discerning capacity does not function at that level. Awareness has gone deeper than discernment can go. It has reached the totally…

We cannot be free of the mind if there is only mind. If we have just the conceptual mind, there is no freedom. But the fact that awareness is beyond that conceptual mind, and we are that awareness, means that we are fundamentally free. It is just that we are…

If we can be without the mind even for a little while, many of the subtle obstacles and identifications, as well as the conceptualizations underlying our reifications, can be exposed. We can see the discrimination, the labeling, and how all of these activities are the natural activities of the mind—necessary for navigating our practical life but not necessary for us to be ourselves. To be who…

But many people think that if mind is gone, there will be no experience. In fact, the opposite is true: awareness continues with more intensity, more clarity, more transparency; colors are more vivid and forms are much more distinct. That is because everything becomes much more itself, since all the veils, all the projections, all the concepts are gone. We perceive without anything intervening, so everything is naked as itself. To believe that when…

The reification of the concepts of doing and nondoing in this dimension of experience is not the barrier—the conceptualization itself, the knowing itself, is the obstacle. Actually, it is even more subtle than that. The knowing itself is not inherently an obstacle, but because it can easily become the…

Our capacity to be in the nonconceptual makes it possible for us to use our mind and yet be free from the tendency to reify. Usually, we…

So how do we resolve this dilemma? We need to find out how to use the knowingness in a way that doesn’t ensnare but liberates. The fact is that we need knowingness to get to enlightenment. Without knowingness, we would just become stupid saints. A cow is a kind of saint—she grazes peacefully, lies down when she has eaten enough, has no hatred for anything, doesn’t want to kill anyone, is completely harmless. But a human being in that state would be called a stupid saint because the knowingness that brings in creativity and learning would be missing. Our human intelligence, our knowingness, our discerning capacity, is what opens many of our potentialities. But it is a double-edged sword; it can turn back on itself and cut us into pieces, disconnecting us from the primordial place of unity and innocence.

How do we do that? If you remember, we cease fighting only by recognizing how we are fighting. And as we recognize where we are, without trying to change ourselves, we begin to have insight into our identification and reification.

So we could say that there are three different kinds of not knowing: 1.   “I don’t know, and I don’t know that I don’t know.” This is pure ignorance and darkness, for I believe I know many things. The knowing mind is present. 2.   “I don’t know, and I know that I don’t know.” This is awakening to my condition. 3.   “I don’t know, and I don’t know that I don’t know.” This is pure realization, light, no darkness, but the knowing mind is absent. Zen masters have expressed these as: First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain.

EXPLORATION SESSION Knowing and Not Knowing This exercise is an exploration of your basic orientation to knowing and not knowing. Give yourself at least fifteen minutes for this inquiry and more if you need it. The first thing to consider is how knowing helps you to be yourself. In what ways do understanding and discrimination in your experience bring you more in contact with who you are? Then consider the opposite. How does knowing get in the way of being yourself? This might include trying to know, believing you should know, holding on to past knowledge, describing your experience, using words—any way that knowing comes up for you as a hindrance. Finally, take some time to consider not knowing. What are some of the ways you have experienced not knowing? How does not knowing affect you?

CHAPTER 17 To Be and Not to Be

In general, what is most real for human beings is the physical. To us, a rock is something that actually exists; it is something to contend with. If everything else fails, we look for a big, solid rock—whatever we consider to be “the bedrock of reality.” Why? Why don’t we naturally move toward liquefying everything? Why don’t we want to make everything gaseous, more like air? Why do we find the solid state preferable?

For example, our feelings are pretty fluid and hard to find. Our thoughts are even more so; they basically don’t exist. They are more like ungraspable holograms. But those thoughts, those ungraspable holograms, always want to pin things down, make everything real and established and known in a concrete, storable way.

We can see how this habit becomes the tendency of the ego-self—or what we call the self—to preserve itself. The self is always looking for something concrete, something solid, stable, graspable, to support itself with, to depend on. That is because the self believes that if there is no bedrock, it is going to sink; if the bottom of reality is not solid, the self will get submerged and drown. So we believe that we have to locate some kind of island or rock of solidity to stand on to keep us from drowning.

