Introduction

Why pursue enlightenment? What is it?

The second question is easier to answer. Enlightenment is seeing things for what they are. It is seeing clearly. This is a simple thing to say, but its ramifications are extraordinary. When you see clearly, what and how you see transforms you, because what’s really there is not at all like what we normally assume.

This is a natural process we can see operating all the time. You see something, you have a certain understanding of it, and if you get to know it better, you gain a much deeper appreciation, one that doesn’t annihilate your initial impression, but puts it into a more complete context.

This happens with all kinds of things. People, skills, objects, everything. We meet someone and we think, this is who that person is. Then, if we allow it, something amazing happens, it turns out, that person is something much richer. That first impression has some relation to that richer view, but it is only like a small, skewed angle or perspective.

And if we allow this process to continue deepening, it finds an even deeper layer which is just like ourselves. There is a part of ourselves that is very deep, before thoughts and concepts, that just is, and that same deep essence is there in everyone else!

In fact, it’s there in everything. There is no thing, no phenomenon or occurrence that if directly witnessed openly enough doesn’t reveal that essence that is both its own inner truth - and our own! This is a life changing awareness.

That change is the answer to our first question, which was: why pursue enlightenment?

When we are seeing clearly, everything can continue to operate as before, but we see in it an essence that is beautiful, that is connected to everything else. That essence is and was always there. It is us that changes, in the way we see. Our own essence that gets a chance to come to the fore. That too was always there, but it was hidden or obscured. Even this hiding is also a function of the essence. The essence remains undisturbed.

That part of us that lets us know that we are who we are through all the stages of life, the one that keeps you being you when you are a child, in school, graduated, going to work, retiring, all these many stages, it is that aspect that makes you still you, even though you look different, your surroundings are different. Everything has changed but you are still yourself. That is the essence, and it recognizes itself in others, in all things.

What obscures things and prevents us seeing clearly are the models we carry around with us. These are the mental frameworks that we superimpose on everything. These mental patterns operate on our experiences, filtering them, organizing them, defining everything as it happens, instead of letting us actually experience them directly. Most of the time this is happening so fast and we are so familiar with it, it goes entirely unnoticed. A lot of the time we think we are interacting with the world, but we are really interacting with a series of well-rehearsed ideas about the world. It’s like a glove that we’ve worn so long we forget it's there.

When we first came into this world as babies, we didn’t have this filtration system in place. We just stared with wonder at everything, cried when we were unhappy, smiled when we were happy. But the world immediately gets to work on us, and this is our education, both formal and informal. Everything and everyone imparts a bit of the structure to us, until we have an entire world inside, a world of ideas and preferences and automatic responses.

This training is not necessarily something we can or should cast off. We need to be able to tie our shoes and know what a stop sign means in order to function in the world. What is desirable, what will let us see clearly again, is to be able to tap into that original state that is still there underneath, to let it be our touchstone, our baseline. If we can do that, then all the other skills and mental processes can work when they need to, but they will be witnessed from a deeper perspective. You can stand back and watch them. They are more like another interesting process that is happening, rather than the program in charge.

A surprising outcome when this happens is that you become more effective. You are more focused and oriented towards what is important and you are more skillful because you are more awake, alert and attentive. This is the paradox of beginner’s mind. What is more important than technique and training is the attitude. An attitude of total openness allows the world and your activity in it to be in sync. It is not active control, but it is not disengagement, either. It is a subtle merging of them into attentiveness.

To be present and mindful produces excellent action. This truth contradicts the idea that enlightenment leads to a kind of indolence or indifference. Non-attachment allows us to see clearly, but it is not the same as indifference.

It’s pointless to be awesome at doing what doesn't really need to be done. Although we’d like to think that getting good at something and just doing that over and over is excellence, it’s a bit of a lie. What is really excellent is to take wherever you are, right this moment and meet it with the fullness of yourself. Even if it's something that we normally dismiss as insignificant, whatever it may be, if we apply the skill of being fully awake then we can do it well, which in its basic sense, means doing it with love.

Sometimes we even dismiss other people as insignificant. This is a huge red flag, a glaring reminder to hold up and re-examine. Nothing happening in your life is unimportant, and most of all, are the other human beings you encounter not insignificant. Even the chair you are sitting on, the way it is putting pressure on your body to hold it up. The way you are breathing, right now, it is so profound, it supports your very life. If we could learn to breathe with utter care and attentiveness, the rest will also be infused with that awareness, because we are always breathing, no matter what we are doing.

There is a light touch, a kind of gentle awareness that can rest upon everything that is happening, without impacting it, just allowing it to be what it is. This can stand behind even our activity. This awareness is always there, in the background. We can ease back into this awareness and everything continues along as before. But we, in our perspective, are changed, more sensitive. This background awareness is open to both activity and inactivity. It naturally connects to everything. This awareness gives space and allows for the entire range of occurrences in the entire universe. This is why it is synonymous with unconditional love.

This change, easing into this awareness, we are calling enlightenment. It naturally makes a change to our behavior, because now we are witnessing ourselves, our environment and its inhabitants and the events unfolding there from a perspective that allows them to be what they are. It puts them into their proper perspective and brings them together effortlessly because it is itself the uniting factor.

This awareness is always there, functioning. If it weren’t, nothing would exist. Whatever is outside of it is non-being. It is the basic witnessing which gives life its first hearing. Because it is always there, enlightenment is always there. Enlightenment is not in the future or far away or in somebody else’s control. It is always now.

Breathing

Enlightenment is now, and a good place to start seeing it is with the breath, which is also always there with us. Watching the breath should be an uncomplicated thing. It’s more a remembering to notice than a technique. There are plenty of breathing techniques out there and they may be very helpful, but here we are concerned with just the natural breath, with paying attention to it, more than making it do something special. It’s already doing something very special.

In life and on the spiritual path, we are in need of something we can rely on. Our worldly fortunes are always rising and falling. There are contradictory religious doctrines. Thoughts are continually finding themselves in a confusion. It is very easy to become lost in ideas and impressions. Emotions will carry you off and deposit you somewhere. It can be very hard to distinguish what is really happening. Just turning on the news or having a conversation with a family member can trigger a whole cascading stream of thinking that carries us away.

The breath can be our homebase.

Sometimes we end up at war with ourselves, trying to eliminate negative thoughts and cultivate the state of mind we want. It can be hard to even figure out what is real anymore. What we know is sometimes wrong, that is for sure. Have you ever worried about something, so much so that you can’t even sleep at night and then find the very next day that the thing wasn’t a problem at all?

The breath is real. That much we know. Without arguing with the mind, we can simply turn the attention to the breath. The thinking process will naturally settle down. Thoughts continue to arise and that is totally fine. That is their nature, it’s what they do. It’s very much like the wind through the trees. Sometimes it blows hard, sometimes soft. The difference is that the wind might actually blow the tree down. Thoughts aren’t actually dangerous, until we take action on them or they stir up enough hurtful emotion to cause damage.

Thoughts and emotions like to come and present themselves as absolutely essential. You know what is actually essential? Breathing.

At first, the breath might seem boring. That is actually not true. It is always changing. It is reflecting how we are moving our body, our emotional state, our thinking. It is a two way process. How we breathe in turn influences these other things. It's an interconnected system. This is all just stuff we can observe. It’s interesting. It doesn’t mean we have to control it. If you get turned around and confused, just watch the breath. The breath will reflect your state of observation. Your observation will reflect the calming breath. This is a benevolent effect, but even that isn’t the point. The point is just noticing this incredible process that is happening.

The breath exists right on the continental divide where on one side, our will is in charge and on the other, things just happen in their own way. The breath works both under our direct will and also on its own. This fact is itself extraordinary and worthy of attention. The slightest movement of the will can influence the breath. This is very amazing. There is another kind of ebb and flow here, between control and natural process.

We can develop that lightness of attention that will follow the breath when it is happening on its own as well as when we are acting upon it. Behind both of these, what we could call the positive and negative poles of breath, is that simple awareness.

A description of breath awareness that I found helpful was given by Pema Chodron in Wisdom of No Escape. I mention that here because I think it is a friendly book and does a good job describing a kind of breath awareness that is not overbearing. I am giving you here just a simple idea about watching the breath, even less formal than what Chodron describes. Whenever you think of it, just pay attention to how you are breathing.

The breath is really a good friend, because you can always turn to it and it will be there for you. Get to know it. The air moves through your nose, cool going in, warm going out. The chest moves rhythmically. Tension and release. A good inhale is pleasurable. A long exhale has a hint of urgency. If thoughts interrupt your paying attention, it's no big deal. Just gently return to the breath-noticing.

You don’t have to resist taking control of the breath. That is ok, it naturally happens when you pay attention to it. There’s no need to take dominance over it, or completely not influence it either. You can take up a watching attitude that will watch both sides of this equation. There is an observational part of you that can quietly watch the part of you that takes control of the breath, as well.

There’s really no wrong way to pay attention to your breathing. When the mind has got you confused or events in the world are overwhelming you, you can just gently set that all aside and feel: “I wonder what the breath is up to.” Then you just naturally start watching it. The more you do this, the more friendly you become with the breathing. It really does become a good friend that you know well, in all its different aspects and moods. You become glad to have time to spend with it.

The breath is very interesting. It is astride our inside and outside. It takes air in, does something with it, then puts air back outside. The world does its part with the air. We don’t just take a big huge lungful of air at the beginning of life and then slowly let it out over time. We keep on, moment by moment, in and out, a process of engagement with the world.

Some of the most interesting parts of breathing are the little pauses at the changes from inhale to exhale and back. If you pay close attention, there isn’t really a single, decisive moment where the one changes to the other. Or maybe there is. But they do change. We are breathing in, we are breathing out. But the change is more like a continuum, a subtle shift. There is a moment where they must be poised in perfect balance, when the exhale has completed and the inhale has yet to begin. Likewise with the exhale becoming an inhale.

All this is remarkable. It's even more remarkable that we’ve managed to dismiss it as an uninteresting sidebar to life. Maybe we are here to do lots of big things in the world, but this breathing thing, it seems to be one of the things that we really are meant to do, something really essential and important. Are we breathing in order to do everything else, or, is it maybe more true that this breathing process is something essential we are doing here?

In any case, watching the breath is a wonderful antidote to confusion. Uncertainty, unhappiness, feeling lost. Intense emotion of any kind. We can say, OK, that is there. What is the breath doing? And just gently turn towards it, let it do its thing while we watch. It’s so humbly going about the business of keeping us alive.

We don’t have to argue with our thought processes. They are doing their thing, fine. We can let them be and just breathe. This is very practical advice. Thinking is very easily and regularly wrong. It is unreal. It will convince you that X is true beyond a doubt and you must do Y immediately or else and then the next moment it’ll tell you Z is true and instead you should do A. This goes on and on and will make you crazy.

