An Exploration of
Present-Moment Awareness

The most useful piece of learning … is to unlearn what is untrue.
ANTISTHENES

It’s now time to challenge some of our most basic assumptions about reality.

Take a moment now. Come right back to present experience, to what’s actually happening where you are. See, hear, look freshly at your own experience. Begin again, as if you were a child seeing the world for the first time—because you’re always seeing it for the first time. In this moment, life is always new. You have never experienced this moment before and never will again. The sounds of this moment have never been heard before. This moment’s feelings have never been felt before. These words have never been read before. And even if you believe that they have, that is a memory, a thought about the past, appearing now, in this fresh, new moment.

When you come right back to what’s happening now, what you find is simply the spontaneous play of life. Life is a dance of thoughts, sounds, sensations, smells, all appearing and disappearing freshly and freely in the space that you are. And notice how effortless it is to see, to hear, to feel. Listen—without you having to do anything, sounds simply appear. The sound of breathing, the sound of cars beeping their horns, the television blaring, a bird singing—all of these sounds simply appear and are heard, effortlessly. Close your eyes if you wish, and notice the sheer effortlessness of hearing. You don’t even have to remind yourself to hear; you don’t have to tell your ears to “do hearing.” Hearing just happens, very naturally and effortlessly. You could say that hearing happens without you being involved at all.

And then a thought appears: “I am hearing.” What does that mean? It means “I am a separate person, hearing these sounds. There’s me, and there are the sounds. I am the subject, and the sounds are the objects. There is a perceiver separate from that which is perceived. The sound is out there, and I am in here.”

Thought makes huge assumptions about reality. And we very rarely stop and check these assumptions, to see if they hold up against simple investigation.

“I hear the sounds.” Is that really true?

We are now questioning our most basic assumptions about our perception of the world, assumptions that may have been there since we were very young. But, as Jesus said, we must become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven (which is the kingdom of the present moment). So let’s explore.

“I hear the sounds.” Are there really two things—the sound and the you who hears it? Does this separation—between the sound and the one who is hearing the sound—ever actually take place? In reality—in direct, unfiltered experience—is there any evidence that there is a separate somebody here, hearing sounds? Is there, in reality, an I hearing the sounds, or is hearing simply happening, effortlessly?

Check for yourself. In your direct experience, right now, can you find two things—the one who hears the sound and the sound itself? Or is there just one thing—the effortless hearing? Can you find any dividing line at all, in time or in space, in your direct experience, between the hearing of the sound and the sound itself? Can you find the one who hears the sound over here, separate from the sound over there? Or are over here and over there never actually part of your direct experience?

For most of my life, I lived with the assumption that there was a separate me here, a separate self here right at the heart of experience, an entity doing hearing, doing seeing, doing thinking. And yet, upon investigation, that untested theory crumbled. There is nobody here doing the living; there is just life appearing, just the various waves of experience arising and falling, and nobody here at the center of it all.

Again, I don’t want you to believe this, but to look for yourself. Can you find the one who hears, the one who sees, the one who thinks? Or is the reality much, much simpler—that sounds appear, seeing happens, thoughts arise—and it’s simply another thought that says, “I’m doing that!”

Check for yourself. Which is more true: “Sounds simply appear” or “I hear sounds”? Which statement holds up upon direct investigation? Ponder this question. Meditate on it.

Still, the thought “I hear the sound” or “I think the thought” is allowed to arise; it’s simply another wave that is deeply allowed in the ocean of you. And even though ultimately these thoughts are not true, speaking in this way is useful for human communication. In the world in which we live, telling an ear doctor “There are simply sounds appearing, but I cannot find anybody here hearing them” would not be particularly useful—and it would probably result in the speaker being sent to a very different kind of doctor!

And so the thought “I hear” is allowed to arise. But the mystery of existence is that hearing still happens without the thought “I hear,” doesn’t it? The thought “I hear” doesn’t itself hear anything, does it? Without the thought “I see,” seeing still happens, doesn’t it? Without the thought “I think,” thoughts still appear, don’t they? Reality is always prior to thought. Thought always comes afterwards, desperately trying to capture a reality that is unlimited, unified, whole, complete, and turn it into a story about reality that is always limited, divisive, dualistic, and incomplete. Thought takes effortless hearing and says, “I hear.” It takes effortless seeing and says, “I see.” It takes effortless living and says, “This is my life!” It’s almost as if thought is trying to claim ownership of life. Thought says, “I did that! I made that happen!” Thought wants to take credit for everything. It wants to be in control. It wants to be God.

Young children still have a sense of the mystery at the heart of experience. A woman once told me how one day her young daughter ran up to her, clutching some paintings she’d been feverishly working on for hours and exclaimed with amazement, “Mummy, Mummy, look what my hands made!” Not, “Look what I made! Aren’t I a great artist?” but, “Look what my hands did all by themselves! Isn’t that amazing!” The girl was not yet lost in thought-constructed roles; she was not yet identified as being an artist. There was a simple wonder at how life could happen all by itself. Her creativity came out of nowhere; in truth, it was not hers. It belonged to the universe, not to a separate “artist.” All honest artists will admit this.

The truth is that we are not the doers of life. Life moves in its own way, and it’s only afterwards that thought takes credit for things it never did. Thought says, “I did that! I made that happen! I’m in control of life!” and we believe that story until the day we die.

So we say, “I see a tree,” and that statement begs the question, who is it that sees the tree? Are there two things: me and life? The tree and the one who sees it? Or is there only the one seamless, unspeakable, unified reality that is life itself, a reality that I cannot in any way separate myself from? In coming back to present experience, all I can find is an effortless seeing that’s happening right now, with no division between the one who sees and everything that’s being seen. Life has no boundaries. Seeing has no inside or outside. There is simply seeing, simply shapes, colors, and textures appearing in the vast open awareness that I am. I simply cannot find the dividing line between who I am and everything that appears. I cannot find the place where I end and life begins. Maybe the line doesn’t exist and never did.

It’s only later that thought says, “I. I see. I see . . . a tree.” Now there appear to be two things—me and the tree. Now I feel separate from the tree in some inexplicable way; it seems that the tree is somehow outside of me. On some level, now I feel limited and homesick; I feel separate from the tree and long again for union. I feel separate from the sky and long for union. I feel separate from my body and long for union. I feel separate from you and long for union. But prior to thought, prior to the dream of inside and outside, is there really anything to separate us? Is there not just intimacy? Is reunion necessary when there is already union?

Prior to thought, who is separate from life? Who is incomplete? Who longs for union?

Jesus once said, “You have to lose your life to save it.” That statement always puzzled me—it seems like the ultimate paradox—until I realized that perhaps he was pointing to the total intimacy between what I am, in my essence, and life itself. Yes, in the place where I would expect to find a separate, solid entity called “me,” all I can really find is this amazing dance of waves, and nothing to separate myself from them. In the absence of me, I find the presence of the world. The world and I are in love—in the true meaning of the word love. I lose identification with “my life” and discover my inseparability from life itself. I discover that I am not some disembodied awareness or consciousness or soul or spirit detached from life, floating above or beyond or behind life, or existing before or after life. I am life itself.

Present experience is so full of sights and sounds and smells and sensations that there is no room left for a separate me. Life squeezes me out!

The spiritual teacher Nisargadatta Maharaj made this beautiful statement: “Wisdom says I am nothing. Love says I am everything. Between the two my life flows.” As the vast ocean of Being, you are no thing in particular. You are not a me or a you. What you are is the vast open space in which everything happens, and the recognition of that brings clarity and wisdom. But clarity and wisdom are not complete without their reflection: love. And love comes from the recognition that, as open space, as the ocean, what you are unconditionally and deeply accepts all the waves that appear—all the sights and sounds and smells and sensations that are appearing now. Everything is inseparable from the nothing that you are. In your eyes, everything is beloved. The recognition of wisdom is truly incomplete without the recognition of love.

I find that many spiritual seekers get stuck in the “nothing” aspect of realization and are left with only an intellectual understanding of awakening, which does not bring total freedom and rest. The true end of suffering comes from the recognition of this total intimacy with life itself—in other words, the deep acceptance of “everything” appearing in experience. In this deep acceptance, mind and heart are one. Nothing is everything; they were never two separate things. Mental clarity and certainty give way to deep acceptance of this moment. And there, the war ends.

Yes, right at the heart of our experience we find an intimacy, a total inseparability of all the waves of experience—thoughts, sounds, smells, feelings, sensations. These waves are not separate things that come and go within us or things that come from outside of us and move through us. They are us.