Looking For Something Solid

How does this relate to our practice of nondoing? From this perspective, the practice of nondoing basically becomes an undoing of this process of solidification. We just see through the various mental operations that conceptualize and grasp onto things in an attempt to make them solid and concrete. We make that process transparent, starting with observing the gross, surface level and moving to the deeper, more subtle subliminal processes.

Why do we have such a need to concretize? Because for us to orient ourselves, to feel a sense of reality, to operate, we feel that we need a foundation, a solid center, a base of operation. We believe that we need some place from which to spring into action. And we want our center of operation to be as stable, as solid, and as real as possible.

That is why some teachings have been reluctant to say that there is such a thing as True Nature. Because the moment I think of True Nature, then there is me, there is True Nature, and I can sit on it. I can sit in it, I can stand in it, because it is a solid ground of reality. This idea gives us a feeling of security that we won’t disappear. It gives us the recognition that we are not just a ghost, not just a hologram.

“Why am I always doing that?” As soon as this inquiry arises, we will begin to see all the ways and the reasons why we try to solidify things. Maybe we are looking for approval or we want security. We think it is important to have land, possessions, family, children—anything that we can possess we make into something solid to rely on in order to continue being.

Our Attachment To Positions

We all have positions, and we are very attached to them. Whatever happens, we have a position—for it, or against it, or “I’ve got my own position that is independent of everyone else’s,” or even, “Well, since I don’t know all the facts, I really can’t take sides; so I refuse to get involved.” That is a position, too.

But a position doesn’t have to be ideological or political. For example, if we say there is such a thing as a physical body, we assume that this is a fact, but actually it is a position. When it is an assumption from which we operate, it is a position. How about the statement, “I am a being of light”? That is a position. Now we’ve changed how we see ourselves: “I am not a physical body, I am a fluid being of light.” But if you are really a fluid being of light, you don’t need to defend that reality, you don’t need to protect it. If somebody doesn’t recognize what you are, it doesn’t matter to you. So it’s not something you have to take a position about.

FEAR OF THE BLACK HOLE Why do we have this tendency to constantly look for validation of our self-existence? What is behind all these efforts to constellate around anything we think we can rely on to keep confirming that we are? If we continue with our inquiry into this, at some point we may feel fear, perhaps even terror, and that fear shows us that we are running away from something.

If we explore those feelings, we discover that what we are trying to climb out of is a black hole. We are terrified that the black hole will suck us in. We somehow can sense that nobody ever escapes the black hole! So we hope that we will be able to stay outside the event horizon beyond the influence of the black hole. Remember, the event horizon is the point inside of which objects, experiences, and even light cannot escape because they get sucked in by the overwhelming gravity of the black hole.

Even though we say that presence is our being, that it is the authentic ontological ground of our consciousness, neither being nor existence are what we are referring to when we speak of the existence of a rock or a chair. We need to be very subtle in our understanding of what “presence is being” means. We need to recognize the pitfall of the tendency to objectify. This tendency to objectify is always an attempt to get away from this truth, from this reality that I am referring to as the black hole. And we are always trying to get away from it because it is always here; we cannot escape it. And somehow we are aware of that inescapability, we intuit it. We are continuously trying to create solidity because if we let ourselves completely relax, we will find out that the nature of presence itself is completely, absolutely nothing—it is more nothing than the nothing of empty space. It is nonbeing itself. So even though presence feels like being, when you recognize it, it is nonconceptual and therefore it is not—cannot be—the opposite of nonbeing. The notion of an opposite does not exist in the nonconceptual, and neither do being and nonbeing, because they are conceptual.

The ground of the ground, the ground of presence itself, of the luminosity itself, is nonexistence. You feel it… it exists. But what is the feeling of existence in it? What makes it exist? What is the ground of the existence of presence? The recognition of the fact that it does not exist, that it is absolutely nothing. Complete transparency, no opaqueness, no thickness, no objects, no solidity, no substance, no mass, no atoms, no time, no space… nothing. But we get accustomed to believing in and living according to our ideas of what we think our existence is—an objective existence such as that of a rock.