Just acknowledge that all that is there, but let your awareness rest on the breathing. This you can do anytime, without permission from anyone, without losing anything or undertaking a great effort. It's just an act of noticing. This simple practice can give you a real, reliable touchstone as you go through everyday life and walk the spiritual path.

Relaxing

There is an inner tension we carry with us. This is the tension of sorting everything we encounter according to our mental criteria. We are so good at this, we don’t even notice we are doing it. We think we are interacting with the world, but really, we are interacting with an intangible layer of meaning that we project onto the world. It’s impossible to really relax while this is going on. Usually, we only get a break during sleep or special circumstances when the filtering process is suspended for a time.

We want to relax not only because it's good for our health and wellbeing, but because while we are all clenched up inside, we are not able to feel what’s happening in and around us. If you ever have the chance to sit in nature, you’ll notice that if you are quiet and still for a little bit, the little birds and critters will start coming out, the whole scene will start to reveal itself and its life. Even the grasses and leaves will wave shyly at you in the breeze. The mosquitos and ants might get after you, too!

There’s a whole world that is there. Relaxing lets it come out, because clenching is clenching to our own little world. We are the sovereigns of these little worlds, and no matter how troubled the realm may be, at least it is ours. The tension that will not let us relax is the business of projecting this little kingdom onto the world.

This is a subtle process at work. I think at the root of it, there is a sense that we know what the world is, and we are determined to process everything we experience accordingly. I mean, it feels like a responsibility to fit everything we experience into our known framework. Everything labelled, this is a car, that is a tree, a car is important if I need to go somewhere, the tree is good for shade, etc. This is a that, how does it relate to what I am trying to accomplish?

For we do seem to always be accomplishing something. Even when we are relaxing, we are accomplishing relaxation. We seem to be good at that part of the equation: tensing while relaxing. But we are not so good at the other side: relaxing while tensing. This is a kind of balancing that emerges without effort on our part, but more as a result of allowing insight to flourish. Yogananda once wrote that we can be “actively calm and calmly active.” That is the balance of real relaxation.

At the root, the “this is a that” action of our mind is the one doing the heavy lifting. Everything that arises has to be plugged into a known category or sloughed off and ignored. We can trace back to the origins of this activity, but the main thing is to start being aware of it. Awareness is love, and love is the power that unties the knots. Just like it illuminates our breathing, it will illuminate our mental processes.

We are really convinced that we know what everything is. Our materialist science supports that view. We feel justified in ignoring the cool texture of the desk on our hand because it's ‘just’ a collection of molecules and energy bouncing around. It fits into a mental framework and gets pushed aside. A desk is only a means to an end. The entire universe becomes only a means to our ends!

We only get a break from this usually if something shocks us into a moment of direct witnessing. If you are involved in a car wreck, suddenly, all the well-ordered pieces of what is what are disarranged and for a little bit, you just see directly. It’s extraordinary. In a car wreck, especially a bad one, suddenly all the priorities are totally clear, what is really important? You immediately go to the people. That’s it. The wellbeing of the people comes immediately to the fore.

The job of continually organizing everything according to what we know is exhausting. Everything must be continually fitted into the framework and the truth is they just really don’t fit entirely. The systematizing mind will never accept that it is itself a part of the reality it is trying to encompass. It cannot see its own limitation. That is up to us, to activate the deeper part of ourselves that can.

You look at the curtain hanging in the window and just go, “curtain”. Nothing special to see there. But if you go a bit closer in, hm, where did this little stain come from? And you know that this particular curtain has its own unique history, the cotton came from specific plants, the polyester from some oil well, passed through certain machines and people’s hands, all the way through shipping containers and stores and brought to this place where it is just hanging there quietly doing its job.

Obviously, if we went around trying to encounter everything with this level of detail, we’d quickly become lost. Instead, we can learn to set aside this sorting, ordering and organizing. Then things can present themselves just as they are, without being arranged by any thought process at all. In fact, you can start seeing this mental process itself as another experience that is occurring. Then it is just another phenomenon, no better or worse than the curtain. It just is.

The same pure witnessing is the audience of both the curtain hanging in the window, and the mental action that processes it. The mental process wants to claim it is more fundamental and important, but that simply isn’t true. In the view of unconditional awareness, they are equivalent.

A lot of our mind-work is filtering things out. A lot of life gets deflected as unimportant. For example, the breath. Why not notice it again right now? You can label its phases as inhale, pause, exhale, pause, but you can also just watch it. It’s a magical process, irreducible to concepts. Each instant is totally unique and its own moment.

Relaxation is the background state. It’s always there. It’s ok to exist without justifying it.

Desire

The organizing and orchestrating of life is driven by the desire to make things turn out the way they should. We naturally seek pleasure and avoid pain. On top of that is this whole structure of beliefs about what will satisfy those requirements, how we are going to achieve it. It is a responsibility we feel. We should never stop implementing what is right, to not do so is irresponsible. This responsibility is almost never completely set aside. It becomes almost inconceivable to set it aside; it appears to be the very reason we are here and alive. If not to bring about what is right, why are we even living?

When we feel like we are really making this plan work out, we can become very satisfied. When it’s going bad, we can become seriously discouraged. This pendulum swings back and forth. What is and what should be are ever at odds. In truth, we are not very good at determining what is nor what should be, because we are stuck inside our minds and their patterns.

The criteria we are using to judge things are suspect. They come from questionable provenance. They are really just a bunch of ideas and assumptions built up about things. They are standing in the way of actually seeing anything. If we can become more familiar and intimate with the seeing process itself, it will naturally clarify.

We have a responsibility to life, but it is more to respond with sincerity to each situation as it arises, rather than fix the world so it fits into our ideals. The only way to do this and really relax is to trust the overall process we find ourselves within. Obviously we’ll never relax if we are convinced that the train will go off the rails the instant we stop managing it. The only way to trust it is to see it for what it is, and that means easing up on the effort to control it. This seems dangerous at first, but there is a deeper layer of control, if that is the right word, that we can tap into, just like the deeper layer of awareness. Where control and awareness merge.

There is a role for us to play, and there is a role for confidence or trust in the work that the universe does on its own. We need both. We get into trouble when we think we are the decider. That’s where we get pathological with our moods because we are stuck on our own idea of good and bad.

Feeling up or down is natural. But when you can’t move through it, experience it and let it go, then you are stuck. We can even turn this into an infinite loop where we feel bad for feeling bad, because feeling bad isn’t allowed by our criteria!

We are so accustomed to managing things we don’t even realize we are doing it. We have adopted a basic understanding about who we are, what we are about, what the world is and what we want from it. These ideas have only a crude, tenuous relationship with things themselves, they are inevitably off-base and out-of-date. If we’re honest, we get good at looking at the world so it fits into our ideas, rather than the other way around.

We are running a program designed to implement an agenda in service to an ideal or end that we have in mind. We feel we must constantly check on this, ensure that what is happening is going towards that and not away from it.

No wonder we are stressed out! The solution then is to do ‘relaxation exercises’. Isn’t that a funny expression? We are exercising to relax? If we are exercising, we are definitely not relaxing. There may be value in these techniques, but so long as we are still in the mode of trying to accomplish some thing, even if that thing is relaxing, then we are still stuck there, leaning forward.

This leaning forward posture is very characteristic of the world we have created today. Maybe in another age, people leaned back too much and they were more in need of ‘tensation exercises’. In any case, today we are usually on the way somewhere, somewhere more important, to do something more interesting that only requires right here as a stepping stone. Here is only a necessary place to pass through.

What if right here is where we are going?

We are sorting things according to whether they are going to contribute to our goals, or hinder them, or are irrelevant. Most things fall into that irrelevant category, and we treat them accordingly with indifference. We mistake this for mastery of the world but it is only mastery of a phantom, the phantom-shadow of reality. There is an inevitable shadow cast in the world of relativity. It’s simply unavoidable. The problem arises when it becomes a phantom-shadow and we imbue it with reality of its own. It's only part of the reality, that transient shadow cast by permanent light. A shadow naturally follows the movement of light, but when it becomes detached and we go on managing this shadow as though it were the light, we are lost. We are clinging to the form of things. This clinging is the source of suffering, not the form. The form itself is always reflecting immediately the true essence. “Enlightenment is now” is just the observation that even the clinging is itself a natural form reflecting the essence.

We get very good at determining what is good and bad in the world. We get very clever at it, start applying strategies for maximizing this process, admiring those who have been successful with it, start analyzing our own thought processes to make them better and more efficient at producing the results we like. There is a whole industry for this now, the success industry, life coaching, positive thinking.

I am not demeaning these programs. Are you familiar with Napoleon Hill’s book “Think and Grow Rich”?. Notice that he later in life changed the title a little, added a very important clause to the end: “Think and Grow Rich with Peace of Mind.”

Sometimes, we want to eliminate from life anything that isn’t serving a purpose. We get to where everything we do and see, be it making money, entertaining ourselves, whatever it may be, should be aligned in reference to this master plan that is somewhere inside. Trying to bring this master plan into a permanent structure is trouble.

If we watch our mind-states without judgement, we can see they are changing all the time. Our goals are constantly shifting around, slipping and being supplanted. We feel this inner demand to keep focused, to force the goals we want to remain front-and-center. We reprimand ourselves for losing track of them. Because worst of all is to be without aim. Then you are simply drifting through the universe without anchor. A meaningless void opens up in front of you.

When I was a young man, having sex was like, really important. I seemed to be a failure if I failed at this. It's strange though, because the more I looked at this, the more it seemed like the real purpose of this intense focus was to avoid falling out of having any purpose. This was just kind of the backstop purpose. Where did it come from? It came from my upbringing and my culture and my biology. But there was a kind of fear behind it. What is this fear? It is the fear of reality unmitigated by an orienting desire. This unmitigated reality has a terrifying message for the unprepared mind: you don’t exist. Not the way you thought you did.

What’s the point?

Unfiltered reality is so vast and alive that one needs to prepare gradually to witness it. The main filter is desire. Desire is the fuel and substance that builds up the whole structure of the unreal.

Desiring is in fact the essence of false existence. It is very self of ignorance. It is what is termed the ego, this process of desiring. Desiring, fulfilling, lacking, desiring. This is samsara, cyclical existence without foundation. This is the action of the ego, which is all it is. There is no ego identity beyond it.

How did we fall into this trap? The truth is, we haven’t, really. But as long as we don’t see clearly, it is like we have fallen into a trap. When we see clearly, everything can operate as it will without fooling us. It isn’t the world that tricks us, it's us ourselves, in our own heads. The trick we play on ourselves is seeing what is always changing as permanent, and considering the lasting as entirely non-existent!

In a weird way, though, this is how we are made. The arc of awakening begins with us taking ourselves to be in charge of our own little kingdom, our lives. We believe that this belongs to us and is ours to control and guide towards the ends we choose. We believe the worst possible thing would be to lose that sovereignty. That would be total annihilation.

We hold on to all kinds of quests, the quest for a mate, for money, for prestige. We elevate these to righteousness, then most of life becomes something we endure, like sitting in traffic, in service to our overarching aims. Reluctant acceptance is the tone of these things that are to be overcome as soon as possible.

