begin? There is no rest of the world. Do you have a suspicion of this? Did you think there was error?
God is a patient god. Lucky for us. No clock ticks there. It has been going on forever. It will go on another forever. We play in it, recklessly. Reckless of our majesty.
Fear is food. Eat it, shit it out, be done with it. It never did have anything to do with you. It is bored of our interest in it. It is going away now. One day, they will hear stories about the old world, how it used to be. Before we remembered what we are made of. We are here: this is that old world, where death is dreaded, where war is our idea of a good time. They will tell stories about us, how bit by bit, we shrugged ourselves awake. How we opened our eyes, looked around, and saw for the first time the miraculous world.
Shut Door, Open Door
In ordinary awareness, most moments of life seem to be like this. I am (anyone is) a certain person, having a particular identity, separate from all around me. I am here, now, and something is occurring. Maybe I’m doing something, or observing something, or something is happening to me. Maybe something noticeable is going on inside, in mind or body or emotions. There’s a physical setting and I’m located in it. Things appear to be in motion. I am somehow engaged with the surrounding experience. I am experiencing, processing, reacting. My inner response to what’s happening in the immediate scene has a landscape and an energy of its own.
Whatever the primary focus of attention, whether the immediate outer condition or an absorbing inner reality, there’s an ongoing sense that I am a physically contained awareness moving through space, moving through time, and subject to experience. That I am separate, a subject taking in an object.
Now forget all of that.
In a moment of presence, in which the solid sense of self is felt to briefly dissolve, what happens? For some reason (a thing we are not in charge of), a door has opened. In floods awareness. This is not a mental experience. It is not a “spiritual” experience. (Forget all of that too.) This is a human experience. It’s about feeling. Presence is the enlivening of intelligent awareness that is felt throughout the body.
Something has caused awareness to sense itself. People often will say they recall vividly the first time this happened. Probably it was in youth.
What opens the door? The gathering of electrified attention. The quieting of thought. An encounter with astonishing beauty can do it. Being stunned by radically unanticipated circumstances. Extreme physical effort. Rhythmic, repetitive, “mindless” activity. Creative endeavor. Breathtaking emotional or physical pain. (I experienced it at the height of labor contractions.) But even just the plain, quiet gathering of attention will open the door.
You are in utter stillness. Briefly, the familiar sense of person-having-experience has melted into diffuse awareness. There is sensation. Deep peace. Likely, you feel something. Alive, alive, you are alive. The mind is still. The apparent separateness of a self — so familiar — has softened. You are the moment. You are the space in which all is taking place. What’s happening “around” you is on the same plane of reality, in the same space, as whatever’s going on inside your apparent self (thoughts, feelings, sensations). It’s all one “thing.” (This is what is meant by “being one with all that is.”)
What holds the door shut? (For this, the shut door, is the primary ongoing human experience.) Resistance. Pushing away the spontaneous feeling that comes in response to a moment of life. Mentally managing a feeling. Making up a story about what’s happened, erecting a barrier to protect yourself. Believing your thoughts, mistaking them for reality itself. Paying attention to something inside your head instead of paying attention to what’s here and now.
Fear holds the door shut. It is all about fear — of the unknown, of the uncontrollable, of pain.
When the door opens, you allow yourself to feel what’s happening. You are an aware intelligent animal — sensory, heartfelt, fearless. What’s happening “around” you is happening within you. You are the present. This is what presence is.
This is what religion and spirituality have invented words and concepts for (”God” being one). But when you are flooded with presence, you aren’t thinking “God.” Just like a fish doesn’t think “water.” There isn’t anything but.
The thinking about it, the name for it, comes only after, during the in-between times. The useless times.
Spiritual Liberation: Top of the List
Spiritual awakening can be seen as something gained, or as something coming to an end. What’s gained is a deep, unwavering sense of well-being. What falls apart is the machinery for suffering. While most people live their whole lives without seeking liberation, or even thinking much about it, a few get a hunger for it. (There are some who wake up without having ever tried to, who never thought about it once. These people can be infuriating to the hungering ones.)
The longing can be great but stay in a perpetual stall.
Liberation tends to be seen as the final victory, the triumphant conclusion of lesser bits of “progress.” A kind of last frontier. It’s seen as the ultimate goal. But really, it’s the undoing of all goals.
Even if a person longs for liberation, there’s usually a bit of a list of other longed-for things. I want to be free . . . and I also want to be loved by somebody, and respected by my children and peers, and I want to be healthy and have a great job.
If spiritual freedom is the thing most longed for, that means it’s at the top of a list. The list is a problem. Being free means being free of the list. The other things have to be held lightly, so lightly they just may blow away. (It’s not that they wouldn’t be preferred, among other possibilities; but that the attachment to them would be less ferocious.)
But don’t I want my children to be happy? My children will be what they will be. (If they are happy, I won’t be made happier, and if they are unhappy, I won’t be made unhappy.) Don’t I want there to be world peace? The world cannot (right now) be any way other than the way it is.
A person probably can’t decide to stop wanting something, to turn off the attachment to (say) making enough money to pay the bills. But just noticing the force of wanting can have a softening effect on it. While you can’t talk yourself out of it (it’s a waste of time to try), you can look in the face of desire, the felt need to have a certain something. You can really look at the awful force of it. Feel it. Feel the pain it can’t help but cause. How it keeps the machinery of suffering going on and on.
Maybe you’ll be surprised. The desire might just turn and go then, all on its own. Maybe the thing you’ve been looking for will come in through the back door, looking for you. No more longing. No more suffering. No more list.
Conditioning
When I first was drawn to the spiritual practice I did for many years, one of the things that most appealed about it was the recommended practice of noticing what was going on in my head as I moved through my day. Not like an aggressive gardener bent on rooting out weeds, but gently, curiously. Just observing. Seeing how I reacted, on the inside, to things that happened on the outside. My young children squabbling: how that generated heat in my body, which generated yelling (and sometimes grabbing). My husband calling late in the afternoon to say he’d be delayed getting home: how that made the remaining minutes of being a single parent seem to elongate, multiply. Receiving a real letter from the editor of a literary journal, instead of the usual small rejection slip: how that swelled my heart, gave me a sense of being a real writer.
Until I encountered this idea of noticing my interior as its own world, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was a separation between that reality and the one out there — the things that happened, the situations surrounding me. To me it was all a big integrated blob, the inner and the outer woven together in a way that made them a single thing. A unified reality. As far as I had always understood it, there was a causal, inevitable relationship between what happened and how it affected me. As my mother often used to say of her own behavior and attitudes, I couldn’t