This intimacy is what we are all looking for, in a million different ways. It is the perfect inseparability of absolute and relative, yin and yang, masculine and feminine, nothing and everything, clarity and love, humanity and divinity, and it is right here, in something as simple as seeing a tree, hearing a bird singing, or feeling intense pain. And yet we look for it “out there,” in the world of time and space, in other people, in far-off places, in other realms, in the beyond. But if we listen very carefully, life is always calling us back here, to where we already are, to our true home beyond words, to the true beyond.

“IT’S ALL IN YOUR MIND”

There’s an idea common in spiritual teachings and espoused by some scientists and philosophers, that the world exists only in our minds or in our brains—that the world is merely our imagination or even worse, that it is just a mistake of perception. But is this ever part of your direct experience of life? Do you experience the world as inside something else, something called a mind? Where exactly is this mind that the world is supposed to be in? And whose mind is it? Mine? What is “mine” in direct experience?

When I take a fresh look, right now, again what I find is that thoughts appear, smells appear, sounds appear, feelings appear—all in the open space that I am—but there is no evidence that they appear in something else called a mind. I can’t find any evidence that something called a mind is producing all that is thought, seen, smelled, heard, or felt. I can’t find any evidence that these waves of experience come from a mind or come from anything or anywhere else. I just can’t find any mind—none outside of thought arising at present. Thought says, “There is a separate mind,” but that’s just a thought appearing. When I was a child, I learned that I “have” a mind. But is it true?

All I ever find, when I look, is present experience. I do not find past or future, I find now—and if I do find past and future, they appear as memories and ideas appearing now. It’s all now.

And what I find now is that experience is not inside or outside of me. I simply don’t find any inside or outside here. There is just total intimacy with all that appears. Experience is not contained within anything, nor can I find any evidence that it is outside of anything.

And so my experience of the room I’m sitting in is not “in my mind”;I don’t find any evidence for that. My experience of the room is right here, as the room. It is not separate from the room. It is the room, as it’s being perceived. Experience has no location; it’s not located in the head or in the brain. It is everywhere, just as the ocean is present in all of its waves. It is the mug of tea I’m drinking. It is the sky and the stars. It is the leaves crunching beneath my feet as I walk to the post office. The world is not “out there,” nor is it “in my mind.” It is intimate with what I am. It follows me everywhere. I cannot shake it off. I don’t enter and leave the world; the world is always right here. I don’t move through the world; it moves with me. And there is no me separate from it. (Oh, don’t you love words!)

Similarly, my experience of the sun is not in my brain, my head, or my mind. I never experience it as being inside me in any way. My experience of the sun is not located inside something else. The sun is simply here, in present experience. I cannot say the sun is inside me, and I cannot say it is outside of me either.

Now, conventional wisdom tells us that the sun is a giant ball of burning gas millions of miles away from our physical bodies. And that is true, relatively speaking; let’s not deny it. But what is also true—and this is the real miracle—is that the sun is always right here, in the intimacy of present experience. It appears in the intimacy that I am. It is the warmth on my face. It is the heat on my skin. It is the glare in my eyes. It is a dear, old, familiar, and close friend, who has been with me for as long as I can remember. It is not far away from who I really am. It is here.

Although from one perspective, a wave may seem far from another wave in the ocean, from the perspective of the ocean, since every wave is the ocean itself, the concept of distance, or lack of it, becomes meaningless. The ocean has no specific location—which is to say, it is in all locations at once. In other words, it is always here.

All waves in the ocean that I am are essentially myself, even if they appear to be millions of miles away.

THE STORY OF THE WORLD

You can experience something in your world—a car, a tree, pain, frustration, a cheese sandwich, the sun, a spoon—only if on some level you tell yourself what you are experiencing. In order to experience anything, you must have a thought story about what that thing is. Otherwise, you have no way of knowing what you are experiencing. Without the story, you really have no way of knowing what you are looking at. Thought labels everything that appears. How do you know you are looking at the sun unless thought tells you it is the sun? How do you know what you’re eating is a cheese sandwich unless you have the story “This Is a Cheese Sandwich”? How do you know that a bird is a bird without all of those ideas, concepts, beliefs, and memories that tell you it’s a bird? How can you know the names of the available dishes at the restaurant of life without first consulting thought’s menu?

Now, some people have taken this message too far. They say that without thought, there is nothing. This is a misconception because “nothing” is just another thought—the opposite of something. Reality is beyond even that. Without the thought story telling you what you are experiencing, it’s not that there is something called “nothing”—it’s that there is no way of knowing what you are experiencing. There is utter not-knowing. You meet the world for the first time. You are in the Garden of Eden, and nothing has been named yet. This is beyond all our ideas of something and nothing.

In order to experience anything—in other words, in order to know what you are experiencing—on some level you must tell yourself what you are experiencing. In order to experience a chair, for example, you must on some level tell yourself that it’s a chair. You must have a chair story running; otherwise you have no way of knowing what it is. The thought “chair” appears, and suddenly I know I’m experiencing a chair. I have learned about chairs. I have sat on many chairs in the past. Perhaps I have read the history of chairs. I know what chairs are; therefore, I know that I’m experiencing a chair. Without that thought, can I know what I’m experiencing? Without thought, can there be a knowable world?

Watch babies explore their environment. They have not yet learned the names for things. They have not yet learned the value of things. Cheap and expensive, useful and useless, sacred and profane mean nothing to them. You hand them a worthless piece of plastic, and they are fascinated. You hand them a priceless diamond ring, and they are fascinated. And when they are no longer fascinated, they move onto the next object. They have no fixed story yet about the world. They are meeting everything for the first time and exploring. They are smelling, touching, tasting, wondering about everything. Quite literally, they exist in wonder.

Before we name the world, there is only mystery.

At some point in a child’s life, we tell them, “That’s a chair.” Now they know what it is. It’s an “object” called “a chair.” It’s separate from what they are. They no longer have to explore it, to run their fingers over it, to look at it up close. They no longer need to be fascinated by it, to be intimate with it. It’s now a useful piece of information, a “fact,” rather than a mystery to be explored. For the rest of their lives, they will look at a chair and tell themselves that they know what it is. But do they really know what it is? Beyond the words, isn’t there just mystery? Isn’t there still wonder and not-knowing?

In order to experience your mother, father, sister, or brother, on some level, you must tell yourself (or remind yourself) who they are. Without your story about who they are, you have no way of knowing who they are, do you? Without your story, you meet them, quite literally, for the very first time. Without the story, there is only total intimacy. Beyond the story, there is love. Love means “not two.”

However, we forget that we are experiencing our own stories about the world—our own thoughts, our own labels, our own interpretations, our own memories, our own prejudices, our own fears, our own conditioning, our own dreams. And we fall into the belief that there is actually a separate world out there, with separate objects and people, and that we are experiencing this world objectively and reporting back on it. We forget that we are experiencing a projection of our own dream, and we live as if we are separate from—and slaves to and victims of—a world “out there.” We forget the total intimacy right at the heart of life, and we fall into a world of separation and fragmentation, a world where I’m over here, and everything else is over there, and we are forever at a distance. This forgetting is the origin of all loneliness, isolation, and depression.

Then we start talking about things like “my mind” as if it were a real thing, a substance, an entity, in our world. We forget who we really are—the open space that holds all form—and we identify ourselves as being separate minds and bodies, separate people in our separate worlds. Fragmentation and isolation result. And then, in our fragmented state, we turn to religion and to spirituality to set ourselves free from fragmentation. And we do all of this because we don’t take the time to really look deeply into our own experience and see the intimate truth.

Think of the freedom that would be unleashed if we taught our children to look—to really look—at their present experience and discover the intimacy present within it. It would shake society to its foundations. Maybe that’s why we don’t do it.

THE STORY OF MYSELF

Not only do you not have an inside and an outside, but you also never actually experience yourself directly as a person. (Try telling this to a psychiatrist!) All you ever find are thoughts appearing, sounds appearing, feelings appearing in what you are. And then thought says, “These are my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions. Life is happening to me.” That’s where the story of the person begins: in identification with the forms that pass through awareness, identification with thoughts and feelings, identification with the waves that appear and disappear in the ocean that is you.

Find a photograph of yourself as a child. Who is that in the photograph? You may reply, “That’s me.” But that answer begs the question, what is this “me” that you are claiming to be? Is the me in the photograph the same me that’s here now?

The thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and ideas that are appearing and disappearing in your experience right now are certainly not the same ones that were appearing and disappearing all of those years ago. Your story about yourself has changed since then, maybe beyond all recognition. Back then you wanted to be a fireman or a ballet dancer. Back then you were terrified of the monster in the closet, and you believed that tiny pink dinosaurs lived underground in your neighbor’s back garden.