There Is No…

The truth of our existence reveals itself only when we start to wonder why we are always moving toward solidity. If we inquire into this, we can follow the thread of why we keep doing it, as if something were pushing us toward reifying, objectifying, making things concrete. Why don’t we just relax and let things be whatever they are? Because if we really did that, we would discover that the whole universe is just an event horizon. We would sense the infinite nothingness “within” all of reality. All of our experience, everything that manifests, is existing just on the edge of a huge…

What would happen if you didn’t try to squeeze yourself into something solid and just let yourself relax? Just by relaxing, you would realize that things start to feel lighter. If you continue, everything becomes so light, so free, so transparent, that it feels as though you could put your hand through it. You can see through everything—and behind everything there is nothing, absolutely nothing. That is why you cannot see anything—because there is nothing. You look and it is pitch dark, like the universe before the Big Bang—no stars, no light, nothing there. But…

We are not yet comfortable being an emptiness. We are not comfortable living with nothingness. Our soul, our consciousness, still doesn’t know how to be settled without being settled on top of something. It doesn’t know how to be on nothing or how to just float. We always have to sit someplace. We haven’t recognized that if we feel our nature completely, we don’t need to sit anywhere, and we don’t need a ground of any kind. And that is how it is anyway—there is no ground. It is not as though somebody is going to take reality away from us; nobody is going to take anything from us. All that will happen is that we will see through our belief, our position, that there is being and nonbeing.

Reality is: You don’t exist and you keep on living. You die and are born again even though you don’t exist.

EXPLORATION SESSION Exploring Fluidity and Solidity in Your Experience

This is an opportunity to explore the potential for fluidity in your experience. Begin by spending several minutes being present with and observing your immediate experience, allowing whatever arises in your moment-to-moment awareness. Next, take some time to consider the following questions: Did you notice any tendency to solidify what you became aware of? Did you find yourself labeling, associating with, engaging in inner dialogue about, preferring, judging? What other forms did solidification take in you? Is it possible for you not to break your experience into objects or make yourself into an object? Feel free to return to an awareness of your immediate experience as you explore these questions. The more you refrain from solidifying or objectifying, the more open your experience will become. It will be less defined, less determined by your mind, and more unknown. What stops you from allowing your experience to be completely open at each moment? Is fear involved in limiting the openness? Keep noticing how you feel as you engage in this inquiry.

CHAPTER 18 The Preciousness of Each Moment

So each moment of our life is the teaching. And we can see what the teaching is if we allow ourselves to be where we are. When we are asking, “What is the meaning of my life?” we can see what it is if we allow ourselves to be where we are. Then we are seeing what True Nature is manifesting at every moment. And if we can truly and fully be where we are, then we realize that no moment is better than any other moment. Each moment is—all moments are—the expression of True Nature. There is nobody else, nothing else, that is manifesting anything. Thus, each moment of our life is the teaching. And each moment has its own value because each moment is really the way that True Nature is manifesting itself, the way it is appearing, the form it is taking.

At the beginning of our journey, when we are not able to be ourselves, value appears more in terms of what our mind thinks is valuable. But when we are real, when we are genuine, sincere, we recognize that true value is actually the same as recognizing the

truth of the moment. Then we experience a kind of value that is not mental, that is heartfelt, that makes our heart feel satisfied.

It is not that it’s valuable because it is transparent and luminous and free and light; its own intrinsic nature makes experience and life supremely worthwhile. It makes every moment seem full of treasures, treasures that the mind cannot fathom. And those treasures are not someplace in the future but in the moment. Knowing this is simply a matter of recognition. It is a matter of being able to see clearly. THE SOURCE OF ALL VALUE

even veils and obscurations, barriers and obstacles. Every experience is here to teach us. So the issue is: How good a student of experience are we at each moment? And what does it mean to be a good student? To practice, to learn, means to perceive the teaching that is coming through each moment of our life—not just during a meditation retreat or while reading this book or doing the practice exercises or pursuing our inquiry, but in each moment of our life. There needs to be no differentiation or separation of these activities from the rest of our life.

