Some people wonder how I can like the diverse group of authors that I include on my websites recommended book list. After all, the list includes Steve Hagen, Toni Packer, Darryl Bailey, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Eckhart Tolle, Alan Watts, Wayne Liquorman, Rupert Spira, Tony Parsons, Thich Nhat Hanh, Karl Renz, Gangaji, Sailor Bob, Joko Beck, Ramesh Balsekar, Pema Chodron—people whose teachings seem downright contradictory. How can I possibly embrace and recommend them all? As I see it, every expression that gets put into words is a map, a finger pointing at the moon. No map is ever the territory (the living reality) that it represents or describes. What matters is that living reality, not the sign-post or the map that points us here. I don’t mean in any way to deny the very real differences that exist between different maps, nor am I suggesting that every map will lead to precisely the same realization. But ultimately, all these different maps are pointing to this placeless place Here / Now. Ultimately, they are all pointing beyond the thought-sense of separation and encapsulation. They are all pointing to a recognition of wholeness and nonduality. They all recognize the fictional nature of the mirage-like character at the center of our life stories and the fact that no apparent “thing” has any solid, persisting, inherent, objective, observer-independent existence “out there” somewhere apart from consciousness. They all have something to do with relieving our human suffering and realizing our inherent freedom and perfection (even in the midst of apparent limitation and imperfection). And yes, they do all this in very different ways and with many differences of opinion over the nuances and details. Some of these teachers say that the entire movie of waking life (including our whole spiritual journey) is all nothing but a dream-like illusion, while others appear to take the phenomenal manifestation (and spiritual practice) very seriously. Some insist that there is nothing to do other than exactly what is happening, while others offer some kind of apparent process, practice or method for waking up. Some seem to suggest that you have the power of choice, while others say there is no you and that everything is the result of infinite causes and conditions over which no one has any control whatsoever. Some say liberation is found in the realization of complete impermanence while others insist that it comes with the recognition of THAT which never changes. Some say enlightenment is a permanent realization while others say it comes and goes and still others insist that it only happens now. Some of these teachers are all about devotion and love and opening the heart, others focus on clear insight and seeing through thoughts and beliefs, some recommend a path of service to others, some say there is nothing to do and no one to do it. Some insist that you shouldn’t eat meat or watch violent TV shows while others say that drinking beer and watching TV is every bit as enlightened as meditating or attending satsangs. Some tell you to meditate with your eyes closed, others say your eyes should be open, and some claim that any deliberate or intentional meditation will only serve to reinforce the imaginary problem and the fictional character who apparently has it. So yes, undeniably, there are differences. But the differences are in the map. And I find that different maps serve us at different moments. Sometimes we need a path of mindfulness, discipline and commitment. Sometimes we need to discover our complete powerlessness and give up all our efforts at self-improvement and relax into the absolute perfection of what is, just as it is. Sometimes we need to cultivate the ability to shift our attention from thoughts and stories to awareness and sensory presence, and other times we need to discover that no one is doing this shifting and that Ultimate Reality doesn’t depend on any shift or any circumstance—that it cannot ever be lost or found because it is all there is. Sometimes we need to focus on love and other times we need to focus on clarity and discernment. Life seems to give us exactly what we need in each moment—the perfect teacher, the perfect teaching. Sometimes that teaching is a disappointment or a loss. Sometimes it is a moment of immense beauty and overwhelming gratitude. Sometimes it is a failure, maybe an addiction or a compulsion that we cannot seem to leave behind. Sometimes it is the challenges of intimate relationship or family or work. Sometimes it is being thrown into prison or handed a terminal diagnosis. Sometimes on the path of life we need Toni Packer and sometimes we need Tony Parsons. Sometimes Advaita is the pointer we need, sometimes Buddhism is the perfect map that sets us free, and sometimes radical nonduality is the key that unlocks the last imaginary lock on the gateless gate. What I’ve discovered is that we go astray if we turn ANY teaching into a dogma that we believe in and defend. Nondual fundamentalism is not all that different from Christian or Islamic fundamentalism—all are belief systems accompanied by a strong sense of superiority. The truth, the living reality, is not a belief system or a sense of superiority. When I speak of waking up or awakening, I am speaking of NOW, not an event that happened yesterday or a continuous state that someone abides in forever after. Awakeness is timeless, which means it is NOW. We are waking up from the thought-generated (and bodily-held) delusion of separation, waking up from the stories about “me” and “the world” that we mistake for reality, waking up to the true nature of this moment. And when there is awakeness Here / Now, there is no thought-sense that “I” am awake. That kind of thought (“I am awake” or “I am not awake”) is delusion. When there is awakeness, we realize that enlightenment and delusion are two sides of a single coin that can never be pulled apart, and we see that each side contains the other. In that sense, we realize there is no coming and going and no one to “get it” or “lose it.” Can we choose to wake up, to open our heart, to be free from delusion? I have danced for many decades with the rich koan of choice vs. choicelessness, free will or determinism, power and powerlessness. Ive come to see both views as maps of reality that are each partly true, and that are both equally false if clung to dogmatically. Each map (choice or no choice, power or powerlessness) has something positive and true to offer, and each one has a way that it can be false and destructive if it is misused, misunderstood, misapplied or carried to an extreme. The “free will” map can lead to guilt, blame, shame, vengeance and all sorts of other problems when it is misused to prop up a false sense of agency and self, or to discount all the infinite causes and conditions that create this moment. And the no