These days your priorities have changed. You no longer worry about the monster in the closet. You worry about making enough money to put your kids through school. You worry about your pension, about the stock market, about the war, about the latest terrorist scare, about not becoming enlightened in this lifetime. Can you really say that you are the same “me” now that you were then? Your physical appearance has changed totally; in fact, there is not a single cell in your body that remains from that me. Your face, your voice, your hair—everything has changed.

But you still somehow still feel like you, in a way that you can’t explain. There is a certain sense of being here that hasn’t changed. The sense of “I am” has remained constant. The ocean has remained; it’s just the waves that have moved. Millions of thoughts have come and gone. All kinds of feelings have appeared and disappeared. But this basic feeling of Being has remained. And yet, we can’t really talk about what that Being is. It feels somehow intimate—somehow totally yourself, and yet somehow unknowable, somehow beyond you.

Take a moment now to gently turn your attention to what it actually feels like to be you. By “you,” I don’t mean the thoughts and judgments about yourself that come and go or the sensations and emotions that arise and fall throughout the day. I don’t mean the images and pictures of your past or the worries about your uncertain future. I am pointing to something that comes before all of that. I am pointing to the sense of just being you, simply you, here and now, a sense that has been here since you were a child. It is a very subtle but very alive feeling of presence that has never gone away, no matter what you’ve achieved, no matter what you’ve lost, no matter how many spiritual insights or experiences you’ve had. I’m not talking about “you” as a special state or experience. I am not talking about a higher self, or an awakened self, or a special version of the self, but the simple and very ordinary feeling of being you, in this moment. You don’t even have to understand what I’m talking about in order to know this basic sense of me-ness. Whether or not you think you understand, and even if you feel confused and frustrated right now, notice that just behind this struggle, there is still the simple feeling of being you. I’m really pointing to something very, very simple indeed—too simple for the mind to comprehend. You already know who you really are. You are already completely you, no matter what happens. This simple recognition is at the heart of what this book is all about.

It is always strange these days for me to meet up with someone who knew me when I was younger. I feel like I’ve changed so much over the past few years—so much that I barely recognize the me that I apparently used to be. And yet that old me still seems to exist for other people. I meet old school friends or relatives that I haven’t seen since I was a teenager, and it’s always amazing to discover how they are still living with an old story of Jeff Foster, based on what they experienced many years ago. Everyone lives with their own version of me. Even if you have changed beyond all recognition—even if you are dead!—people will still be carrying their own story about who you are, based on memory. We live in our stories of each other. Do we ever truly meet each other?

I walk into the room, and you project your story of me onto this body. But if you know the story of my life, the details, the history, do you really know who I am? If you know about me, do you really know me? If you ask me to tell you about myself, and I answer with a story about what I do for a living, about my relationships, about my successes and failures, my likes and dislikes, am I really telling you the truth of who I am? Or am I just giving you a story about who I am, the story of a character in a movie? Does telling you about what I’ve done in the past and what I hope to do in the future really tell you anything about who is here right now, in this moment? Can the past or future really capture this present moment?

Without referring to the past or future, who are you, right now?

When we talk about ourselves, what we are usually talking about is the story of ourselves: “I am good. I am bad. I am successful. I am a failure. I am kind. I am strong. I am intelligent. I am black, white, short, tall, handsome, beautiful, rich, poor. I am Jewish. I am Christian. I am a Buddhist. I am a lawyer, a shopkeeper, a doctor, a politician, an artist. I am shy. I am extroverted. I am spiritual. I am musical. I am sporty. I am enlightened. I am unenlightened.” And so on.

But as open space, all the stories in the world cannot touch what I am. As open space, I am what I am right now, in this moment, and nothing more. I am not what I have been or was or will be. As open space, I am not the story of a person in time. I am not the image of a person in a world. I am not an incomplete seeker looking for something in the future to complete myself. I am what’s appearing now.

We talk about finding our “true identity,” but our true identity does not lie in the story of our lives. I am not the story of my achievements or my failures. I am not the story of my social status. I am not the story of my wealth or poverty. I am not the story of my successful or failed relationships. I am not the story of my illness or disability. I am not the story of my childhood or my past or future lives. I am not the story of my race, my color, my religion. I am not the story of my beliefs. I am not the story of my search for enlightenment or my success or failure to find it.

I am simply what’s happening in this moment. That is where my identity truly lies—in the here and now, not in the time-bound story of me. I am identical with this moment. That is the true meaning of the word identity: “to be identical with.” What I am is identical with life as it appears now, just as the ocean is always identical with its waves.

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, there is a famous scene in which the once-great king wanders naked on a heath during a terrible storm; the wind howls and the rain lashes his frail body. The awesome power of nature shocks him into a realization of his total insignificance in the face of life. He is forced to see the bigger picture: He is not really a king at all. He is a frail, vulnerable, and mortal human being, ultimately powerless to control the universe. He had simply been playing the role of a king—and he had forgotten that he was playing it. He had been living with a false image of himself. “King Lear” was simply a temporary shape that consciousness had taken on in him; it was not who he really was, in his essence. Stripped of his kingly role—his costume, his castle, his power—stripped of all images, lashed by the storm, who was he, in this moment? Who was King Lear, without his image of “King Lear”?

It’s no wonder that scene is so powerful—it touches something profound and essential about the human condition. Underneath our roles—as kings, queens, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, homeless people, doctors, lawyers, therapists, shopkeepers, dancers, artists, spiritual seekers, spiritual teachers—who are we, really? As individual waves in the ocean of life, we all may be different in shape, size, color, beliefs, backgrounds, experiences, knowledge, skills, but are we not all equally water? We may differ in appearance, we may each be unique expressions of the ocean, but our essence is the same. Is a king really any more powerful, in the true meaning of the word, than his court jester?

Underneath all our roles, underneath all the images of ourselves, even if we are kings and queens, saints or sinners, are we not all simply this intimate open space of awareness? Are we not all simply identical with this moment?

As open space, in fact, it’s very hard to talk about myself at all. It’s very hard to tell a story about a fixed identity, for I notice that here, in the open space of awareness, everything is constantly changing. Thoughts appear and disappear. Feelings appear and disappear. All kinds of sensations and sounds and smells and tastes come and go. Here, everything is alive, always moving. I would have to press pause on this ever-changing landscape in order to begin to tell a fixed story about myself. I would need to somehow freeze the river of life, fix this moment, point to it, and say, “This feeling, this thought—that’s me!” But the beauty of life is that it cannot be frozen or fixed. It’s always moving; it’s always dancing. The river of life cannot be stopped by anyone.

It’s no wonder that the word moment and the word movement come from the same root (the Latin word movere, which means “to move”). This moment is inseparable from the movement of life. Stillness is in love with movement. The ocean is in love with its waves.

Hopefully we are now in a position to clearly understand what the spiritual teachings are talking about when they use the phrase “There is no me” or “There is no self.” Look into present experience, and what you will discover is that there is no separate, independent thing called a self in this open space that you are. There is only the dance of life, the dance of waves—thoughts, sensations, feelings, all appearing and disappearing, all moving through. And ultimately the thought “There is no self” is just another thought, another viewpoint, that appears and disappears. It is another wave that comes and goes like any other wave. Even the thought “There is no me” cannot define what I am!

The thought “There is no self” can actually be very misleading, if you do not clearly see what those words are pointing to. If you’re not careful, you simply start to believe that there is no self. “There is no self” becomes your new religion, your new image of yourself! A self starts to believe that there is no self. A wave, still experiencing itself as a separate wave, still suffering and still longing for rest, tells itself “There is no wave.” The seeker is ingenious, isn’t it?

I remember, some years ago, when I saw myself as a very serious spiritual seeker, one day my brother asked me to do the dishes, and I, in all seriousness, replied that there was “nobody here to do the dishes.” I told him that if he believed that the dishes needed cleaning then he was still stuck in duality and delusion. Back then I was very much stuck in spiritual concepts. Nonduality had become my new religion, although I believed I had freed myself from all religion. I thought I had found the truth of all existence. I was nobody; I had lost my self, and I was living in a world full of annoying somebodies who didn’t recognize who I really was and, even worse, wanted me to do the dishes for them! But now, looking back, I see my own arrogance—and my own innocence too, of course. I think secretly I just wanted to get out of having to do the dishes, and I was using spiritual concepts to avoid authentic human engagement.

Something else that seems to cause confusion among spiritual seekers is the idea that the self is an illusion. I may be an illusion, but when I bang my head accidentally as I get out of a car, it damn well hurts! Or as Neil Young sang, “Though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make ’em go away.”

