Opening the Door: Jan Frazier Teachings On Awakening. Jan Inc. Frazier

in common, and they had the same thing in common with the names for things and with the colors of things, and the same thing in common with air and with the absence of air, and the same thing in common with what gets called evil. What? How could this be, all of it home, all of it what gets called God? Not God the father. God the dirt, God the blood vessel, God the spool of thread, God the slither of spaghetti.

      When I arrived back home, this is what I knew, all of this. Only I had no words for it. I only felt it, in the body felt it. I had no explanation, no theory, no way to account for it. All I could say was, nothing would ever be wrong again. Nothing would ever be wrong again. Nothing ever had been wrong, only I didn’t know it.

      But now I knew it. But even knowing that was incidental. Knowing about it was around the edges. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

      But what I’m trying to tell you (here the madwoman reaches across the table, nearly knocking her glass over, grabbing the shirt of whoever is sitting there), what I mean to get you to see is — this was home, it was familiar, it was known to me, since all the way back to forever, and I couldn’t get over it, how it could feel so natural and right, so not-scary, to suddenly have every single solitary thing be so . . . strange. So unutterably sweet.

      And then I had the sense that I’d been right close to it, to this home thing, all my life but just not known it, like it was on the other side of this tissue papery wall running all down the length of every bit of my experience. Like in the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence, only the tissue paper was invisible and infinitely rupturable, the whole time all ready to be ripped, to have the whole home thing come flooding in, taking over, obliterating my whole prior understanding of what life was and how it operated. If only I’d known about the tissue paper wall, and had some inkling of what might have been on the other side.

      And what happened? How did it go? Something put a match to it. It was gone, just gone. I didn’t even notice it happening. I wasn’t myself anymore. I didn’t tick the way I had. Nothing was the same, and yet everything was deeply familiar. Like I had been in heaven all along, only I didn’t know it.

      The Certainty of Death

      If you think about it, the fact that death is both dreaded and unavoidable is the perfect recipe for unhappiness. Why live in dread of what is inevitable? It seems like we ought to be able to talk ourselves out of that one.

      The way we manage our knowledge of the certainty of death is to live as though it isn’t so. We pretend, on a day-to-day basis, not to know what we know. A lot rides on this denial. So we keep it going.

      Then, when somebody dies, we are truly shocked. Even more, when our own death is suddenly imminent, we just can’t get over it. As if we thought it was all going to last forever.

      What is it like to live with the ongoing awareness that death could come at any time — to anyone, self or other? To live that way but without dread or paranoia? There’s something peace-inducing about the alignment with reality, even when the reality is painful. It doesn’t much matter if the reality is something we approve of or something we’d just as soon skip. Either way, the thorough acknowledgement of the fact of a thing generates a feeling of peacefulness.

      What is real is that we constantly don’t know whether life will still be going on this time next week, or even ten minutes from now. Also, we do know that one fine minute life will have stopped. We just don’t know which minute.

      This time last week, my friend was alive. Nobody would have guessed that when he went to bed a week ago tonight, it was the last time he would do that.

      Fortunately for him, unlike most people, this man had a pretty much ongoing awareness of the unpredictability of ongoing life. He was one of the most content and joyful people I’ve known. He pretty regularly got ready to die. Which is to say, he didn’t hold on to much.

      What is it like to live without the underlying expectation of continuing? To crawl into bed at night as though it is the only time for that to happen? What is it like to live this way and yet not be in a state of vigilance, anticipating doom at every turn? What is it like to live with the recognition of uncertainty and yet not to feel insecure?

      Trying to manage the chaos we swim in doesn’t get us very far. Probably the chaos will resist management, and anyhow, during the occasional smooth patches, where things seem to be roughly in order, that tenuous stability will probably not manage to entirely quiet the undercurrent of anxiety, the one murmuring that any minute all hell could break loose. (We do know, however hard we try to pretend otherwise, that someday death will come.)

      What is the answer? It sure isn’t in trying harder to keep the dam from ever leaking. It isn’t in avoiding the certainty of death (and the uncertainty surrounding pretty much every minute getting from here to there). It’s in allowing as how a person can’t take anything for granted, and letting that be okay. You might as well let be okay whatever is. It doesn’t look like that would make for peacefulness, but it does.

      I had a conversation recently with a couple who are trying to sell their house and move across the country. The woman looked nearly panicked as she relayed the couple’s pretty constant and consuming fear of all the ways this house sale could go wrong, or just not happen at all. I floated the idea that rather than trying to manage the fear, or worse, trying to manage the unmanageable circumstances surrounding the house deal, instead, she and he might reflect on what the fear does for them. She looked at me quizzically.

      I tried to clarify. Ask yourself what you get out of running the possible nightmares through your head. What you get out of that. While you’re at it, notice how bad it makes you feel.

      She said, What do you think we get out of being afraid?

      I said that sometimes running the awful possible scenarios can feel weirdly better than just allowing as how you really have no idea what is going to happen. Her eyes became huge circles then.

      Oh my God, she said, turning to look at her husband. That’s the ultimate nightmare — not knowing! She had just gotten something.

      The ultimate nightmare also turns out to be the truth. We really don’t know what’s going to happen — with the sale of the house, with the timing of death. Spinning scenarios protects a person from the terrible not-knowing. But it turns out to be terrible only when it is not allowed. Recognizing the truth of the deep incentive to lie to self — to invent scenarios, to pretend you’ll live forever — can be a wonderful starting place on the road to a more peaceful daily existence.

      If you can deeply allow as how I just don’t know, and sink into that, you may find you feel some peace about the whole thing. Simply because you have lined yourself up with the real, with what you know to be the truth. You have stopped asking yourself to believe a lie: that the future is knowable or controllable.

      The peace may surprise you. After all, it’s the last place you ever expected to find it.