I’m not advocating the elimination of goals. So long as we are here in the human form there are objectives that will motivate us, that is natural and good. What we want to do is be able to have these goals and witness them from a deeper place, that bottomless well that is itself relaxation. It’s interesting that the positive things always exist within an infinite pool of the negative. There is light, it exists within an apparently infinite expanse of darkness that is just there, stretching throughout the vacuum of space. There is achievement, existing there in this vast expanse of things just kind of happening without apparent aim.

When we shine the clear light of awareness on things they resolve into their actuality. When we can’t do that, the best thing is to strive towards spiritual growth. It's not hard to see the inadequacy of all material and worldly aims. Assessing this and accepting it, we will naturally turn towards a higher motive: understanding the real nature of this life.

We want to make of ourselves what we want. And that means, above all else, we want to feel good about ourselves and that means we need to control our thoughts. This is where positive thinking really kicks in. This is an interesting maneuver, because when you start looking at thoughts you really find some stunning things. For example, you have these parts of your mind that are not desirable. You might catch a line of thought that could be labelled depressive, like, what is the point of all this struggle and achievement?

And there are all kinds of responses to that moment. You might just kind of slip under it, lingering in despair, or, you might fight with it and do some positive thinking. One thing is for sure: there is a part of thinking that is apparently indispensable that is a bummer, like it’s a cycle that just can’t be avoided anymore than the nighttime can be avoided.

But there’s a third avenue. You could really go straight at that question: what’s the point? What is the point? You can start by trying to think your way to a solution but you’ll find that is just another part of the never ending stream of thoughts. But there is an answer, it lies below the layer of thoughts.

The answer to purpose is to drop right into purpose itself. It is very broad and deep. It’s a very curious thing that that ‘negative’ realm we mentioned, the darkness and emptiness that is the backdrop to light and existence, when you really go into them, really deeply, it turns out they are also a part of the whole, which is itself, pure good. Diving deeply into darkness, absolute darkness is revealed to be none other than pure, absolute Light. This is a mystical transformation. It is an existential fact. Total relaxation reveals utter purposefulness. Real, true purpose is totally relaxed because it has no obstacle. Nothing can stand in the way of Divine will.

When you are truly relaxed into nature, only exactly what must happens will happen. This is the meaning of the Tao te Ching’s “

When you are totally relaxed, and yet still acting, this is the middle way. You are balanced between the poles, therefore, you can see the whole. It’s a demonstrable fact that the positive-negative duality of creation is the work of a purely Good existence. You can demonstrate it to yourself. The whole is Good, and the relative good is the obvious representative here in the world, but the relative bad also is a part of that Goodness.

Relaxing is trusting. Trusting that the next inhale will come following the exhale. Trusting that when non-breathing comes, it too is but another side of a larger breath. We can trust that this process we are within is benevolent. We don’t have to just blindly trust. We are ourselves a part of this system, so we can at any time go into it, into our own nature and see. The more often we look at this, the more often we are convinced, the better we carry this trust with us in our daily lives, until one day the conviction is confirmed and a subtle but distinct change in the tone of life results. This we are calling enlightenment. It means whereas before we were kind of going back and forth from one pole to the other, now we are sitting astride them, able to accommodate both while seeing the whole in a more ongoing way.

Mind

Another way of thinking about it is that we are learning to operate from a deeper layer of the mind. The lower layer in which experience occurs we could call “the mind itself”. There are thoughts, they apparently exist in this medium we call mind. Thoughts and emotions and external experiences, they all seem to come together as presented to this mind. Experiencing anything has the same character of being an experience.

All kinds of thoughts and experiences are bubbling up out of the mind all the time, but it itself, as itself, doesn’t change its nature. It is receptive and acts as a venue for all kinds of things, but it never loses that pure receptivity.

The nature of this mind itself is so subtle that it is also called ‘no mind’. This is an interesting destination that one arrives at in anything that is really examined very closely. Not examined in a logical way, but in a direct apprehension way. One arrives at a place where the thing appears to vanish but its effects and reality remains. You can see modern physical science really wrestling with this place in quantum mechanics. There doesn’t appear to be any physical cause or structure, and yet, here it is!

The point for us now is to get into that place where no-mind/mind itself are apparent and just let that space exist. Mind is like space in allowing other things to be and in a sense not existing itself. Spaciousness itself cannot be said to firmly exist or not exist. Life experience is full of content that fills this mind-space. When enough of the mind-content filling the space is stilled, what remains? No-mind! Or, mind itself. It's certainly not nothing, but it’s not a thing either.

We are not quieting the mind not to allow this spacious non-mind/mind-essence to exist. No, it is always already existing. We want to quiet down the thoughts and emotions so we can see it. It’s always there. Once we see it clearly enough, we can go on seeing it when there is activity within it.

Another way to think of this is as potentiality. The potential for a thing is there, whether the thing is actively there or not. Pure potentiality always exists, full of all possibilities, whether manifesting or not. Whether it is ‘patent or latent’, the possibility remains. Think of it! Whatever is possible, it is possible at all times, forever. It cannot be that potentiality has limited itself by manifesting something. If something is momentarily not possible, that doesn’t mean its potentiality is forever eliminated. The next moment it could become possible.

The mind is sometimes deemed the enemy of insight. It's really the patterns of thought that are the problem. The mind is itself pure in its essence. It is only the potentiality for things to occur. The potentiality remains, even when things are happening within it, just as an object in space doesn’t change the nature of the space. If I hold a pencil in front of me, then move it, the space it moves through isn’t affected by all this. Likewise, the mind’s nature as potential is unaffected by the experiences occurring there.

What we normally consider to be real and solid, the world of physical objects, are all ultimately, on somber analysis, experiences. They carry a significance of externality with them. By that I mean, they are experienced as existing outside the mind. Without arguing about how this all works, I am just suggesting that you turn inwards, towards the mind itself. Just as we turn to consider the breath, with a steady, gentle consideration¹, to allow it to express itself just as it is, we can observe the mind.

We are observing the mind, with the mind. This is really more of a stance or attitude than anything. It is a poised awareness. Just as when we calmly poise the awareness on the breath, balanced right at the center of controlling it and letting it operate automatically. This is how we consider the mind, in order to access its real nature.

Thoughts

Thoughts flow like any other natural process. They move just like a river. If we can see them as such, they lose some of their hynoptic power. We’d like to control our thoughts, so they produce desirable emotions and actions. Before you could do anything like that, though, you have to see them as and for what they are.

As we have watched the breath, you have noticed how it exists between what is inside and outside your influence. If you try to take conscious control of it, you may find that its not very effective. If you really want to influence breathing, the way to do it is not to grab authority over it, but rather to gently influence it. This is half letting it be what it is, and half guiding it. This way, you don’t flip-flop from intense focus to total unconsciousness. You build up a kind of magnetic field of awareness that naturally possess the power of influence.

The thoughts are just like this. They way to influence them is to gradually come into awareness. I should say that thoughts are not as friendly as breathing. Breathing is such a service-oriented process, it is so unassuming and helpful, it naturally cooperates with your awareness.

Thoughts are more unruly. That’s because they have a kind of personality to them. They often arrive with a feeling of self-importance. They are powerful, relative to everyday life, and that power goes to their head. They start to act like they are in charge, like they are a boos around here. In fact, they will start to act like they are you.

Thoughts are tied into emotion. Emotion bridges the mental and the physical. A thought that arrives with a feeling of ‘uh oh, this is scary’ gives the thought impetus. A lot of life gets swept along by this roiling mix of thought-emotion. We start to wonder, where is this taking me? Where am I right now?

A lot of the time, we start waking up to the tyranny of thinking because we don’t like how they are making us feel. They are cycling through pleasant and unpleasant apparently on their own agenda, but when they really start to make us miserable we can get motivated to get a grip on them. Controlling them is notoriously difficult, though. For one thing, we have for so long let them run the show they have a lot of inertia. For another, they are such a subtle thing that sudden movements to control them tend to just stir them up.

Real, enduring “thought control” consists more of maintaining an empty, pliable state of mind and allowing the beautiful thoughts that are merited to flourish, while simply observing and noting the thoughts that aren’t beneficial. It’s silly to think that we’ll obtain a perfect anything in this world, let alone a perfect thought process. Its more about taking up a balanced stance that can harmonize the conflicting forces.

Instead of looking on negative thoughts as awful curses to be eliminated ASAP, we can see them as an opening, places where the flow of habitual, automatic thinking can break up more easily. When things are going good, we are more content to just flow right along with them. Thoughts are happy, no problem, let’s just live for today.

The ‘negative’ or unpleasant flow of thoughts are unwelcome because they highlight the insufficiency of simply pursuing our ends endlessly. Obviously, we don’t want to wallow in painful experiences and we naturally work towards resolving them and relieving our pain and that of others. The point is to see the underlying message that inevitable pain is delivering. When the thought arises: ‘no matter what I do it seems that I still have to confront pain and death,’ it isn’t lying to you. It actually wants to awaken you to a deeper contentment.

This contentment is found in the very nature of mind, or no-mind. True contentment is not a trait, it is the very being of reality. This seems so obvious when you encounter it. The perfect adequacy, worthiness and vindication of existence is there. It is not a conclusion or outcome or result. There is almost an amusement there, it greets you with a laugh, could I be anything but perfectly satisfactory?

Suffering

The dance of light and shadow in the world is an enduring mystery to be appreciated, rather than solved. Before we come to the point of appreciation though, it causes a great deal of difficulty, as we are now happy, now sad, seemingly at the mercy of some indifferent universe that toys with us, tempting us to go after our hopes and dreams, only to trash them before our very eyes, and yet insisting that we go on trying. What a strange quandary.

Even the attempt to escape becomes its own trap! Now we are caught in the spiritual endeavor, trying our best to uncover no-mind! This goes on, alternatively we are waking, sleeping, inspired, depressed. A growing sense of certainty that something must be beyond this tricky game is building, we catch glimpses, the real character of lasting spiritual insight is suggested by our mystical experiences but they fade and doubt remains.

That gnawing doubt is like a duty, we can’t set it aside until it is really addressed. Just adopting some kind of insincere faith is never going to work. We know that we must demand from ourselves a real, true breakthrough into certainty that legitimately overcomes all doubt and uncertainty, all rational thought that can call it into question. This predicament goes on developing, and where we want more peace from our spiritual journey, instead we are getting less, more dissatisfaction and greater swings from highs and lows, it’s a real mess.

There is a special kind of this interior pain which we can call suffering. This is acute spiritual pain. This is when the question about what is the point of this human life becomes intolerable, there are no cures, no distractions, nothing remains except the single, unbearable need to understand what is the purpose: why am I here?

The writer Soren Kierkegaard called this the ‘sickness unto death’. St. John of the Cross called it, ‘the dark night of the soul.’ It is not in any way softened because it has been named and experienced by others. When you are going through it, there really is no relief. You are fully, completely miserable, at a loss.