It might help to look at what the word illusion actually means. It derives from the Latin word illudere, which means “to mock at” or literally “to play with”(from in, meaning “at,” plus ludere, meaning “to play”). So the word illusion simply means “a play” or “a deceptive appearance.” It doesn’t mean “nonexistence.” This understanding can help us clear up much confusion. The self, the me, is an illusion, not because it doesn’t exist, but because it doesn’t exist in the way we imagine it. We imagine that there is a solid and separate me—a separate entity here at the center of life, an entity that is in charge of life—but upon investigation, that assumption crumbles. The illusion is seen through: what I really am is intimate with life itself. It’s not that the wave doesn’t exist—it’s that the wave is inseparable from the ocean.

The separation of the “I”(or ego) from life itself is the illusion, but I, as a unique, unparalleled, never-to-be-repeated expression of that ocean, still appears to exist. “We are one, but we’re not the same,” as Bono sings in U2’s beautiful song “One.” There is no wholeness without the appearance of diversity. Wholeness actually expresses itself as the astonishing diversity and multiplicity of life.

And so it’s not that there is no me—it’s that when I take a fresh look, right now, I can’t find something separate from life itself called a me. I can’t find anything here that’s solid and enduring in time and space. I can’t find anything divided from this moment. I find only passing forms—waves of experience appearing and disappearing. I find only thoughts, memories, images, sounds, sensations, smells, feelings—all coming and going in the space that I am. The story of me is something else that comes and goes in the space that I am. “I” come and go in what I am!

The illusion is that there is something solid, fixed, separate here. In the end, I can say, “There is no fixed self.” Or actually, I could say that “everything is Self”—all the waves are inseparable from what I am. The words you use cease to matter when you really see what’s going on. All the words in the world just dissolve back into the space, into the silence.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FEELING AND BEING

As the open space in which all waves appear, you cannot actually be defined by any of the waves that appear. Anger, fear, sadness, boredom, joy—these waves simply appear and disappear in what you are. You are intimate with them, but they cannot define you. The happiest feelings, the saddest feelings, the most painful feelings, the most intense feelings, every kind of thought, no matter how strange, unpleasant, or “abnormal,” can all come and go in what you are. And what you are remains untouched, in the same way that no matter what is projected onto a movie screen, the screen remains pristine.

What you are is simply the capacity to think anything and to feel anything, but you are not defined by any of the thoughts and feelings that appear. What you are is like a sieve through which all human experience can pass. You are the movie screen that no movie can ever stick to.

Anger can come and go in what you are, but there is no angry person. There is fear, but no fearful person. There is sadness, but no sad person anywhere to be found. You are not a limited person—you are unlimited and unbounded capacity for all of life.

To understand what it means to be the capacity for every wave, it is important to understand the difference between feeling something and being something. You can feel ugly (or weak or hopeless or confused or fearful or bored or excited—whatever) in the moment, but in reality, who you really are cannot be that. You can feel ugly, but, as open space, you cannot be ugly. There is no ugly person. The ugly feeling cannot define you. The open space that you are is beyond all of the opposites. Feelings of both ugliness and beauty appear in what you are, and what you are remains untouched by either polarity. What you are is not made less complete by feelings of ugliness, nor is it made more complete by feelings of beauty. What you are is neither ugly nor beautiful; it allows both ugliness and beauty, but cannot be defined by either, just as the ocean allows all of its waves, but cannot be defined by any particular wave that appears.

So you cannot be ugly, but you can feel ugly. There is no ugly person, just present-moment feelings of ugliness appearing in you. You cannot be a failure, but you can feel like a failure. There is no failed person, just feelings of failure appearing and disappearing in what you are. You cannot be helpless, but you can feel helpless. There is no helpless person, just feelings of helplessness coming and going in you. You cannot be anything in particular (because what you are holds every feeling as it comes and goes), but you can feel anything and everything. All feelings—any feeling that a human being is capable of, any feeling that any human being has ever had—are allowed to come and go in what you are. All of human consciousness, in that sense, is available to you. Anything that you can feel, I can feel. Anything that you can think, I can think. There is no wave that is alien to the ocean of consciousness. There is no thought, no feeling, in reality, that is alien to what you are. You are the space that holds all of humanity. You allow the entire river of human consciousness to flow through you. You are the nothing that holds everything as it flows through. In the absence of a separate person, you discover all of humanity.

Much of our suffering rests on the assumption that if we feel something for too long or too intensely, or at all, we will become it. We assume that if we really allow the feeling to be there, it will stick and end up defining us. Much of our suffering rests on what amounts to superstition! Just because you feel like a failure does not mean that you are a failure. Just because you feel ugly does not mean that you are ugly. Just because you feel a wave, it does not mean that the wave can define you.

In our drive to define ourselves, to distinguish ourselves from others, to hold up a consistent story about who we are, what we end up doing is not allowing in feelings that conflict with the image or story of ourselves that we are trying to hold up. We say, “This feeling is me” or “This feeling is not me.” If I see myself as a beautiful, attractive person, I am not going to allow an ugly wave in. I can’t allow myself to feel ugly. That wave just doesn’t fit with how I want to see myself and how I want you to see me. If I feel ugly, I start to feel that there’s something wrong—that I don’t “feel myself” today. Or if I have an idea of myself as a successful person, I am not going to allow a failure wave in. It doesn’t fit with my idea of myself. I cannot allow myself to feel failure. If I see myself as a strong person and want others to see me as a strong person, I cannot allow myself to feel weak. I cannot allow any wave into my experience that threatens my idea of myself.

If we were actually in control of the waves that appear, we would simply be able to shut out all the waves that don’t support our story of ourselves. But, ultimately, we are not in control of the ocean of life. Despite our best efforts, thoughts and feelings that we do not want keep on appearing. We try to banish the ugly, fearful, painful, uncomfortable waves; the failure waves; the weakness waves; the “negative energy” waves; the “dark” waves, and we find that, ultimately, it’s not possible. They appear anyway. We cannot shut out half of the ocean. The ocean of life is wild and free and cannot be tamed or repressed.

Why can we not control the waves? Why do our unwanted waves appear? Because in the world of duality, the opposites must appear together. This truth is very important to understand too. Our experience is in perfect balance. If there is beautiful, there must be ugly. If there is success, there must be failure. If there is enlightened, there must be unenlightened. If there is loved, there must be unloved. This is the way things are, and it’s not a problem until we go to war with the way things are, until we go against the balance of life.

The beauty of life is that it’s constantly changing, moving. We cannot feel the same thing all the time. In present experience, there is no “all the time,” and there is also no “never.” There is only the dance of waves now. When we say, “I want to be attractive. I want to be beautiful,” what we must mean is that we want to feel attractive all the time and never feel ugly. Remember, what you are cannot be anything in particular, but what you are is the capacity to feel anything now. We want to be something fixed and solid in time and space, and yet when we look, we find that our feelings are constantly moving, changing, in the timeless moment.

The reality is that, in any moment, we can feel beautiful, or we can feel ugly. Sometimes we feel like a success; sometimes we feel like a failure. Sometimes we feel weak; sometimes we feel strong. Sometimes we feel certain; sometimes we feel uncertain. Sometimes we feel joyful; sometimes we feel sad. Sometimes we feel in favor of something; sometimes we feel against that same thing. This is the way things are, and it is totally natural to feel these seemingly contradictory feelings one after the other or even to feel them at the same time. We don’t like paradox, but when you understand that we are essentially paradoxical creatures and that is deeply okay, you see how natural it is to not feel the same thing all the time!

In the ocean that is you, change, flux, and inconsistency are the way of things. The changeless ocean loves to express itself as waves that constantly move. But in our quest to be a consistent self, to have a fixed, consistent, and changeless story of who we are, we label inconsistency as negative and try to avoid it at all costs. We want to feel the same tomorrow as we do today. We want to think the same thoughts, have the same opinions, want the same things, believe the same beliefs, day after day, year after year. We don’t want to flip-flop. We don’t want to be seen as flaky, changeable, unreliable, unable to make up our minds. Change, movement, flow are the way of things, and yet we want to be fixed. We want to hold up a fixed image of who we are, to tell a consistent story about ourselves from day to day. We want to be something, and yet our nature prevents us from ever being a fixed “thing.” Because of our misunderstanding of who we really are, we go to war with the wholeness of experience, trying to freeze the natural flow of life—and much frustration and suffering result.

We are at war with the opposites; we reject any opposite that doesn’t match our image of ourselves, and we don’t realize something very important: in reality, there are no opposites. Opposites are a creation of the mind. Only the mind splits reality, splits experiences into two and then seeks one of the opposites and tries to escape the other.

Here’s something that’s crucial to understand: In reality, feelings have no opposite. Energy in the body has no opposite. Life itself has no opposite.

