great book or figuring out how to help my children be happy.
I think I used to want more time because I couldn’t really rest. I couldn’t rest from trying to find the perfect thing, reasoning that the perfect thing (which usually had to do with love) would make me perfectly happy.
I’ve given up trying to make me happy (or anybody else). It’s very restful. Somehow the things that need to get done seem to get done, without a lot of effort, and without feeling like there isn’t enough time. There always seems to be enough time. Plenty, really, since nothing that happens there matters all that much anyhow.
Once, I had the thought — maybe I’ll live to a hundred. In that case, my life would be just a little more than half over. It’s hard to imagine what life would be like after all that time. I wouldn’t be better off than I am now. Even so, the idea that I might have that many more years to live outside of time is breathtaking. I don’t know how you go about counting up years without being in time. It’s a bit of a conundrum. I mean, in the moment (to moment to moment), the flow of so-called time is not felt. Even so, when you look back, you can tell something’s happened. The face is wrinkly. The knees are creaky. A lot seems to have happened.
Breaking the Rules
When you live life without fear, you are breaking the rule that says to be human is to suffer. From the perspective of a life in which fear is alive and well, if you try to imagine what a fearless life would feel like, you might picture yourself being just as you are used to being, only without fear in the picture. It’s understandably hard to see how that could be. If you look at the moment fear leaves, it isn’t that you keep on being who you’ve always been, only with the fear part cut out like a tumor. It’s more that the person who has been fearful just isn’t there anymore. That’s why when fear leaves, you don’t feel like you’re the same person anymore. You aren’t.
Actually, when that happens, you haven’t really broken a rule. You haven’t “done” anything. What has been broken is you. The neatly-defined, well-bounded person has gone altogether missing. Talk about breaking the rules. Isn’t there a rule that says a solid sense of self is a good thing? A clear set of values, principles, definite preferences, aspirations? And there is the rule that says if those things aren’t there, you are a wimp, or not fully alive.
If your sense of being a separate, particular self has dissolved, how would you be able to tell yourself apart from everyone else’s self? Exactly. When you look at how much trouble is caused by our working so hard to distinguish ourselves from one another — well, there couldn’t be violence or greed if we didn’t follow that rule. Why would you beat yourself silly? Why would you hide food from yourself, make yourself sleep out in the cold rain?
When the separate sense of self has gone, compassion is the only possible orientation to all and everyone that is. You are everyone. Compassion turns out to be about self-interest.
But everything I learned, growing up, had to do with making myself a certain kind of person. Somebody admirable. Somebody with a lot of learning, with the right politics, good looks. As if any of that would make me feel like I had really lived when the time came to die.
When fear goes away, it seems to be because you can’t figure out how to take yourself seriously anymore. The rule about taking yourself seriously is what has been broken. Everything that has ever been wrong with your life has lightened up. It doesn’t seem to be a part of you anymore. It doesn’t need fixing. You can see it, but it isn’t you anymore. There is no one left that needs to recover.
Your dearly familiar self has lost its solidity. As a result, gravity can’t seem to get hold of you. Not that the world has broken the standing rule requiring it to be a bloody mess. You can see all that’s wrong with the world. But you aren’t a bloody mess. It all just happens. It’s just that it doesn’t scare you anymore. You know it all has to go the way it has to go. (Sort of the way you had to suffer and suffer until you didn’t have to anymore.)
The other rule that’s been broken is the one that says a person must die before getting to go to heaven. The day fear had its back broken turns out to have been the start of a whole new life. You couldn’t fear death now, because it already happened. Except that somebody who looks very like yourself is still here, roaming around, wondering how come everything has turned from a problem into a miracle.
To Live in Paradise
What is it to live in paradise, in human skin? It is to feel the moment-to-moment of existence as aliveness, awareness, as pure being. This is what is primary, always. Not what the moment holds. Not the content of life, but the container. The sensation of plain being. It is exquisitely pleasurable.
Whatever comes along in life is just there. Things don’t give rise to ideas about them. Opinions, preferences. It doesn’t happen that way anymore. The impulse to approve or disapprove has broken up. There is too much light for it to exist in. It is as if all the old ideas about who you are and what your life is about (or what you wanted it to be about) have lost interest in themselves.
Nothing “means” anything. Each thing is just itself. Then the moment passes. Then another one comes. When it’s over, it’s really over.
If you imagine setting aside all the accumulated sense of who you are, who you have been all your life until now; and imagine a quiet mind (day in and day out, quiet, unless you ask it to do something for you) — if you imagine these two things, a mind with no inner need to be in motion, and your sense of yourself and your whole history blowing away like milkweed fluff — and if you further imagine that you are still very much here, are alive and aware and physical (imagine, imagine) — well, there is no present you will ever miss. You have become the present. You are pure attention. No longer ensnared by idea or memory or hope. Just here, throttlingly awake. You resist nothing. Whatever comes is allowed. Is bowed to. You don’t hurt anymore. (When you don’t resist, you don’t hurt.)
You notice that aging is happening. People you love are in trouble. The world is a mess. You are quite aware of it all, maybe more than you were before, when fear ran you. You can take anything. All is tenderness. Your heart is big and cannot be damaged.
Every little thing you do or see — every little, ordinary thing — carries this tingly sense of being. It is hard not to cry sometimes at the most unspectacular things. The lines of the walls in relation to the flat of the floor. Its horizontality. The nap of the rug. The sound of the car going by. The smell of the skin on your arm. All is miraculous.
You have forgotten why it ever mattered so much to forgive or to be forgiven. To get your own way. You can’t remember why you wanted so much to be, finally, understood. To be on the receiving end of love. You have trouble remembering what it felt like to fear death, to mind getting pulled over by a cop.
When you lay your head down on your pillow in your dark room, there is no murmuring in there. No rehash of the day, of the life; no anticipation of the morrow (which you know will take very fine care of itself when it comes). All you know right then is the feel of the pillowcase against your cheek. All you know is the silence in the room, the peepers beyond the screen (or the traffic, if your bed is near a highway). Like a stone set down on the surface of a pond, you drop into sleep that is profound. If something wakes you in the middle of the night, you don’t curse being pulled up out of sleep. You don’t start thinking. All you know is beloved, beloved, beloved. It is all beloved.
The mind no longer runs on automatic. It is like an obedient dog. It responds when you ask it to. Without a request from you, it will not do anything on its own. Torment is gone from your days.
It is easier to describe what is absent from paradise (mental and emotional torment, resistance, effort) than it is to portray what is present. What it feels like. The sweet, plain, steady sensation of aliveness. Joy. Cherishing. There is such a feeling of cherishing: of self, of other, of life, of all that is. It is so restful. Everything is allowed to be as it is. Everything is enough. Every moment is the whole world.
Already Free
It is one thing to say I long