What happens is that this suffering is working a hidden change inside of you. Your thinking mind finally gives up. It can’t figure a solution. You just finally let go. You are amazed to find that the world keeps operating. You keep moving around like a human being. You have gotten to a point where you truly, honestly cannot offer a good motivation for your continued existence, or that of anything at all, and yet, here it all is anyway.

Until you get to the point, one way or another, of seeing that all the parts of life, no matter how great or successful they might become, are essentially lacking and inadequate, you will not see the backdrop of life which imbues them with actual Purpose and calls them forth into being. The only way to eradicate doubt is to go right down into it, into its very bowels. That is where you find the fundamental nature of desire and no-purpose resolved into the whole of Purpose.

Just as the breath serves both to keep us alive but also is its own, self-merited process. Meaning is the redemption and resolution of suffering. It is not something that is concluded from or built or projected by us onto things. The world is only as deep as our experience and trying to discover the meaning and depth in it is futile. It is to turn to the experiencing process and discover the meaning which does not come as a result, but hums and shines with its own self-actualized life, from which all things issue.

Just as breathing in and out serve to awaken to the true process of breathing, in this very moment, suffering and pleasure, good and bad, all the pairs of opposites serve ultimately to awaken to the true living Meaning.

Indifference

One of the greatest blocks to awakening is indifference. Even though there is always a hint of dissatisfaction, a subtle bitter flavor that tinges all our experiences, we go ahead and try to cover that with more pleasures and successes and distractions. We look around and see a world filled with people pursuing their ends, seemingly untroubled by any reflections about the transitory nature of life, they seem to be living for all its worth in the moment, going for their dreams. Or at least, accepting the consolations of what life has to offer. Maybe that is all there is and that is enough?

So we set aside that small doubt and turn towards the quest for success. Everywhere you look there is someone telling you how to make more money, get the right mate, decorate the house. Enough of this, and you will make it, to a place where you will sit back and realize, that’s it, I have it all, I am great, now I can experience total satisfaction without end.

Doesn’t that sound silly on the face of it? Usually, we don’t think too much about it though, what we really want is just to feel better right now. That means turning towards the multitude of avenues readily waiting to channel the mind: scrolling on the cellphone, buying something at a store, watching streaming TV, dwelling on some habitual train of thought.

Before it sounds like I am condemning these things let me say that of course they have their role and place. Nothing in life is without its rightful place. We are just now pointing out the greatest and first obstacle to enlightenment, which is indifference, which is fed by the fuel of distraction, which is simply the attempt to avoid the inner prompting that wants us to looks more deeply, to live below the surface level, to discover the essence of things that gives life to them.

Obviously, if we are convinced that this inner prompting is useless, or is itself the distraction to be avoided or even that it is pathological, something to be remedied with therapy or pharmaceuticals, then we will dodge its end result, that is, to waken to a more profound experience of life.

There isn’t much we can do about this situation. As long as a person is determined to keep their eyes down and try to find happiness in the world of things and pleasures and success, they won’t really pay much attention to spirituality. Oh, they might include some religion in their habits and routines, but it won’t get much traction, not at a gut level, anyway.

It is up to some kind of miraculous intervention that lifts a person’s eyes up. Or, perhaps it's the inevitable operation of time and the ups and downs of life. In any case, we can see that dissatisfaction with worldly life and a yearning for something more is at first very unhappy, but must be seen as an essential and precious first step. This is why Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Just as the breathing reveals itself to be something beautiful and inspiring, all of life begins to reveal itself when we start to wake up from the delusion that we already know all of life and what it is about and start to actually look into it with an open mind and heart.

Impermanence

Life itself has a way of prying us off our determination to discover happiness in the world. This is inherent in the impermanence of life. This is why ‘impermanence’ is such a prominent feature of spiritual traditions, they continually point at it, not to be mean and rain on your parade or spoil your fun, but because it is real, always operative and once accepted, surprisingly reveals a deeper kind of contentment.

But it is really unpleasant when impermanence raises its head and we are trying to build joy and happiness on the things it is working on. Our family, friends, careers, homes, our very bodies. All these are gradually swept away by impermanence. This is exactly what Jesus was talking about when he described building our homes on sand instead of rock. Only Spirit, that deeper current that underlies all of life, can be the rock. It’s the same meaning behind the advice to store your treasures in heaven.

Buddhist also talk about impermanence all the time. It’s a common trait among spiritual traditions because this transient character of reality is so important for letting us stop resting in that which changes and becoming aware of that which doesn’t. Swami Muktenanda was asked what is real, and he replied, “That which does not change.” Where can we find such a thing?

The Koran says “The life of this world is but play and amusement.” [6:32]. Clearly, it doesn’t recommend finding lasting peace there. It’s the same with one of the most famous spiritual statements of all time: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”

Impermanence seems to be an unfortunate, unavoidable characteristic of life. Everything we hold dear and work towards eventually is worn down and carried away by time. But in times of pain and hardship, the benevolence of impermanence is seen. And it has a deep message for us if we will listen, to not seek our footing in the world of changing things. The real foundation we seek is what contains the change, but is itself unaffected by it, just as the breathing process is moving in, pausing, moving out, but itself continuing on.

Tradition

It's surprising, stunning even, that people have managed to portray a division in the root of our spiritual traditions. They are all, in their heart, in their essential messages, united, and one key factor is this sense of impermanence and how it necessarily voids normal, worldly existence of a lasting happiness. It’s natural and right that we want to relieve suffering and produce happiness in ourselves and others. The trick is to discover the wellspring of these both. If you pursue the experience of pain and pleasure to its origin, you find that events just occur, and there is a level within you that determines their meaning or worth. If you continue on, you find the one who produced that power and the power of experience itself.

By remaining close to that one, the pair of good/bad opposites is easier to dissolve in its nature, which is pure Good. It’s a mysterious power that absolute Good produces relative good and evil. It’s like in its abundance, it produces both abundance and lack. One side is more like It, but both sides reveal It.

This is a trait of all deeper wisdom that seeks to balance and harmonize, rather than impose an understanding of goodness upon reality. Instead, the inherit, ineffable, transcendent Good shines through and does the real work. We get to bask in it and it calls forth from us our deepest aspiration and inspiration to contribute, but we know that it is not us that does the real work. Our efforts become more like an offering or an adornment or a spontaneous expression of gratitude and celebration. “Act without attachment to the fruits.”

Scripture is full of apparent contradiction because it is not attempting to present a logical system of thought. It is trying to wake you up to see for yourself what the writer is seeing. This is the key difference. Scripture isn’t designed to explain, it's designed to awaken.

All rigid systems will fall apart when contacting real life. Being awake, however, will do the job. Awakening to your inner nature, that is the only security. The spiritual traditions and their teachings are designed to help catch up with you, wherever you may be, in whatever state, and guide you towards that inner awakening, towards yourself. Depending on where you are, this can require very different tactics. Sometimes it requires a real jolt, a shaking of the indolent personality. Sometimes, it is a gentle nudge. Sometimes, it is a caring hand extended.

There are as many paths as there are people. The details of the paths are impossible to enumerate. The essence of scripture and teaching is the quality of consciousness with which they are created. This is the active ingredient. This is the magnetic field that when your own consciousness draws close to it, will pick up a resonance and eventually carry its own self-awakened vibration.

The love that is imbued into teaching is the critical factor. This is the reflection of divine Love. When one is very clear about this, it is easy to discover at what level a teaching is delivered. A dead give away for an undeveloped teacher is any kind of dividing of humanity and setting them against each other. An enthusiasm for a particular path that has helped you is natural, but a denigration of another’s path is a sign of insecurity and in a state of enlightenment, there is no insecurity.

Awakening is awakening to what is universal, the Universal Presence, which is in all things and especially inside each human being. This supreme treasure is One. It is equally available to all. It is the aim and purpose of all spiritual traditions. Find those traditions that work to awaken this inside of you. Let them be alive in you and work their magic, and after a while, you will find that any tradition you encounter will speak its special language of the one message. (You will also quickly and dispassionately discard any dead teachings speaking of disharmony.)

There is no systematic organization that will meet life in its moment-to-moment happening. Only living is able to meet life. Scripture is demanding that we wake up, to live like that, fully meeting every moment. Then we will act naturally in the right way in every situation, not because we have mastered some rule-set, but because we are engaging right then and there with our true selves and that of those around us, the real nature of things, which is the Life in life itself.

This is exactly why scripture continually says things that the reasoning mind has a hard time with, and often can’t make sense of at all. This is the point that Zen dialogs distill. They force you to abandon preconception and enter into the primordial mind, or no-mind if you like, to make sense of what is happening. Even then you can’t logically, fully account for everything. THe point is you have entered into your own real nature, right now, not conceptually, and there you have all the resources you need to live.

Another turn of this wheel is to see that everything at all times is expressing this nature. Even what we consider our mistakes. There is a role at one level for us to exercise our will and to do the best we can to act rightly. But at another level, we must see directly that we are not really the power behind these actions. There is a universal will that is behind them. These two levels can exist simultaneously. This is the mystical resolution of the paradox of omniscience and freewill. The power of omniscience is such, it is so far beyond our relative understanding of power, it is so unconstrained, that providing a universe where it has created everything and yet beings within it are endowed with agency, this is an easy accomplishment, a small thing. What we consider fantastical or impossible are all based on rules that we have accepted, rules that are the plaything of the omniscient.

This is what the Bhagavad Gita has in mind when it says: “With your mind centered on Me, act.” It means, you are connected to the absolute, and you act within the relative world. Its a mistake to abandon either aspect. This is what Tsong Khapa means in his Treatise, when he says that as long as there is a division between form and emptiness, awakening is not complete.

To realize that everything, right now, including you, with all your misgivings and mistakes, is in fact exactly already the thing; that is the core of this teaching. Enlightenment is now. It can’t be otherwise. There is no ‘where else’ for anything to happen. It all is happening now, as part of the truth. Nothing can fall outside the truth. If it's outside the truth, it is incomprehensible, it will never arise in the first place.

After apathy, the feeling that enlightenment is in the future or distant is the second obstacle. In fact, it is always right here, closer than anything else. Real insight is both transcendent and gritty. It does not abandon you in any circumstances whatsoever. It is with you in hardship, in failure, even in anger and foolishness and the everyday grind. You see that insight doesn’t overcome anything by warfare, it unravels it effortlessly by seeing it as existing and operating as a part of itself.

Even the worst of ourselves, the hate, selfishness and greed, they can’t be overcome by hating them, or selfish desire or greedily wanting, obviously. We do want to, rightly, overcome them. It is good to see them, identify them and want to rise above them and transform them. This is very natural, it is a natural goodness in us that dislikes the parts of us that cause harm.