Does the sound of a bird singing have an opposite? In this moment, listening to the bird singing, is there such thing as an opposite? Thought might say, “The opposite of the bird singing is the bird not singing,” but that is just another thought, another image, appearing right now. Does the actual tweet-tweet of the bird—listen to it now—have an opposite, in reality?

Does this moment have an opposite? Does the presence of life here and now have an opposite? Does anything actually oppose it?

Does a sensation have an opposite? Pinch yourself now. Bring awareness to the intense sensations that result. Can you find an opposite to these sensations? Yes, thought would say, “The opposite of this pain is the absence of this pain,” but again, that’s just another thought appearing now. In reality, does present sensation have an opposite that you can actually find in present experience?

Is an ugly feeling the opposite of a beautiful feeling? Or are they two very different experiences, with different sensations, different tastes? Is a happy feeling the opposite of a sad feeling? Thought would say they are opposites, but outside of thought, can you find an opposite?

In reality, there is no such thing as an opposite of a feeling or emotion. Every feeling and emotion is a complete experience in itself.

Experience itself has no opposite.

Feeling ugly is not the opposite of anything—it’s just feeling ugly. Without calling feeling ugly “negative” and feeling beautiful “positive,” without making them into opposites, we see that feeling ugly is simply an experience happening now—just a wave of experience, just something passing through. No wave is intrinsically better or worse than any other wave, because no wave is the opposite of any other wave. Every wave is equally water. Feeling ugly is not the opposite of anything—it’s just feeling ugly. It’s just life-energy moving in a particular way.

And let’s go deeper. Not only is beauty not the opposite of ugliness, but ugliness is also simply a concept in itself, and as such, it cannot capture the actual present-moment experience. In other words, without the story that what I am experiencing is ugliness, what is actually happening here?

Without the story that what I am experiencing now is failure, what is actually here?

Without the story that what I am experiencing now is pain, or grief, or boredom, or anger, or discomfort, or depression, or confusion, or even seeking, what is actually here?

Without any story about what is happening now, without labeling this experience as “failure” and comparing it with success, without labeling it “ugliness” and comparing it with beauty, without calling it “anger” or “fear” or “pain” and comparing it with its conceptual opposite, how do I know what it is that I am feeling?

As I was saying before, without the story, you have no way of knowing what you are experiencing. Without any story, without naming the waves, life is simply raw energy moving. It is the ocean—nameless and mysterious. We try to put a label to that energy. We judge it, try to escape it, make it the negative of an opposite positive and then seek the positive.

And yet underneath all of this, we don’t really know what we are running away from in the first place. We simply call a wave “fear,” “anger,” “sadness,” “boredom,” “grief,” “joy,” or “pain” because these are the names and concepts we have learned, and then we try to escape these waves or hold onto them. But take away those labels, and what are you really trying to escape from or hold onto? Do you actually know? What happens when we drop all the labels, all the learned descriptions, and face the raw energy of life, as it is in this moment, without trying to change, escape from, or cling to it? What happens when we drop all descriptions of what this moment is or is not and deeply feel into present sensations?

This is where the real adventure of life begins.

When you go beyond the story of what you are feeling, you come to see that you never really knew what you were running away from. And you meet the raw energy of life. You stand naked in front of life—and this is true healing. It is the falling away of all ideas of how this moment should be.

It’s when we label the waves that the war begins. The moment we label a wave of experience, we set it up as the opposite of another wave, even though, in reality, waves have no opposite. In every label, there is an implicit judgment. In creating the opposites beauty and ugliness and then seeking beauty, we go to war with what we call ugly. In trying to be beautiful, in trying to feel beautiful, in trying not to feel ugly, we end up going to war with this present experience and trying to reach its opposite—even though it actually has no opposite! No wonder we suffer. We think, “This feeling of ugliness is a threat to my completeness. If I can get rid of it, if I can move from ugly to beautiful, then I’ll be complete.” And the game is on.

What images of yourself are you trying to hold up? What do you want to be seen as? Happy, beautiful, successful, peaceful, blissful, enlightened? Expert? Teacher? The one who knows? The one who has worked everything out? What don’t you want to be seen as? Sad, stressed, unpopular, ugly, unintelligent, a failure? Which images of yourself are not okay? What do you want to feel? What don’t you want to feel? Which waves are not okay in your world?

I once worked with a woman who told me about her lifelong quest to be beautiful. She desperately wanted to be desirable to men. She wanted to be the most beautiful woman in the room. She thought night and day about her looks and spent huge amounts of money on clothes and cosmetics and plastic surgery, all in her search for beauty. After I’d been talking to her for a while, it became clear where this obsession with beauty came from. Secretly, she felt desperately ugly.

For her whole life she had felt ugly, and she was trying to cover up her feelings of ugliness with fashion and makeup and the appearance of beauty. While there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be attractive—making efforts to look attractive can be an enjoyable and fun part of life—her seeking wasn’t working for her. It wasn’t removing the incompleteness at the bottom of it all. Her attempt to be beautiful wasn’t removing her feelings of ugliness. In fact, she felt uglier than ever, and she was becoming more desperate than ever to escape her feelings of ugliness.

Whenever she felt the ugliest, she would dress up, go out to a nightclub, find a man, and have superficial, unfulfilling sex with him. And for a while she would feel attractive, beautiful, sexy, and wanted. For a while, she would feel complete. It seemed as though sex had the power to take away her feelings of ugliness. Sex had become her guru.

But the morning after, her feelings of ugliness would return worse than ever, and now they were mixed with guilt, because she knew on some level she was not being authentic; she was not revealing who she really was in the moment. She was pretending to be beautiful, when in fact she felt ugly and could not reveal her feelings. It was all an act, and her act was not providing her with what she truly longed for: love; wholeness; release from her burden of seeking; home; to be loved for who she really was, not for who she was pretending to be. The seeker of love will do anything to feel loved, if only for a short while.

Do you see how her quest for love and beauty in the future was identical with her attempt to escape ugliness in present experience? On some level, feelings of ugliness were a threat to her, to her idea of who she was, to who she wanted to be. Ugliness equaled “not okay.” She revealed to me that she was abused as a child, and feeling ugly also brought with it feelings of unworthiness, guilt, and failure. Basically, feeling ugly was linked to feeling unloved and unlovable, so she couldn’t allow herself to feel ugly for very long. Going out and having unfulfilling sex was a great way to distract herself from these uncomfortable feelings. But in the end, she always felt uglier than ever, as well as more disconnected, more fake, and more unloved.

It had simply never occurred to her that it could be deeply okay to feel ugly sometimes. Surely feeling ugly is a sign of being ugly and, therefore, is not okay? She had associated feeling ugly with being ugly. She believed that only an ugly person would feel ugly. This was her superstition.

In seeing that the ugliness wave was already accepted in the ocean—in other words, seeing that even in the midst of the most overwhelming feeling of ugliness, the open space that she was remained unaffected—she could then allow herself to feel ugly and know that, on the deepest level, this feeling was okay. The ugliness could not define her. So although she could feel ugly, as the open space of awareness, she could not be ugly. Nobody is ugly. We just feel ugly sometimes. And when we are at war with that feeling in ourselves, we project that rejection onto the world and call other people ugly.

The woman came to see that feeling ugly sometimes was not a fault of hers, but a natural part of the total balance of human experience. Lots of people feel ugly, but don’t admit it. It’s not the sort of thing that beautiful people talk about—or at least not people who want to be seen as beautiful!

Deep down, neither this woman nor we really want to be beautiful; we want to be whole. And being whole means being open to all experience. It means knowing yourself as the space in which ugliness and beauty come and go. In a very strange way—and this may sound a little crazy at first—we long to be ugly, because on some level, we know that ugly is the ocean too, and we know that it’s only when we allow ourselves to truly feel ugly that we can also feel truly beautiful.

We don’t really long to find what we are looking for. We long to discover that we are already what we are looking for, even in the midst of feelings of ugliness, failure, weakness, insecurity, or total devastation. We actually long for all the things we are running away from—ugliness, failure, fear, weakness, insecurity, devastation—because on some level, we know that in these things is where completeness lies. We long to allow everything.

By seeing that her ugliness was already accepted, this woman discovered that she could finally give up trying to be beautiful and instead simply be honest about the fact that she felt ugly sometimes. By seeing that her ugliness was admitted (in other words, already deeply allowed into present experience), she could admit her ugliness! What a relief to admit the truth of this moment, to finally stop pretending to be something that she knew she wasn’t! What a relief to no longer have to hold up a false image of herself! What a relief to be herself in the true sense of the word—the wide-open ocean of consciousness in which every wave is deeply accepted.