choice map can undermine genuine awakening by disempowering us in a false way if we misunderstand it to mean that we must eliminate the neurological sensation of agency that is part of how we function, or that we “shouldn’t” ever “do” anything deliberate, intentional or aimed at improvement of any kind—a misunderstanding akin to shooting ourselves in the foot before we even start walking. So the ultimate lesson here is that no map is ever the territory it represents. We always suffer when we try to live in a map-world. So can we use these maps of choice and no-choice wisely, without clinging to or rejecting either of them and without turning either one into a new belief system? And what about enlightenment? Is there such a thing as an enlightened person? Practically speaking, we often say that someone is awake or enlightened or that some people are “more stabilized” in wakefulness and presence than others, and this may have some relative truth to it. But in fact, no one is ALWAYS awake. There is no solid or continuous person and no permanent state in which any such fictional entity can permanently abide. Relatively speaking, we can certainly say that Buddha and Ramana were awake and that Hitler and Jack the Ripper were deluded, and to deny that difference or to fall into some false equivalence would be absurd. But in the deeper sense, there is no solid, continuous entity called “Buddha” or “Hitler” (or “me” or “you” or “chair” or “table” or “earth” or “sun”). Every apparent “thing” is actually ever-changing, thorough-going flux, inseparable from and interdependent with the entire universe. Buddha and Hitler are like two waves of the same ever-moving ocean. A wave is not a solid “thing” that you can grasp or pin down, there is no real boundary between one wave and another, and no wave ever exists independently of every other wave and the whole ocean. Buddha undoubtedly had moments of delusion, and Hitler probably had moments of clarity and love. No one is just one way all the time. Still, in a practical sense, we can distinguish between enlightenment and delusion, and between Buddha and Hitler, and to deny this kind of discernment and differentiation would be foolish. The ultimate truth is never one-sided. It is perhaps best expressed as “not one, not two.” What about teachings that insist that awareness (or the Ultimate Subject or the One Self) is always present and unchanging? Nondual teachings like to point out that the seamless and boundless ocean is equally present in every wave, and this is a wonderful realization as long as we don’t turn “the ocean” into a new kind of relative thing, a new mental concept—and that’s actually a very easy thing to do. That’s quite different from the recognition that the whole universe is present everywhere and everywhen. As Thich Nhat Hanh so beautifully describes it, if we look deeply into a single sheet of paper, we will see that the paper could not be here without the trees from which the paper is made, and without the sunlight and the soil and the rain that nourished the trees, and without the lumberjack that cut down the trees, and the workers at the paper mill, and their parents and grandparents, and the food that sustained them, and the conditions that brought forth that food, and so on and on. Ultimately, the whole universe is here in a single sheet of paper, and in the same way, the whole universe shows up as you and me and this moment. We may also notice that consciousness is the ground of every experience, that we never experience anything outside of consciousness, that consciousness is the one “thing” we cannot doubt. But then we might wonder, what remains when consciousness disappears, as it certainly seems to do in deep sleep or under anesthesia or (presumably) at the moment of death? We can never find an actual place where anything begins or ends. Darkness is present in light, and light is there in the darkness. We say that we began at birth or maybe at conception, but those are like the boundary-lines on a map—they are conceptual boundaries, not actual ones. On every level from the subatomic to the cellular to the chemical to the organic to the cognitive and emotional, a person is not the same from one moment to the next, and no person can survive without air, water, food, sunlight, companionship. In other words, nothing can be the way it is without the whole universe being the way it is. We don’t exist independently of everything else in the universe, and we are not a solid “thing” that persists over time. No such frozen and independent “things” can ever actually be found; they only exist as concepts. Reality is fluid and ever-changing. And if we simply make “the ocean” (or “the universe” or “awareness” or “consciousness”) into a new “thing” that we think is unchanging and permanent, and then turn that imaginary “thing” into a new kind of security blanket and hold onto some concept of unchanging permanence as a belief, then it seems to me we’re trying to find permanence (and the stability and freedom from death it promises) in all the wrong places. And when we pick up “oneness” as a new concept, it’s easy to run around equating Buddha and Hitler and denying that there is any need to wake up, but that doesn’t quite hit the mark, does it? No words are ever quite right. All these words like awakening, liberation, realization and enlightenment get used in different ways by different people, and there are many different maps of the awakening journey, some of them quite complicated and some very simple, and one of these maps is the radical one that uncompromisingly insists that there is no awakening and no one to awaken and no journey and “this is it” and that’s that. But whatever we say, no words can ever capture the living reality Here / Now. Whenever we try to freeze and pin down this ever-changing living reality with words, apparent paradoxes abound. There is nothing to attain and nowhere to go and no one to become enlightened, and yet the difference between being awake and not being awake is the difference between heaven and hell. It all sounds very contradictory, but the confusion is always in the words and concepts, not in the living reality which is always simple and obvious and impossible to actually avoid. So can we be sensitive to when we’re clinging to a particular map or fixating on one side of an imaginary divide? Can we listen openly to someone else even if the language they use to express all of this is totally different from the way we express it? Can we hear their intended meaning and not get stuck on rigid definitions? Can we be open to the possibility that there is always more to discover and more to learn or to unlearn? There is, in my experience, a great freedom in not knowing, in being open, in not grasping anything, even non-grasping.
Posted on: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 20:53:24 +0000