But how to transform the negative things in us, that is a subtle thing. This is why Jungian shadow work and similar approaches are more effective than any kind of white-knuckled war on ourselves. In shadow work you acknowledge what's there and give love to it! It’s the love that does the work. Love can grow to encompass everything. Love has an unconditional root that leads directly to the nature of all things.

It’s always better to move towards the good, rather than war with the bad. This is the essence of the advice to “resist not evil.” There is a very profound expression of this idea in the Yoga Vasistha translated by Swami Venkatesananda, which is: “do not investigate the unreal, investigate the real.” If you investigate the unreal, it will go on forever. The only way to stop this is to turn, right now, and look towards the Real.

When we investigate the breath, an ievitable question arises: who is the breather? That is the question to be answered. Sometimes the breath just moves and sometimes I seem to be in control of it. How do I control it? Not with thoughts. I don’t think “inhale now”. No, I just will it to be so and it is so. Where does this power reside? What is its relation to my ability to witness all of this? The more you delve into these questions, the more you’ll see that there is no detangling them from eachother. They are organically a whole, working seamlessly to breathe.

Models

Creating mental models of reality is a major preoccupation for us these days. We are doing this everywhere, professionally as scientists and engineers and all day long in our regular lives. One thing we tend to forget is that all models exist within the reality they describe. If you spread out a map of the region on a table, that map exists as a part of the region it is in.

We use our mental models to understand reality and help us navigate it for more desirable results. Modern science and engineering is largely about this process, creating and improving models to make them more predictive. Mathematics is a kind of model. But we do it too in everyday life, all the time.

Aristotle discussed this in his Nicomachean Ethics, observing how we strive to manage and control even other human beings. That project is alive and thriving today, “Win Friends and Influence People”, “Power of Positive Thinking”, not to mention the teeming swarm of social media influencers who will teach you how to influence. Aristotle may be right in his observation about our behavior, but Plato was right in a far deeper way when he described us as being in a cave, fascinated by shadows on the wall. The models we have relate to the shadows dancing on the walls. But to truly know their nature, we must know the Light that casts them.

These models include what things are, what their meaning is, whether they are good or bad, what we are, what our roles are, what we are trying to do with our lives, etc. They are dynamic and evolving. One person might have a model that says money is really important and so they have this whole mind structure set up about how to get it and keep it. Another person has a model that says that money is bad and their model tells them how to have just enough to survive.

We aren’t concerned with the specifics of the models. We want to notice they are there. It’s ok that they are there. They are doing their job. They are up to something, anyway. Deciding that they are bad is just another model! See how quickly the mind can get tangled up? You wind up with models about models. The mind does not know when to quit. Only seeing that these models are made of our own belief in them, that they have no substance in themselves, can diffuse them.

tHe changeable world has a certain relative reality, as it is the expression of the unchangeable Reality. But our models about reality, they are doubly divorced from Reality. They are shadows of shadows. A shadow doesn’t cast a shadow. These are illusory phantoms that exist only as we provide them with belief and emotion.

There are more or less beneficial models to have. It is far better to have a model that supports helping other people than taking ruthless advantage of them. Still, even the model of helping others can get in the way. That’s just because our root motivation there is often a sense of our own goodness, a certain self-satisfaction. To really arrive at a pure motivation, one must dig all the way down, past one’s own small self, to the Self, itself. This is the reason for one of Jesus Christ’s most beautiful sayings: “Why call me good?”

In everyday life, you can feel the models operating, with the sense of going through the world feeling, “there's something I am looking for, and this ain’t it.” If you can get behind this reflex, you can start to see that life is bringing you exactly what you need. You will not make life more beautiful, it will make you more beautiful, if you let it. In the final analysis, life is itself the Guru, it is the living Guru, every moment, perfectly addressing its lesson to you just as you need it.

We are seeking perfection, so it would seem, but there is only one perfect thing and it's not a thing. We are restlessly driven by discontent with what is. This restlessness can be turned to discover the source of contentment itself.

The process of making, holding and applying models interferes with seeing directly.

The problem we have is in the model we hold about the Universe, in accepting it as being real, as a substitute for directly witnessing it. This model in our day and age is what I’d call “scientific materialism”. Everything is made up of particles, let's call them subatomic particles, or waves or whatever mechanism you like. These exist independently ‘out there’ and fly around colliding, causing all of reality and experience. That is the universe as ‘materialism’ sees it, and we explore it with ‘science’, which is our modern dogma or religion.

Any mental model can interfere with seeing directly. In fact, any mental structures or forms can do that. But I think there is something especially tricky about this modern viewpoint. It tells us that we are the result of matter, and that science has answered this question thoroughly and we should get on with the business of living within this framework.

The assertion that science has ‘proven’ this and that is the issue. Proof is a very high bar to cross. It puts the proven thing into a category of faith. We should have faith in what science has proven. But science itself, when taken honestly, doesn’t claim proof, ever. This is a very important point. It is the doorway out of the stuckness many of us experience.

The reason we have so much confidence in science is because it restricts itself to dealing with experiences and their results. It explicitly and emphatically keeps itself to the facts of experience, that is, experimental evidence. That is all well and good, but we can see immediately that if science goes beyond this it is no longer science as such, instead, it is dogma, or faith or orthodoxy or theory or something else. True, pure science never allows itself to assert what it cannot prove, and it acknowledges that it can’t prove anything, it can only offer theories that have been tested and not disproven.

One thing is sure, the science which is facing outwards, towards the physical world can go on forever finding more details. The physical world is always changing and filled with infinite variety. This is why the Taos te Ching refers to it as the 10,000 things and endless naming. Science is naming and naming and naming. Now there are Moun g-2s. There are an astonishing number of subatomic particles. We originally were told that atoms, the very name means non-divisible, atomic, were the basic building blocks of the universe, but no, it turns out there’s lots of other stuff beneath that, and the more we look, the more we find.

Because in that project, the project of physical science, we are looking outward, into the multiplying diversity of creation. We’ll never find the root of existence, the fundamentals, there.

That is a real delusion of modern science, that we’ll dig deeply enough into matter to find the basic cause of reality. When did we make that decision? When material science was good at building bridges and rockets and the internet, we just made the conclusion that it must be good at everything and it would be good at cosmology and it had eliminated spirit and the need to study ourselves. This is just wrong. It’s not often you get to point at something and just declare it outright incorrect, but here it is: physical science does not have the answers to spiritual questions, and it does not eliminate them either.

To find the source, you must turn inwards, to discover the power of observation itself. Obviously, if you are looking at stars through the telescope, you will find lots and lots of stars, but you’ll never understand or suspect the nature of the telescope itself, which is also an essential component of the universe. In that analogy, your own consciousness is the telescope, I hope that makes sense.

What is the apparatus of understanding? How can we possibly go on exploring the universe without becoming fascinated by that question? This is not to say go look into neurology and the science of consciousness understood as an external phenomenon. It means to begin looking at consciousness itself, which means the only consciousness to which you have direct access: your consciousness.

This is a basic flaw in the way we moderns approach science. Science is at its heart a willingness to observe and to acknowledge what observation reveals, rather than what we want or have been taught to believe. Yet, the modern scientist is committed to the external-material understanding of reality to the extent that they will not look at consciousness itself. This is tantamount to someone refusing to look at a microscope and therefore disbelieving in microbes.

Inner science, the revelation of what is found when looking at our own nature objectively, that is what is required to escape the current impasse of culture, the deadend of nihilism and despair. What am I? This question must be taken on, the ancient admonishment to “know thyself” remains as ever relevant.

Effort and Grace

I think discipline is so necessary in the spiritual path almost more because it reveals to us the inner landscape, as we try to control it, we realize, my, what a mess there is!

Because ultimately, it isn’t us, in our own small selves that does the overcoming. Effort is required and every little effort brings a little glimpse, that is certain, and the little glimpses encourage us to continue on. When we are peaceful and calm, we see clearly, the beauty and wonder of what is there, behind the screen of desires and disappointments that tend to fill our vision. It is really the inherent goodness of what we see, the pull it has on us, that redeems us. We are really not able, of ourselves, to rise out of self-driven seeking, that isn’t really our fault even. WE are made to experience life as though it was all there is, but with the seed of yearning for something greater planted in us. That seed will necessarily germinate and grow over time.

We are lifted out of a narrow vision by witnessing, in gradually greater portion and consistency, the goodness of reality itself. That cancels out the impossible situation we are in of wanting to be liberated, and the very wanting blocking it. Both sides are necessary. Sincerely seeking is met by true help.

Seeking and self-effort are absolutely priceless and necessary. The thought, God is handling it and inevitably I’ll be awakened, that is true to some extent but you won’t like how it works! What happens is that, if you will not willingly undertake what you know you should, you will be forced into it, and the mechanism that must be used at that point is pain and suffering!

So, it is absolutely true that God does not abandon any of his children - how could he? But what we do not learn through earnest effort, will be taught through suffering. (I might add a small side note here that creation is also amazing enough to allow for human creativity. Yes, there is a certain degree of wandering off course that reality will correct with what we might term ‘punishment’. But, there is also, in this abundant reality, plenty of what you might call artistic expression, that is, you have a choice here if you smell this or that flower, or paint the wall green or red, or play this or that note on the guitar.)

Even doubt and dismay are not divided from the whole. The effort is to untie the inner knots, release the tension within, to allow the real nature of things to shine through, of their own light. Then things tend to resolve themselves. You can see that this is a strange paradox, that effort to stop struggling and see!

How can we ever struggle hard enough to stop struggling?! We can’t! Here is something that can’t be proven ahead of time but is nevertheless true: you struggle, you go deeply, you are sincere and then at some point, something from the outside saves you. This is Grace. This is salvation. This is Mercy. This action from the universe reveals that all along everything was none-other than its own activity, both wisdom and ignorance. This is something very, very beautiful that once seen, once revealed, even though the world can still pull all its tricks on you, you simply know in some part deep inside that everything is alright, the basic nature of everything is Good, no amount of scary or painful experience can completely shake that knowing anymore.

Grace always gets the next move. It is simply the nature of everything reabsorbing into itself its own expression. We catch glimpses of this true nature along the way. In various moments when meditating or encountering beauty or goodness. The confirmation comes when our suspicions are confirmed: yes, that is it, that is the real essence of all things. This is why Buddha says that ‘form and emptiness are one’. What he means is that this world we live in everyday, it is not different from the unconstrained, spacious reality behind everything.

God

When we say there is nothing outside of God, we tend to imagine some ‘thing’ which is named ‘nothing’ that is out there, containing God. That is, of course, wrong. Nothing is not some ‘thing’ that has a trait of not existing, it means, it doesn’t exist at all. “Nothing” is an idea that exists within God.

If you don’t like the word God, you can use the word “Universe” in its place. Universe is good because it is something science accepts and also, it seems to definitely exist. You’d never say something about the universe and have someone go, “Oh, well, I don’t beileve in the universe.” We all believe in the universe and if anyone doubted its existence, we could tap on the table or something and say that is what we are referring to, this place where we are right now.