And the strange thing was that by admitting her feelings of ugliness, she no longer felt the need to cover them up by seeking out men and pretending to be beautiful around them. She no longer felt the need to hide her feelings of ugliness in the way she was doing before, because she no longer felt the need to hold up an identity of herself as beautiful.

Why must we hold up stories about ourselves? Why do we need any story about ourselves? Why can’t present experience just be allowed to be as it is, without us pretending it’s something that it’s not? Why must we live with an image of who we are? Why can’t we simply be honest about present experience instead? Why can’t we simply admit what is present and discover that what is present is already admitted by what we are?

The woman no longer wanted to be beautiful. She wanted to be honest instead. She wanted to be authentic instead. She just wanted to feel what she felt—no more, no less. Later, she told me that men were now able to connect with her on a much deeper level, because she gave them permission to admit that they felt ugly too sometimes! It was a relief for them to meet a woman who understood them on this deeper level, a woman around whom they did not have to perform. How beautiful it is to meet someone who is honest about their feelings of ugliness. How intimate it is to meet someone in their ugliness, to meet beyond the image. How attractive it is to meet someone who is comfortable with feeling unattractive, someone who is not trying to be attractive. What a relief—for everyone—to no longer have to pretend.

“I am ugly” used to be something this woman would never have been able to admit, because that admission would have been the death of her image of herself as a beautiful person. It used to terrify her to think that others might see her as ugly. But these days she can say, “I am ugly,” and those words have a whole different meaning. “I am ugly” does not mean that there is somebody here who is ugly, a separate person with the quality of being ugly rather than beautiful. There is no ugly person, for in truth there is no person at all. “I am ugly” simply means that the feeling of ugliness can be here, in the open space that I am, sometimes. It is allowed to be here, if it shows up.

The words “I am ugly” can be a celebration of life rather than a negative judgment about a separate person. Life appears as everything—beauty, ugliness, and everything in between—and in the open space that I am, it is all allowed to come and go. I contain it all. I hold it all. I embrace it all. I find all of it in myself: I am beautiful. I am ugly. I am loved. I am unloved. I am a success. I am a failure. I am joyful. I am sad. I am strong. I am weak. I know. I don’t know. I am enlightened. I am unenlightened. I am certain. I am uncertain. When you’re no longer at war with the opposites, there is enough room for all of this. All of human consciousness can pass through you. Everything we once called “negativity” is now seen to be part of the celebration of life. All waves are allowed in the ocean. Our ideas about what is negative and what is not are completely released in deep acceptance.

Do you want to be beautiful? Then you have to deeply accept your ugliness, to come to see that it’s allowed in what you are. That’s the deal. Do you want to be strong? Then you have to be deeply accepting of weakness, to come to see that it’s only when you completely allow all feelings of weakness to be there that a real strength emerges—a strength that is not at war with weakness. That’s the deal. Do you want to be a success? Then you have to succeed at loving your failure, realizing that even the most complete feeling of failure is allowed in what you are. That’s the deal. Do you want to be loved? Then you have to come to deeply accept any feeling of being unloved, here and now. That’s where you discover a love with no opposite—a love that cannot be opposed. That’s the deal.

I once asked a businessman who was obsessed with success, “What will happen if you fail?”

“I’ll lose my money,” he said.

“And then what?” I asked.

“I’ll lose my house, my car, my family.”

“And then what?”

“I’ll end up on the streets, homeless, unprotected, vulnerable to life. I’ll be an outcast from society. I’ll be unloved and unwanted.”

Here we got to the core of his fear. It wasn’t really about loss of success—it was about loss of love, loss of approval, loss of completeness. He had associated success with completeness, and failure with incompleteness. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that as a child, although he had loving parents, he felt—very subtly—that they loved him more when he succeeded, and he felt ever so slightly rejected by them when he failed. To this day, he is playing out the same patterns: “I’m unloved in my failure and loved in my success.” His drive for success wasn’t really about money; it was about love.

If you drop down through your deepest, darkest fears—the fear of being ugly, the fear of failure, the fear of poverty, the fear of illness—as you approach rock bottom, what you’ll nearly always find is the basic fear “I will be unloved.” I will be ugly and unloved in that ugliness. I will be in pain and unloved and alone in that pain. I will be incomplete, homesick, and closer to death, in my failure. Our fear is not really the fear of failure or ugliness or pain, but what these things symbolize in our world. And for many people, failure is linked to disapproval, rejection, abandonment, and, ultimately, lack of love. Even the most hardheaded businessman is secretly longing for love and running away from the feeling that, in his failure, he is not worthy of love. Not seeing himself as complete here and now, he seeks completeness through success and fears failure.

When you discover who you really are—the wide-open space that holds everything—you discover that failure, illness, ugliness, helplessness, uncertainty, and weakness are there to be embraced, not avoided. All waves—including the ones we fear the most, including the ones that seem most threatening to who we are—are already embraced by life’s ocean. What you are is not an image, and it cannot be threatened by any wave. Only an image can be threatened.

Taking your stand as the vast space in which everything happens, and knowing yourself as the capacity for this moment, notice that all feelings—good and bad, positive and negative—are already deeply allowed into what you are. They have been appearing all throughout your life, which is all the proof you need. This total embrace of all waves of experience is the love you have always been seeking.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS
A NEGATIVE THOUGHT

We try so hard to control our thoughts, don’t we? We try to have positive, loving, kind, compassionate, spiritual thoughts, and we try to banish bad, evil, destructive, unkind, violent, sinful thoughts. Some thoughts we even call unthinkable. I mustn’t think about killing. I mustn’t think bad things about those I love. I mustn’t have judgments. I mustn’t think about sex. I mustn’t think about what will happen in the future. I mustn’t have negative thoughts. I mustn’t have too many thoughts. I mustn’t listen to my thoughts. I must be enlightened and free from thought altogether.

Trying to control your thoughts—trying to control the waves in the ocean—is ultimately going to create huge amounts of suffering, because the attempt is based on an illusion about who you are. If you’ve ever meditated for more than five seconds, you’ve probably noticed that you’re not in control of your thoughts. You can’t even know your next thought, let alone tomorrow’s thoughts. Thoughts simply appear freely in the vast open space of life. They float in and out of awareness like clouds in the sky. Even in the midst of the noisiest thoughts, there is something here that is very quiet—something that is deeply at peace. It’s what you are. It watches all thoughts as they come and go. It allows all thoughts to come and go.

You can’t know your next thought. You don’t even have the power to not think about something. When you try to not think about something, what happens? That thought, that image appears—it has to. You can’t not think about something. The very fact that you know what you shouldn’t be thinking about means that thought is already appearing, even if you don’t want to admit that to yourself or to anyone else!

This is one of the many illusions that we hold: that we are the thinkers of our thoughts. The reality is, thoughts simply appear in the vast silence that you are, and it’s only another thought that says, “I thought that thought!” Thoughts are impersonal, but we believe that they are owned by us. So now we appear to have two things: a thought and a me who thinks it, the thinker of the thought. But this is an assumption and nothing more. In reality, you never experience this split between thinker and thought; you simply find thoughts coming and going in what you are. There is no thinker that thinks a thought; there is simply a thought appearing now. “I am the thinker” is only another thought!

This is the essence of true meditation: to simply relax back into the vast open space in which thoughts come and go and to notice that thoughts are not personal.

Now imagine this: A little kid goes up to his parents and says, “Mummy, Daddy, I had a thought! My brother is going to die because he won’t let me play on the computer!” The parents reply, “No! That’s a very bad thought! You shouldn’t think that! You’re bad for thinking that! Evil child! No supper tonight! Go to your room!” What they are implying is that the child thought the thought—that he is responsible for having that thought. There is a bad thinker of thoughts, and that bad thinker is not okay and must be punished. Their assumption is this: if a “bad” thought appears (a thought they judge as bad), a bad thinker must have produced it.

From the child’s perspective, he didn’t choose to have the thought. It just appeared out of nowhere. It was an expression of anger toward his brother, anger that had not been deeply accepted in present experience. When anger is not deeply accepted here and now, we move into the story of “I am an angry person,” forgetting who we really are. And then the angry person, seeking release from the discomfort of unaccepted anger, gets angry at another person. “I want to hit my brother” simply means “I am very angry with my brother—so angry that in this moment and only in this moment, I feel that I want to hit him. And I’m trying to communicate this to you. I am simply seeking okayness.”

But now the child has been told that there is a bad thinker producing bad thoughts. It’s almost like being told you’re possessed by the devil (or at least that there is something fundamentally wrong with you). There’s an evil thinker thinking evil thoughts. There’s a sinner thinking sinful thoughts. Your brain is dysfunctional, and it is producing sick thoughts.