The more we recognize this, the more our soul becomes suffused with the juices, the nectars, of fulfillment and satisfaction. The more real it becomes to us, the more our heart becomes full and pregnant with the natural fruition of recognizing the truth. We begin to recognize that we are all children of the moment, which means we are all children of True Nature.

We discover that the presence of True Nature is self-existing worth, self-existing value. It is its own value, and the source of all value.

The Difficulty Of Experiencing Value

Inquiry As A Revelation Of Implicit Value

The more we learn that each moment has its own intrinsic value, the easier it is for us to let ourselves just be in each moment, however it is manifesting. Then we recognize that where we are is where we are supposed to be. Are you sad? Bursting with excitement? Feeling sexual? Having an attack of jealousy? Tired and cranky? Feeling hopeless, inadequate, or afraid? Or are you sitting on top of the world? Well, then, that is what reality is manifesting. Who are we to judge that we shouldn’t be that way? Who are we to say that we should be like some other person?

Value is truly nothing other than our heart’s intimate contact with the immediacy of the moment—with each moment, with where we are precisely.

Nothing touches us more deeply than the implicit value of our own beingness. It is value beyond mind, beyond concepts, beyond ideals and hopes and dreams. This preciousness of simply being here now with awareness and understanding fills our heart with contentment and satisfaction.

EXPLORATION SESSION Discovering How You Value Present Experience This exercise is an opportunity to explore the way value plays a part in your practice of being where you are. First, look at why you do not value the moment. What stops you from feeling the preciousness of each moment in your experience and instead makes you prefer some moments, certain experiences, and particular situations and times over others? Becoming more aware of this will help you to see more about how you value your time, your experiences, and yourself in your life. Second, explore the various ways in which you experience the value in being where you are. How is it worthwhile for you to be present with yourself, to not go away, to feel what is here, to be in the moment? You may not value it all the time, but by now you have certainly touched on the preciousness of being here, being present, being more real. This is a time to articulate that sense of preciousness.

In other words, we assume that the most significant determinants of where we are in our life are the external factors; it is these that become the measuring stick of our development, our progress, and even our happiness in life. But even more significant is the fact that they become central to how we define who we are.

This approach is a spiritual exploration because it focuses on the location of your consciousness rather than your body, your beliefs, your pocketbook, or your significant others. The goal of these teachings has not been to help you evaluate how well you have succeeded or help you decide where to go next.

The real mirror—which is the self-awareness you are cultivating in learning to mirror yourself—is to see yourself without judgment, without comparison, without self-hatred, without reification, and without conceptualization, but with compassion and courage and kindness and love and presence and awareness and intelligence. The teachings in this book have been offered as support for the process of becoming your own mirror in these different ways. They can help you develop the confidence that you can learn to sit and meditate, to inquire, to recognize yourself where you are, to see your own personal thread and be able to remain with it so that it unfolds and reveals the truth of what you truly are—your True Nature.

This is a practice that requires a sustained meditative, focused exploration apart from the activities of daily life. It takes quiet times of attention and reflection to develop the subtle attunement in our soul to our inner whereabouts. Only after continued regular practice with concentrated attention to our ongoing experience can our contact with presence withstand the constant distractions of our own busyness. However, if we follow the thread of being aware and present as our practice of learning to be where we are, we might be able to increase the time or the space where we can be ourselves in an open way, extending it beyond the quiet, secluded moments. The more we remember to practice awareness of ourselves, and the stronger the awareness in our presence, the more we are able to stay open and attuned to what is arising in our consciousness even as we live our lives.

Of course, it also means that we need to consider the life we live and how we are living it. What takes us away from just being where we are? What do we value instead of valuing the truth of the moment? Where does our attention go? How much of our resources of time and energy are actually needed for taking care of the necessities of daily life? What do we lose by turning away from where we are now? Exploring these questions becomes a process of integrating presence into the rest of our life. So, our practice is a process of settling deeper into the moment and learning more about what takes us away from it. The mirror of our awareness gradually becomes less obscured and more luminous as it reveals to us the preciousness of what we truly are.