To make it an appropriate substitute for God, I should capitalize the word: Universe. Why is that? It’s because we want to refer not just to the parts but also the whole, the essence that is lasting. The table changes, one day it will no longer be a table. It’ll become its constituent parts and become something else. Science and religion both teach this. So we want to reference both these changing parts but also the total which includes them all and which in a way is not changed, because it remains after all the changes. Or if we might dispute that such a thing exists, that we are talking about the totality of all these changes, the ongoing process of change that is the Universe.

Just like there is something in us that maintains our identity through all the modifications we experience in life, there is something in the universe that maintains its unity, which I am calling the Universe. This is really the same as God, which is to say, the changing, dynamic and transient world of everyday life, is somehow a facet of it but not the whole story. We can’t really separate this part from it, this is a false division, but if we can view this as its nature we can see both together.

When we say the nature of a thing, we mean its very characteristic behavior and activity. It’s not really possible to isolate the nature of a person or a thing from the thing itself. The nature of the table is to hold things up. If you take that away, its not really a table anymore. As soon as you have that, there is in a sense the presence of a table. This dancing around of concepts and specific identity is ongoing. When we expand on nature, let’s call it Nature, we mean the Nature of the Universe. This Nature is the wild, abundant and diverse expression of creation we see all around us.

Nature, when we use it everyday, as in, I’m going for a hike in nature - that is the nature of the universe. It is the nature of the universe to grow, for the trees to put out buds in the spring and drop pine cones in the fall. It just does its thing. It is its nature. We don’t get into trouble expanding this notion, we get into trouble by limiting it. We think that human nature is somehow divorced from it. We think that this or that is artificial. What is artificial? What could possibly be artificial, apart from the nature of the universe? Of course, even the most synthetic and processed thing we can imagine (maybe a packet of sugar substitute!) is actually just a particular avenue of this natural process.

This totally expanded and unlimited definition of nature encompasses the world of thoughts and ideas as well. This full definition of nature is exactly God’s nature. If we ask why someone does something and we say that is just their nature, this is exactly how we could understand God’s creation of the universe!

Science talks about an expanding universe. If we could just make that expansion really go all the way, it might open the mind up enough to stop putting limits on it. When you leave behind the very impulse of limitation or constraint or definition, you draw close to Universe.

So the nature of the universe, is it like the nature of a tree? Why does a leaf grow they way it does, with that particular shape and texture? Science will say that this is an answered question, its the genes. OK, its the genes being expressed in the context of the environment. But we could fairly ask, why does that leaf have those particular genes? The answer is that its because that’s the genes for that tree. But why are those genes there? Well, that is because its parents had certain genes and they replicated and here we are now. But if we are really insistent the answer will become: because the universe exploded before there was even space and time!

I was wondering about the shape of the oak leaf and now I’m trying to imagine a time and place without time or space. Nature is totally amazing. If you sit and watch the tree leaves in the breeze, you can think, oh that is genetic material expressing itself in the context of air molecules moving around, but really they are two different things. One is something happening before your very eyes, the other is a thought process. It's another one of those models.

I wonder if it isn’t more accurate to say the genetic information and the shape of the leaf aren’t reflections of one another. Or maybe better, they are different angles on the same thing: nature. You might say the genetics predicts the outcome of the organism, but then, the shape of the organism predicts the genetics, as well. It’s a wash.

Neuro-digital bondage

We are in apparently unique and unprecedented times. The materialist project seems to be progressing ever further, coming closer to actually arriving at the physical basis of consciousness. It seems like we might soon be able to upload ourselves to a computer. We’ll have digital analogs that can take on our neural configurations and we will exist in that way, freed from our human biology.

Or, perhaps there will be great progress on the way to human-machine interfaces and we will see the ability to wirelessly induce states of mind in people and to real-time observe what is happening inside of them. This is a kind of slavery. The spirit of a person is always free, but their physical vehicle can be shackled. Just as a person can be put in prison and their ability to exercise agency in the world thereby reduced, the same could be done at the level of the brain and central nervous system.

Everyone should pause and think about the effects of ubiquitous cell phones and wireless technology. The question is just one of how much happiness has this brought you? This is not an argument to abandon our technology. But think how it would be if the physical act of using devices were removed, if it became very difficult to even tell what was your own thinking and what was the network.

This idea of augmented humanity is nothing new. Science fiction writers have been ruminating on it for decades. But we seem to be inching closer to it as a reality. It is a possibility. This doesn’t mean that the physical is the cause of consciousness. That is a simple misunderstanding of what is meant by the word “consciousness”. Rightly understood, consciousness is the venue in which physical experience occurs, therefore, it cannot be caused by those experiences.

Still, consciousness is modified in its experience of the physical. If you are hit in the head, it hurts. The operation of the physical instrument has a profound impact on the experience of the individualized consciousness. The possibility of creating a race of neuro-digitally oppressed humans is real.

Why would we do this? Of course it begins by helping the disabled, to give them more physical ability via machines. Then, it is improving the quality of life for everyone and then offering a life without inconvenience and maybe even a kind of immortality.

Life without anything unpleasant, this should always be a warning sign.

If our very thinking and experiencing processes are integrated into a computer system, you have to ask who is running that system? This is a real question. If your brain is a client and there is a server, who runs the server? If there is an admin in your neurological loop, who is that admin?

We should be very careful about the proffered solutions to our complaints about life. It's worth really looking into our unhappiness, at the causes of our dissatisfaction. If we look deeply enough, they have a lot to teach us. We can learn from them instead of just trying to avoid them.

If you look with an unprejudiced eye, there is evidence aplenty that this Earth has hosted successive waves of civilizations beyond even those we are aware of. It’s entirely possible that others have existed that rose to the kind of technology we have today and that the very same kind of ‘transhumanist’ agenda is what led to their demise. What is clear even from the historical record is that anytime you have the systematic domination of humanity, you have an ensuing collapse.

That is not a coincidence. It is not, as the modern technocrat might hope, just that we haven’t arrived at a good enough technical solution to the problem of controlling humanity. Humanity exists as an essential expression of the nature of reality, not as some odd side effect. Technology exists to serve humanity, not the other way around. This is a point that we seem to have to learn over and over again the hard way.

This is the movement of history that calls forth the avatar. Each one of us is an avatar, an embodiment of the Divine. When there is wise leadership that guides humanity like the guiding of the breath, with awareness and influence, then that Divinity inside all naturally arises easily. The more that will is suppressed in the masses, the more it arises in the few. It’s even true that if will is suppressed too much in humanity as a whole, a small group of people could carry the weight of civilization for a time. A single person could remain in deep samadhi for a very, very long time. A single person can radically change the course of history, look at Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Lao Tzu and Krishna. But look at the widespread suffering that results from the oppression of humanity. This suffering can be minimized by each of us, by taking on our personal share of awakening. Each one of us who works in our daily lives to awaken and simply be a living human being in the moment is doing the vital work of humanity.

Humanity is not created for bondage. Physical science exists to support and uplift humanity, not control it. Fair warning to those who would, out of their own fear and misunderstanding, try to use fear to control people. This carries with it its own special misery. Only a person who inside themselves was far from the enlightening, enlivening Reality within would want to control others.

But for you and I, right now, we can check in on our breathing. There it is, sincerely going about its work. Thank you, breath. Let us pray that civilization moves through this age as gracefully as possible. A deep breath in and exhale. The next cycle will come. tHe world will continue, with humanity as its guide, may we rise to worthiness.

Dreaming

When Jesus said “why call me good?” he wasn’t trying to demonstrate humility. He was expressing a real and permanent truth. There is only one Good, which is the fundamental nature of all things, from which all things emerge and to which they return. Emerging and returning to the source is the movement of all things, continually. We are never disconnected from this source/destination. It is our inner being and that of all things. We can accept it at any time, without effort. There is no reason to defer this.

Nothing is lost in enlightenment. What is termed ego death is really just a reframing to a more correct perspective. When the sun is seen as the center of the solar system, the Earth remains, not lessened, only made a part of its proper whole.

The past and the future exist as echoes in the present. The past is memory. The future is projection. Enlightenment is here because it is simply seeing the uncontrived fact of things, which is always present. How could the fundamental nature of all things ever be distant? It is a trick of the light only.

Enlightenment is a habit of seeing that can be developed, but seeing is always right here, right now. Nothing is excluded from the vision. Real enlightenment must include all states, all stations. No matter who you are, what you have done, will do and are doing, you too are a fully vested member of reality and therefore, simply witnessing your own current experience in its fullness, is in fact enlightenment.

Many techniques exist to help learn this habit, but let’s remember about breath awareness. What is it up to now? Simply observe your breathing. Isn’t it really mysterious and miraculous? The more you watch it, the more you will notice. It is a simple, ordinary, everyday thing, and yet it is also amazing, beyond reduction, a part of everything. That is the nature of all things.

Another term for enlightenment is ‘liberation’. What are we liberated from? From the miserable struggle to implement and impose our own meaning upon reality. Another word is ‘awakening’. Here we are awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. This is God’s dream. In our little dreams at night, we create worlds and if we ‘come to’ inside the dream, what is called lucid dreaming, we can to a degree take control of it. Awakening to God’s dream though is different, because you realize that there is no layer of wakening beyond it.

The dreamer and the dreaming are one. This is the ‘realization’, another term for enlightenment. It is none-other than the dreamer who wakes. “I am that,” the dreamer realizes.

It's easy to dismiss life as a dream and it's easy to look at life as very concrete, nothing like a dream. The challenge is to see the solid practicality of earthly life, the asphalt roads, the financial systems and the demands of family and work and find its dreamlike quality. This quality is always there and it's not too hard to see it. Every situation you are in, no matter how momentous, think how in a short time it will be nothing but a memory.

I recently looked at a picture of my friend’s family member, he was sitting on top of a tank in a parade just after the Second World War. It was a celebration after their return from war, it looked like. He was wearing a uniform and was apparently a part of the tank’s command. It was an old black and white photo, lovingly saved. What a moment! Yet, even such a peak historic occasion slowly fades into time. Nobody present looking at the photo knew who the person was.

This doesn’t diminish an achievement like fighting in WWII. We need heroes of all kinds and they come in all shapes and sizes, from the person caring for the elderly to the firefighter. The greatest achievement though is to see deeply into life for what it is, where all things assume their proper proportion. Just as we learn by observing the breath that both the inhale and exhale are required for the cycle. Both greatness and smallness are necessary for the cycles of history.

How many great battles have been won in history? How many towering political figures have strode across the Earth? How many fantastically wealthy people have wielded enormous influence and privilege? Of course, the answer is, countless.

Only one real kind of greatness is lastingly meaningful for a human being, and that is to awaken to the reality of the dreaming. To discover the real purpose of human existence, to turn sincerely towards those questions we normally set aside in favor of practicality and more immediately reliable rewards and demands, this is always possible.