And so the child thinks to himself, “I mustn’t have bad thoughts (even though on some level I know that I didn’t choose to have the thoughts in the first place). I mustn’t be bad, because Mummy and Daddy don’t love me when I’m bad.”

Now the bad thoughts—and possibly the anger—are going to be repressed in some way. “Thoughts about people dying, thoughts about hurting people, unkind thoughts about others are not okay. Mummy and Daddy told me so, and I don’t want to risk losing their love and approval by having those thoughts.”

And so the war with thought begins.

It doesn’t always happen the way I’ve described in this dramatic example, but as we grow up, all of us are conditioned to believe that certain thoughts are bad, dark, unhealthy, sick, sinful, and negative and, more importantly, that we are the thinkers of those nasty thoughts. Some thoughts I simply shouldn’t be having. Some thoughts are fundamentally not okay. And so we try our hardest to banish these thoughts, to make them go away.

Perhaps we go to war with our thoughts because of another superstition. Just as we believe that if we feel something for too long or too intensely or even at all, we will be it or become it, so we believe, “If I think it, it will come true. If I think it, it will happen. If I think it, I will attract it. If I think it, I will become it. If I think it, my parents will find out (or my teacher will find out or my boss will find out or my guru will find out or my partner will find out or God will find out), and I will be punished. If I think it, people will know that I am thinking it, and they will judge me. They will see me for who I really am, and I will be rejected by the world. I will be seen as the impure, imperfect being that I am.”

If they find out what I’m thinking, they won’t love me.

I once met a woman with a huge smile. She told me what a positive person she was. She was the most positive person in the world! She was so positive, and she spread positivity wherever she went. She lit up the universe with her positivity. She was a beacon of love and joy and happiness. In her own words, she was a “light being.”

There was just one thing that troubled her—a strange negative “entity,” a kind of unhappy ghost, who followed her around constantly. Wherever she was, whomever she was talking to, whatever she was doing, he was always there, right next to her, spreading his negative energy, filling her head with negative thoughts. She couldn’t understand why he was there and why he wouldn’t go away. She was such a positive person; why did she deserve to have a miserable apparition as a stalker? She had tried everything to make him disappear, but he wouldn’t budge. Why couldn’t she make the ghost disappear?

The entity was herself, as you might have guessed. All the parts of herself that she found too negative, all of those waves that didn’t fit in with her “I’m the most positive person in the world” identity (image), were projected onto this unhappy ghost, whom she then experienced as being outside of herself: “The negativity is not in me—it’s in him!”

Do you see the brilliance of the seeker here? What doesn’t fit into our image of ourselves we banish in some way. The woman was not aware that this was what she was doing, and in working with her, I helped her see that there was no ghost outside of her—that, in fact, she was the ghost. And she came to see that the negativity was okay, that there was truth in it, and that it was not a threat to who she was. She simply needed to love the ghost to death—to integrate him into what she was. She would come to discover that who she really was allowed all positivity and all negativity. Who she really was was beyond both polarities. And in that place, there was no need to hold up a positive-person image, or any image, in fact.

In a way, we are all like this dear woman, banishing the waves of experience that don’t fit with how we want to see ourselves and how we want to be seen. When we want to hold up a positive image of ourselves, it is inevitable that we go to war with what we perceive as negative.

However, who you really are does not distinguish between positive and negative thoughts; it does not see positive and negative. All thoughts are allowed to come and go in what you are. You can project any movie onto a movie screen—a romantic comedy; a war epic; a horror flick; a “positive,” happy movie or an upsetting, “negative” movie—and the screen remains untouched. The screen cannot be damaged by any of the movies that appear on it. You are like this movie screen—it cannot be hurt, contaminated, corrupted, or broken by any thought, however “negative.” Any and all thoughts are allowed on the screen of awareness. You are not the thinker; the thoughts simply appear.

When a thought such as “I’m a waste of space” or “I’m a total failure” or even a violent one such as “I hate my friend” or “I wish he was dead” appears, a kind of panic can set in: “I shouldn’t be thinking that. My goodness, where did that thought come from? Maybe there’s something wrong with me. I’m a good person! I love my friend. I would never wish that upon him. Oh God, maybe that thought means that I’m actually going to kill him! Oh no. I’m not a killer, am I? My goodness, I need to get rid of that thought. That thought isn’t me. It’s evil!” We believe the thought “I shouldn’t have had that thought” and we suffer.

We are afraid that thinking about something will lead to it becoming real, but as I have said, this is superstition. The truth is, the more I simply allow a thought to appear, the less likely it is that I will end up acting it out. The more I try to ignore the thought, to repress it, to destroy it, the more I go to war against it, the more I battle against myself, and the more it feels like I might actually end up doing what I fear doing. The more I go to war internally, the more likely that war will express itself in the world.

We see this dynamic at work in the father who had angry outbursts at his children. In his helplessness, in his desperation and his inability to control his kids, the father had all sorts of thoughts—thoughts a father “should never have.” He had thoughts about hurting his kids, even about killing them, even about killing himself (and it took real courage and brutal honesty for the father to admit to me that he’d had such thoughts). He had thoughts that you’re supposed to keep to yourself; thoughts you think nobody else has; thoughts that make you think there’s something wrong with you.

Those “violent” thoughts arose, and the father was shocked at himself for thinking such things. What a bad, evil, vicious thinker he was! The thoughts went against everything he believed—everything he stood for as a father, as a man, as a human being. And yet, they appeared, and they weren’t in his control.

And that’s when the panic would really set in. “Oh my God, I shouldn’t be thinking that! What’s wrong with me? I’m the worst father in the world. I’m a failed father. I’m a terrible person. I’m so far from spiritual awakening! I’m sick! How do I stop these thoughts? How can I get rid of them? How can I destroy them? Maybe I’m mentally ill! Help! Help!”

And at that point of total panic and helplessness, he lashed out at his children. Again, lashing out is a way to get relief and release from “dangerous” thoughts. The irony is, the real danger is in the lashing out to escape the thoughts—not in the thoughts themselves. The thoughts are innocent; it’s in our judgment and rejection of thoughts that the trouble begins.

The thought “I want to kill my children” doesn’t fit the image of a good father! These are not the kinds of thoughts a father—or anyone for that matter—is supposed to have. But the truth was, in that moment, those thoughts were appearing. That was the reality. And who wants to deny reality, however troubling it is? Only the seeker. The seeker thrives on denial. To come out of denial and simply admit what is true can be terrifying to the seeker, for it destroys the image the seeker is trying to uphold.

Deep down, the man knew that he would never lay a finger on his children, but still the “bad” thoughts appeared—an expression of his frustration and helplessness, his desperation to control the situation. The seeker was looking for a way out of the discomfort, and the mind went to an extreme: “If I killed my kids, I would be at peace.” The seeker was becoming desperate for an escape, and desperate thoughts were appearing. The thought was quickly labeled an “evil” thought, a “sick” thought, an “unhealthy” thought. And because there was the assumption that he had thought it, now not only was this father unable to control his children, but he was also an evil father, a sick man, a terrible person, not fit to have children, not fit to live. Suffering on top of suffering.

If he had simply allowed that thought to be there, it’s unlikely that the panic would have set in, that he would have become so angry with himself, that he would have been so frightened, and that he would have ended up screaming at his children in helplessness. We are afraid to allow the most “negative” thoughts, because we are afraid of what they say about us, and we somehow imagine that allowing them to be there, in the space of who we are, will mean they will take us over. In fact, it’s the other way around—when we reject thoughts, try to escape them, and punish ourselves for thinking them, they tend to grow and grow and grow in size and in importance. The seeking, the desperation to escape, becomes so intense that even the most seemingly peaceful person can end up becoming violent. Think of those television news reports about an ordinary person who has gone on a killing spree. When the reporters interview friends and acquaintances of the killer, they say, “But he seemed such a calm, gentle man . . .”

It’s very strange, but in the total allowing of violent thoughts, violence ends. True peace is not at war with violence. The movie screen has no preference. A positive movie, a negative movie, a loving movie, a violent movie—they are all allowed to come and go on the screen. A violent movie doesn’t make the screen more violent. The screen never panics, because it knows that all thoughts are allowed to play out on it.

All of these thoughts that we reject simply wouldn’t be a problem if we weren’t trying to hold up an image of ourselves. “I’m a nonviolent person.” “I’m a positive person.” “I’m a happy person.” “I’m a 100-percent-loving light being.” Wonderful! But that image means that you will go to war with any thought that doesn’t fit that image.