When we turn towards Reality, it turns towards us. Like two mirrors rotating until they perfectly reflect one another and it is seen that the mirrors themselves are also reflections. There is an infinite Awareness, stretching without frontier, unbounded by any externality. This awakening does not annihilate the dreamer, it reveals the dreamer, the dream and the dreaming to be but One.

The banana stem

There is a funny story that Hindus have about the quality of spiritual seekers that I heard from Swami Venkatesananda². It goes like this. There are three types of seeker, one is like cotton soaked in lighter fluid. Any spark nearby and phoom! It goes up in flame! The second is like charcoal. This requires more work, but once you get it going, it’ll burn well. The third is what is called the ‘banana stem’ seeker. You can say, they aren’t really seeking very much. It takes a huge amount of effort to get it to anything but smoulder reluctantly.

I say it’s funny because when I read about the banana stem, I went, there I am. It was just too accurate, I laughed aloud. Many, many times I have been a banana stem.

We are all cotton balls and charcoal and banana stems, some of the time. Sometimes, we go to meditate or pray and just like that, we have insight, clarity, a light is shining in us and we have the reassuring feeling of connection. Sometimes we go to practice and we kind of vacillate between that easy clarity and a struggling to find it. And then there’s the times we try, and sometimes it's when we really need some help, and what we get is just an extra dose of stress and dissatisfaction.

Even worse is just a deadened disinterest, when we aren’t even trying, just robotically going through life, mechanically, unreflectively. The quiet lump of feeling like we are not fulfilling life’s purpose just sitting there ignored. Then we are really banana stemming.

The miraculous thing about this fire that Spirit and the earnest teacher want to transmit is, it will gradually transform that stem into fire itself. If we keep on trying, remembering that God does not abandon any of His children and renew our efforts, they will surely be met with eventual victory. As it says in Venkatesananda’s Yoga Vasistha, there is nothing more powerful than right action in the present. Isn’t that something? The most powerful thing of all is to not worry or debate, but simply start trying, right now.

We are not able on our own to do what must be done, however, we know inside that when we take action as we are able, the true Power moves to us. This is why Jesus told us “with men it is not possible, but with God, all things are possible.” It’s impossible to describe the feeling of moving deeper into God’s field of Power. The sense of oppositions and obstacles entirely falls away. The thing is already accomplished. That is what we mean by “enlightenment is now”.

Whenever we start trying, right now, we are met with aid from seemingly miraculous sources. Life begins delivering what we need, to assist us in moving from where we are. Now, sometimes life delivers a long period of working and practicing, when we’d rather have immediate breakthroughs. But that just means it’s what we need. Learning to appreciate difficulty is a wonderful skill. Not celebrate it, quite, but to say ok, this is working a change in myself and my circumstances.

That quiet seed of knowing you are God’s child, of turning again and again to that source that you know created you, silently or verbally asking for assistance, knowing that I am imperfect, knowing that God already knows far better than I do where I’m at, just sincerely opening up inside without expectation other than Love. This attitude the Divine cannot resist. God will deepen and purify motivation.

The Fire of Spirit is utterly beyond description, but it is Good and it is worth all efforts to discover in ourselves.

Essence

The essence of things is their spirit. This is precisely the factor that our modern world has worked to eliminate from view. There is no essence, goes the reasoning, only the component parts, acting together in a particular configuration. From this arrangement of interacting parts arises the nature or unique character of a thing.

That argument applies to everything, from molecules and their quantum constitution right on up to human beings. Human consciousness is considered an emergent property, meaning it is a mysterious outcome of the way neurons in the brain interact.

It’s interesting that as science has dug deeper and deeper looking for the fundamental cause of everything it has arrived at quantum mechanics, which has some strange results indeed. It’s tough to look at them and say with confidence that the universe is a causal machine.

But even more importantly, the attempt to explain consciousness is different than explaining other things. It’s a lot easier to say that the color blue is the result of light frequencies than it is to say consciousness is the outcome of neurons, for the simple reason that consciousness is the lens through which we see. All the thinking and experimenting we do is within the framework of consciousness. Neurons are at least as much dependent on consciousness as vice versa.

Or can you imagine things outside of your consciousness? But isn’t that imaging another part of your consciousness? This is what I call, ‘speculative embellishment’. We have ideas about what is out there and how the world is and works and then we just go ahead and grant it reality, but this has all happened in our minds only! It’s more of that modelling.

Spirit is the life that animates all things. Everything has this essence, and it is connected to the essence of the whole, the Great Spirit. That is because in the “essence of the essence”, if you will, the simple, basic, inner nature is pure and universal to all things.

The essence is never destroyed, but goes on expressing itself in changing forms, never itself changing or stagnating. What is beyond change or stability is the essence.

Accepting and struggling

Whatever is inside of us, we will experience, no matter where we go.

One key characteristic of spiritual wisdom is that the more developed it is, the more of life it encompasses. Moving away from wisdom tends to divide and separate. This part is good, that part is bad. Let’s reject the bad part. This is an endless game that leads not to more goodness, but more judgement and condemnation and the resulting behavior.

Our behavior naturally becomes better, not because we become better moral vigilantes, but because we spend more time operating from the natural state of grace. We see, accept and love even the hard parts, not because we think they are great, but because we get where they come from, we see that everything that happens is part of the whole. This accepting is itself the antidote.

The view of spiritual wisdom doesn’t cast off any part of anything. Everything that exists falls into its purview. Uniting and accepting is the action of wisdom. Dividing and rejecting is the delaying of it.

The rational mind will argue with this endlessly. It will see that there are thing that must be fought, resisted, overcome, accomplishments for the benefit of people that must be achieved. But the rational mind cannot witness its own limited basis of understanding these things. It will inevitably and continually discriminate incorrectly, forever.

Only once the rational mind can become quiet and still and its own root nature shine through, that real wisdom can operate. Wisdom is not a human trait. Let me adjust that, wisdom is not a solely individual human trait. Wisdom connects the individual, through the whole of humanity, to the whole of creation, to the uncreated.

The Uncreated speaks through wisdom. The Uncreated speaks through all of creation.

Everywhere is distinction, obstruction and barriers, inner and outer, until you see that these too are created of the same ephemeral substance. What is this substance? What material is reality constructed of?

It is thought forms. Think of it, only thought forms can account for both external physical experience as well as internal. Experience itself is the same whether it is inner or outer. They are like ideas in a mind unconstrained by any greater mind or entity.

And whose mind is it? To whom do these thought forms belong? Answer that question, and you will know what there is to know!

Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t just better to remain silent. But, there is a natural creativity in people, myself included. So I keep writing. Maybe it is helpful.

If once the bridge between two people, between two consciousnesses, is really crossed, the division between them is fully dissolved, once it is accomplished for even just a split second, boom, that is it, the gig is up, you know what the deal is. This is the confirmation of what you already suspect within your own self, that your very nature is that which is also spread out everywhere and also living inside of others.

But once you have the confirmation, there is certainty. This is a certainty that underlies all of life. This is the basis of the Guru-Disciple relationship. This is really nothing about the roles of the people, it is about the relationship, simply that one side continually allows true nature to flow through unobstructed and the other keeps striving towards that and one day it clicks and now the other person also flows unobstructed, from within.

This is the key in the relationship. It is only a pointing out what is already within. It is like a candle lighting another candle, but it’s also like realizing the candle is already there. What I mean is, there is a need for the teacher, but the teacher can be anything in life, and the teacher only confirms or validates.

I can speak to my own experience, anyway. That is, many spiritual experiences along the way hinted at the nature of truth. I mean, the true nature of reality. It was suggested. Even reason seemed to indicate what it must be like. And, little experiences here and there, glimpses of it.

But when that confirmation arrives it carries with it an incontrovertible, absolute certainty. A stamp of the “for sure”. Yes, that is it, there it is. And everyone who has had this experience, they are all in a sense a part of this aha moment, like you have been joined in a fundamental way to this camaraderie of witnessing. All the way to the first witness, which is, none other than that truth you suspected all along.

There is misery and suffering and pain and all the rest, life is just this ever accelerating effort to avoid it. And death looms over everything, menacing every moment, making all temporary joys and pleasures a mockery of self-deception. You do everything right, you work incredibly hard, you are smart and you learn and still, at the end, it is all just washed away for naught, this is certain.

Every rationale you might offer to vindicate this situation of life is inadequate. Even having children. How can that be the real basis for the meaning of living the human experience? Surely, it can’t be just spawning more humans forever, with none of them actually awakening to the purpose of living?

How can we have children and hope to find validation if we can’t offer them a real answer to life? I mean, “Teach the Children”, yes? But surely, we should be able to say sincerely to them that we have looked at life straight on, been confronted by it, been transformed by it, having seen into its real essence and come away fully alive, able to hold that truth for any who might be open to it?

And everything in life is tainted this way. There is nothing you can do, achieve, attain or gather that will complete this mystery. Life is itself demanding something else, something within that must become matured so that it will itself see the purpose and meaning in all things, THEN, then no matter what circumstances arise, they will be imbued with their proper importance. Then, nothing will be devoid of purpose, it will be infused with it.

The sense of relief in this meaningful reorienting of existence is absolutely the worthy pay off for spiritual endeavor. That complete and total vindication of life is the fulfillment of spiritual longing. The author of life is itself the joy and bliss that it makes.

When we can rest in Spirit, directly, that is best. When that is happening, there is no uncertainty. If you are still wondering, ‘hm, is this the real deal?’ then there’s a little bit more refinement to do. When the peace of Spirit comes, it is like a big thumbs up in your heart, and you know, ‘ah, there it is.’

Along the way we get glimpses and tastes of this in spiritual experiences. These are real. They are the prelude and preparation for when the ‘ah, there it is’ knowing arrives with a certainty that covers all experiences. What I mean is, we go through a phase of coming in and out of insight, and we suspect that those moments of insight are what enlightenment is made of. We can say these are enlightening experiences. When they are culminated, your suspicions are confirmed, yes, your spiritual experiences were right all along, they all come together in a way that also joins all the ignorant bumbling around also!

A light turns on that validates all those other times it came on, but also the times when it was off, and assures you that that light never goes off, never went off. This is quite an experience, it is really something, it is worth all the suffering and struggle and self-doubt and angst. It is better to struggle and stumble with the promise of this awakening experience than to turn away and find temporary comfort.

When we can’t seem to find peace, then it is right to struggle and strive towards it. It is better even to work towards some worldly goal that we see as worthy than to sink into indifference. It's important not to see the assertion that ‘All is God, all is happening in God’s will’ as a justification to not try. For it is true that it is all God’s will, but when this is directly perceived as an experience, rather than as a logical conclusion or theory, it doesn’t produce predictable results.

When we are resting in God’s presence, we will do according to the moment what is called for by it. It is surprising that when you encounter directly the omnipotence of God's will, you are inspired to do something beautiful. Far from causing a sense of, well, that’s it then, why would I do anything?, it creates a sense of, Oh God, it is so beautiful, I will take this little bit of being you have made of me and do some little thing to reflect it. What else can one do?

One of the best things in life is to have that sense of the beauty and goodness of reality inside and go around sharing it with others. People will pick it right up. They will think life is all about X, Y and Z. Then you’ll smile at them and that smile that isn’t looking for anything, but is just expressing the feeling of joy inside, well, they find that inside themselves also.

It is really the nature of the Uncreated to create. This is a fundamental mystery. It does not require resolving, it requires witnessing. It is the root beauty of things that they are made even though they don’t have to be. There is no cause beyond the Causeless which could compel it to do anything, yet it, within itself, makes us and brings us to meet one another. That is something extraordinary.

If you are looking for a miracle, you should go out and meet another human being. You can think how they have their own perspective, but that at its heart, in its basic nature of being a perspective, it is exactly the same as yours. How can there be individuality and yet the essence is not lost? That is miraculous. That is one of the great, astounding things God does all the time.

We cannot with the thinking mind even attempt to comprehend the beauty of the author of things. It is Glory, but it is an intimate one, it is resounding and limitless but also quiet and close. It is in the mystical experience and also in the everyday. It is natural to witness it and express it with all our faculties, including thought and words, but these should be understood as reverberations or rays coming from a source, rather than the source themselves.

What we think of as good and beautiful and so on, they are expressions of the absolute Good. We try to use the relative good to extrapolate the nature of God, but that won’t work. We have to dive directly into them, discover their origin and root.

Often we find we must wrestle with life when we’d rather have inspiration or at least some fun. This wrestling with things, though, it too is valuable.

Discouragement

Discouragement is never welcome, but it is an essential part of the process. Life is a process of growth. Discouragement is an essential phase. The stronger the spiritual insight, the more it allows of everything within its vision. In a way, it says to what is before it, “this too is a part of my whole.”

This standpoint has an undefeatable power. The more you can rest in this totality of vision, the more it becomes clear that the actual force or motivating action behind everything, including yourself, is that of the Universe itself. This is the target of meditation, to see that you are dissolved into the Whole. Notice that when something is dissolved, it isn’t annihilated, but becomes an integral part of the thing into which it dissolves.

The yearning to return to this awareness is the inexhaustible pull of spiritual practice. It is also the sense of missing something that drags on us in discouragement. We feel that we are not living up to what we should, be it a worldly or spiritual ambition. We have somehow become disconnected from that power that accomplishes effortlessly and this disconnect is itself discouragement.

It’s useless to deny it if we are in a state of inertia or escapism. The first thing to do is to see it, and accept it for what it is. The further you sink into this, the more this way of living becomes itself intolerable, but the further away an alternative appears to be.

When enlightenment is there, even the deepest pain and despair is in a strange way illuminated. This is “the happiness that surpasses understanding”. When it isn’t, even the highest of achievements is empty. This is why you can see even extremely successful people just driven on and on in the pursuit of more.

In discouragement we set aside our will in a sense of its inadequacy or uselessness. This can be an opportunity. The weight of mistakes and doubt that led you here might be insurmountable. But you see that you are still here, the world is still functioning. What is it that causes this to continue on in the face of your total abandonment of effort?

Discouragement, despondency and despair are all related to renunciation. In the deepest depths of despair, only a small token of the clinging self remains. Only the actual sense of loss and misery remains. The actual proximate source of the depression is forgotten, just as at the height of pleasurable ecstasy, its source is forgotten and only the self-existing experience remains for a moment. We can see that each of these is like the nadir and climax of the breath. Naturally they transform into their alternate movement.

Anywhere in the cycle is a moment of possible awakening. It isn’t so much the moment, but the dropping back into the awareness of the movement.

If in despair we can actually shed this last little bit of clinging, it is perfect renunciation. Renunciation simply means relinquishing the attachment to things, not the things themselves. Things themselves will come and go. That is their nature, there is no stopping it. It is being committed to some part of it as your own that causes the problem. In deep discouragement we are right next door to this realization, because we are seeing that our hopes are dashed, and it appears that all is lost, that we and the world are useless. It is there that we can let go and find the miracle that it isn’t us who makes us and the world useful.

Nothing is lost to God’s grace. You can see that you are given this sense of disappointment to allow you to rebuild even stronger. The ruins of what was will become the foundation of what is to be.

Sometimes you feel worthless, but I can tell you with total confidence that God does make anything that is worthless, and least of all does he make useless people. Humanity is the most treasured creation. You are an exquisite and unique being. Awakening to this fact is the mission. All effort and enduring all struggle is worth it. You will surely be astonished when you see it is true.

Meditation

Meditation is the greatest invention of all time. It's the most enjoyable thing you can possibly do. Yes, better than sex. In fact, a lot better than sex. Let’s face it, sex is completely immersed in a whole sea of difficulties and complications and downsides. Yes, yes, there is a fun part to it, but man, do you have to really pay a lot of dues. It starts to look like the calculus isn’t worth it. You end up just plain worn out. If you are experiencing some deep love with someone, it can play a wonderful part in that story. But still, it's just loaded down with all kinds of baggage. You can’t avoid it!

Meditation, though, that is the one activity you really do get for free. The Bhagavad Gita even explicitly tells you that when you omit other duties to meditate, you are ok. Why? Because you are giving up one duty for another, higher one.

But now I’ve called it a duty and that sounds not fun. In fact, when you go to meditate, you find it's frustrating or boring. Meditation is the practice of living. Just like you practice something like guitar in conducive circumstances in order to later on perform well, meditation lets you practice life in ideal settings to perform life better. Let me be blunt and say that if your meditation is chaotic and difficult, it's probably because your life is too. That sounds mean, but it's true! If you can’t find peace and calm in the best setting, you almost definitely can’t in the chaos of everyday life!

When you see someone who is really good at guitar, you think, that looks so fun. Then you go to try it yourself and discover, this is not fun at all, it's awkward and annoying and even painful. Why would anyone push through this? Obviously, to play the music. You can see and hear others do it well, so it must be possible.

That is all that saints and sages are, people who have practiced enough that they are good at it. Life, that is. Meditation is the practice of living. Meditation is the practice of witnessing the perfect, inherent goodness of what is. When you do this enough, that goodness will come out and greet you. All along you are suspecting but not 100% sure, it seems like the underlying nature of all things must and should be good. So you go on practicing, trying to make some real music on this instrument and one day the goodness comes through and verifies, you were right, you got me, I am good and so are you.

All the wrong notes and missed chords were all part of the song.

As for technique, we have tricked you in the book. All along, you have learned breath meditation! Hah! I got you so good. You already know how to do breath awareness!

That same attentive watching, you keep on doing that, applying it to everything you can, and it will spread on out and the goodness that you sense in it will come alive and you will meet yourself there. Your real self.

Sitting in a crossed legged position on the floor is helpful. Lotus position is good. These are excellent because they make your body stable. They are not the essential element, though, that is the attention, the subtle, quiet watching quality of it. The posture is a helpful aid. Putting your hands comfortably relaxed in your lap is very nice also. I encourage you to sit in the position, where your legs are crossed and your hands are resting in your lap and just check it you for a minute. Don’t worry about doing anything. Just think, has it been ages since you just sat down and felt relaxed and like you didn’t have to do anything?

That’s what this is about. You might be amazed at the magnificent gracefulness of your body. You forgot all about it. It’s just this damn thing you have to manage and it gets sick and its awkward and not pretty enough, but then if you actually just sit there a minute in a position that it likes, why, it’s lovely! What a gift! Look at your hands just resting there in your lap. They are so versatile and useful. They respond to your most subtle will movements. They deserve a break, too. They deserve to rest there and have some appreciation and some down time.

You know how often your butt and legs hold you up? All day long you are in a chair or walking around and standing. They just do their jobs. These are very good legs. We wouldn’t want to force them into a posture that makes them uncomfortable. If they get weary here, move them around a bit. Hey, that’s better, they can go for a long time being stable like this if you listen to them.

And if you get in the zone, I mean, you will start hearing ringing and humming sounds and start suspecting something is happening! Yes it is. You are meditating. Your body will get into it, it’ll tell you, hey, don’t worry, we got it, we feel the vibe, we’ll take a little going to sleep tinglies to keep this up.

Maybe you won’t hear anything. Maybe you’ll see some non-physical light, maybe you won’t. It’s all good. No, I’m serious. You think the millionth time that some one practices guitar when they are really good is the important one? No, the most important ones are the early ones. You are practicing at living, and life is hard. It’s hard to be good at life. Why? Because the payoff is so huge. The payoff to really learning to be a human all the way is like, beyond words good. You really get a good look at the magnificence of the Universe itself, I mean, why it is the way it is, how come it made something of itself instead of remaining unmanifested.

So it’s a real blessing in disguise. Why is it so hard? Why can’t God just give us the goodies and skip the hardship, I mean, he is omnipotent, after all. Isn’t that a lesson life is teaching all the time? The harder you come by something, the more precious it is! Really coming through the tribulations of life, to find it redeemed, it is part of the process. Nothing is more precious than Life itself, and so awakening to it should naturally be the most important accomplishment of all.

Your mind will go to work when you sit for meditation. That is ok. That is your mind’s job. It is trying to do everything it thinks it must do, keep you from harm, attain security, and so on. Just watch it with the same watching as the breath. You’ll find that if you just watch with a uninvolved curiosity, they will have their say and move on. Eventually, they will settle down. When the mind starts to make itself known in its pure state, you will often be startled. This startling will make the mind start up again! No worries. That touch of no-mind will make you want to get there again. The wanting will get in the way! It’s ok, return to the gentle watching.

The mind-space that experiences inner phenomenon of thoughts and outer ones like sensation on the skin, it’s the same. There is only one experiencing field. Outer ones come with an ‘outside’ flavor, inner ones with an ‘inside’ flavor.

It’s perfectly fine to scratch that itch. If you observe it, the itch is just like the thoughts, coming and going, and so is your hand moving to scratch it! Nothing is outside of the field of experiencing. A sudden, profound sense of emptiness might dawn on you. That’s it! Your suspicions were right! Everything is all one thing, it is all together, right now!

You may find with a startle that you don’t exist. This is because all the processes that you thought were you have settled down. The tension and the thinking. When they are quiet, that thing you thought was you is just simply gone. But yet, you are still experiencing. This can be a disorienting experience. Stick with it. You are gone, but you are everywhere.

You are being introduced to your actual self, none other than the world you have known all along, but now you recognize yourself. Especially astounding is meeting yourself in other people. Be cool. They will find out in due time also. When you meet someone who also knows, that is a real treat.

This is all a result of meditation, but it can't be rushed or faked. The hallmark of enlightenment is that it sweeps away all doubt and uncertainty. It applies to all situations because it does nothing to them. It transforms them as they are. Only what is always there can be the basis for lasting freedom.

The awareness of meditation transforms you by allowing your awareness to come forward as it is, uncolored. This was there all along but too full of things to see itself. Now you can see yourself for what you are: pure awareness.

You are always meditating.