If you’re trying to hold up an image of yourself as a positive person, you most likely won’t allow negative thoughts. A successful person might not allow herself to have thoughts about failure. An enlightened, spiritual person perhaps won’t allow himself to have unenlightened, nonspiritual thoughts—angry thoughts, sexual thoughts, fearful thoughts. People who are trying to be pure won’t allow any thought they have been conditioned to believe is impure. Or even worse, if they see themselves as enlightened beings who have transcended thoughts entirely, then they won’t allow themselves to have thoughts at all. The moment you hold up any image of yourself, you will be in conflict with thoughts. The most nonviolent individuals will go to war with thoughts that threaten their nonviolent image of themselves. We go to war in defense of images, and images always seem to be threatened by thoughts.

We talk a lot about “positive” and “negative” thoughts, but now we see that there is no such thing as negative thoughts. The thought “I am ugly” is not a negative thought. It is a thought that we label as negative because we don’t like what it says about us. The thought “I am ugly” upsets us because we don’t want to admit ugliness into our experience. The thought “I am a failure” upsets us because we don’t want to deeply embrace failure, since that embrace would threaten our image of ourselves as a successful person. We try to banish all “negative” thoughts and have only “positive” thoughts.

Positive thinking has become quite a craze in recent years. But this tactic ultimately doesn’t work, because the opposites always arise together. Most often, when we think we are thinking positively, we are really just covering up negative with positive. The negative is still there, rumbling underneath, ready to spoil all our fun when we least expect it! We feel ugly, that ugly feeling is not accepted, and so we try to suffocate the ugliness by trying to think and feel “positively.” But our beauty is then hollow and superficial, both to ourselves and others, and doesn’t provide what we truly long for.

You could say that in seeking the positive, we actually create the negative. They cannot exist without each other. Positive thinking actually creates negative thinking.

Some people report that they feel attacked or plagued by negative thoughts. Remember, though, that what we are cannot be attacked—only an image can. So any time you experience a thought as being negative, any time you feel personally attacked, it is a sign that you are defending an image of yourself. When no image of yourself is being defended, all thoughts are allowed to arise and fall away. Then you see that all thoughts are true—in other words, all thoughts have truth in them. If you are honest you can find everything in yourself—and then thought cannot be your enemy. Every thought you call “negative” is actually a dear friend, trying to show you the false image of yourself that you are still defending.

It’s almost as if life, in its infinite compassion, attempts to destroy any false image you have of yourself. If you hold onto beautiful, ugly will come along and attempt to destroy it. If you hold onto successful, failure will start to batter you until you see reality. It’s almost as if life wants to be in perfect balance—it wants beautiful and ugly, not just one or the other. It wants everything, because it is everything. So perhaps what we experience as a negative thought is simply life trying to balance itself out. If we really listen to suffering, it always shows us what we’re still at war with. It always shows us what we are seeking.

So the thought “I am ugly” is simply an invitation to deeply allow feelings of ugliness. The thought “I am a failure” invites us to deeply allow feelings of failure in the moment. So easily we forget who we are, as the vast capacity for life itself, and go to war with a thought, labeling it as “negative,” rather than seeing its inherent truth. If we are open, we can always find the truth in a thought, even the most “negative” thoughts about ourselves. We come to see that we are not who we think we are. We are unlimited and free, vast enough to contain all of life.

Often you are trying to protect an image of yourself and don’t even realize it. A woman once told me how “free from identity” she was. She had studied nonduality—Advaita—for years, learned from dozens of famous teachers, had all sorts of awakening experiences, and finally had come to shed her entire identity. She was no longer someone. She was now no one. She was free from all images. She was simply an open space of awareness. She had gone beyond all roles—mother, wife, daughter, spiritual seeker.

There was one thing that was bothering her, though.

“It’s my children!” she said. “I just don’t understand them. They see me as their mother! Can’t they see I’m not really their mother? Can’t they see that ultimately I’m nothing and nobody?” She told me how her children’s inability to accept her view of reality was causing much suffering and confusion in her life, which further confused her, because she thought that after “awakening,” you weren’t supposed to get confused! “If they could just see who I really am!” she said. “Can’t they see I’m not really their mother? Can’t they see I’m free from all identity? Can’t they see I have no story about myself anymore?”

I said, “But you do have a story. Your story is that you have no story. You are completely identified with not being their mother. And every time your children call you Mother, it’s a threat to your identity, your image of ‘I am not a mother.’ That’s why it hurts when they call you Mother. Their image conflicts with yours.”

She realized where all her suffering was coming from: she was seeking something her children couldn’t give her. She was mentally at war with them, in her attempt to hold up her image of herself as “non-mother.” She had stopped listening to her children. She thought she was free from identity, free from seeking, and yet seeking was still going on.

Yes, even a spiritual identity such as “I have no identity” or “I am nobody” can become yet another identity, another trap, another image to hold up, another story to defend. If you hold up an image of yourself as nobody, you’ll secretly go to war with anyone who doesn’t buy into that image. You’ll start saying things like “I am nobody, but you’re still somebody,” and there will be inner conflict. The defense of an image always leads to conflict and, therefore, suffering—no matter how “awakened” you think you are. It was this woman’s suffering that pointed her back home in the end. All images crumble in the face of life.

Which thoughts and judgments, from yourself and from others, hurt? Which thoughts do you perceive as negative? Can this perception tell you which images of yourself you are still defending in the moment? Where do you go to war in defense of a false image of yourself? Which waves of experience are you trying to protect yourself from? What are you not allowing in? And is it possible to recognize that what you are not allowing in has already been allowed in?

All suffering, all conflict, contains within it an invitation to cease to identify yourself as an image and to discover the deepest acceptance in present experience.

We have now covered the basics of seeking:

• Experiencing ourselves as separate waves in the ocean and not seeing completeness in our present experience, we seek completeness in the future.

• Money, sex, enlightenment, fame, beauty—which of these symbolizes the end of seeking to you? We give these things power; they seem to have the power to bring completeness. And so we mystify them, long for them, follow them, worship them, want to become them. We become addicted to a future wholeness. But we fail to find what we are really looking for until we discover who we really are, in this present moment.

• We try to escape certain experiences—ugliness, weakness, failure, helplessness—any experience we deem to be a threat to completeness. But these are not actually threats to completeness. As waves in the ocean, they are already deeply accepted, and all we need to do is recognize this acceptance in the moment. All thoughts and feelings are allowed to come and go in what you are.

• Deep acceptance is not something you achieve—it’s what you are in your essence. What you are is the open space in which all waves of experience are allowed to come and go. The open space is inseparable from all that appears within it. It is the ocean, inseparable from all its waves. This is the intimacy and love we have always longed for—an intimacy right at the heart of our present experience.

• As open space, you cannot be defined by any of the apparent opposites—good, evil, healthy, unhealthy, enlightened, unenlightened. We run away from the negative and try to reach the positive, and this attempt to escape life we call suffering. Suffering is always an invitation to discover, in the moment, what we are not deeply accepting and to see that what we are not accepting is already accepted.

• As open space, what you are is not the seeker; you are that which sees the seeking play itself out. You are not an incomplete entity that is trying to complete itself in time. The end of seeking is not something that the seeker will find in the future. You are the end of seeking, now. You are what you seek, in this moment.

The metaphor of the seeking mechanism has astonishing explanatory power. It can help us to understand suffering that otherwise may seem incomprehensible to us. Understanding the basics of this mechanism, we will now look in more detail at how this dynamic manifests in our everyday lives.

For the rest of the book, building on some of the ideas and insights we have talked about, we will be exploring the seeking that’s happening in our most intimate relationships—how we seek love and acceptance from other people, and how it leads to conflict, inauthenticity, dishonesty, and strained communication. We will see how the seeking mechanism gives rise to addictions and unhealthy repetitive behaviors, and how in our seeking we end up giving away our own power and submit to the rule of others—to gurus, to cult leaders, to people we perceive as powerful but who have no real power. We will see how suffering is created as we try to escape physical pain, and how the rejection of the present moment leads to everything that we call violent and evil in the world.

We will also see how we can find the deepest acceptance even in the places we thought it could never be. We will find the light even in the darkest of places—the light that we are, enlightenment itself.

In exposing the seeker in all its subtle and not-so-subtle manifestations, in shining the light on the seeker in all aspects of this human experience, we will come to see how we have been creating unnecessary suffering for ourselves and others, and at the same time, we will find a way out of that suffering. The way out of suffering is the way in. See if you can recognize yourself in any of the situations presented in the following pages. If you are a human being like me, I’m sure you will be able to relate to what I am going to tell you!

You cannot find yourself in the past or future. The only place where you can find yourself is in the Now. To be a seeker implies that you need the future. If this is what you believe, it becomes true for you: you will need time until you realize that you don’t need time to be who you are.
ECKHART TOLLE