God damn, homey, my mind is playing tricks on me.

GETO BOYS, “MIND PLAYING TRICKS ON ME”

20

AT THE MOUNTAIN OF MADNESS

Making amends eases many types of pain and suffering, but . . . of all the sources of hurt I’ve experienced, the feeling of aloneness has been the worst. As an introvert by nature, it’s a real struggle for me to be social (though it has gotten better in recent years). I’d always be the guy who was home on Friday and Saturday night (and well, pretty much every other night of the week, too), sitting alone in my apartment, usually with some underlying depression that I’d mask by watching a movie or reading a book.

Some nights, when the emptiness was overwhelming, I’d take a walk in the hopes of passing a few people, simply to feel like I wasn’t alone, even if for only that brief second or two as they passed me by. If that didn’t do the trick, I’d go home and eat some unhealthy food (pizza or chocolate-flavored anything) to get the relief I was desperately seeking. That was, of course, unless it was during one my various periods of active addiction, in which case I’d just get shitfaced, swallow pills, write angry journal entries to God, drunk-dial people, and all sorts of other ridiculous behavior.

Drunk, fucked-up, alone, depressed, or whatever, I still managed to stick with my spiritual practices (mostly meditation, prayer, and mantra) through those years. Of course, they weren’t having too much of an impact because, more often than not, I was doing them just to feel like I was making some kind of effort to try to better myself. But it wasn’t all a waste of time. As a result of my practice, I definitely had some transcendent experiences—ones that gave me a glimpse into the more friendly, calm, and peaceful life that I could have but wasn’t quite ready for yet.

The big takeaway for me was that, once I began having even these minor tastes of awakening, of experiencing the interconnectivity, the interbeing of all things, it became clear to me that my greatest source of suffering was rooted in my sense of separation—and not just from others, but from the totality of life.

It’s easy to write all this off as some esoteric nonsense because sure, on the relative, manifest level, you’re you and I’m me. If I die, odds are that you probably won’t as a result. I can easily grab my skateboard, set it on fire, watch it burn to ash; yet my life will still go on even though the skateboard’s existence ceases to be. This is all true on the material level; however, we often overlook another part of our existence: the absolute, formless, unmanifest level—the place of perfect and complete Oneness. So complete in fact, that even the idea of separation doesn’t exist there, only emptiness.

In the spirit of clarity, let’s take a deeper look at this. On the one hand, we have relative or conventional truth, which is our everyday material experience of the world; on the other hand, we have the absolute or ultimate truth, which is the ground of all things before they manifest. These two truths—or two levels of reality—are not separate. They are completely and simultaneously coexisting with one another, and together make up Everything Mind. It’s like the Zen sutra Sandokai (The Identity of Relative and Absolute) teaches, “Ordinary life fits the absolute like a box and its lid.”1

Relative truth is the level of form (physical, psychological, and physiological), and it’s where we enter the spiritual path. It’s where our passion for truth is ignited, by way of any number of material things such as the texts from the great wisdom traditions, workshops, retreats, nature, performing or listening to music, losing ourselves in the act of making love, meditating—anything that fans our hearts’ flames. These doorways lead us back home to the ultimate experience—a nonexperience or pure nonduality—of who we truly are as timeless, formless, complete bliss, and perfection.

The relative level is also where we spend so much time suffering unnecessarily because many of us live with rigid and concrete concepts about reality, rather than letting them all go and actually experiencing reality itself, free of preconceived notions. Much easier said than done, but doable nonetheless. It’s not going to happen overnight, though (unless you’ve got some stellar karma built up). If we look back at our lives, particularly our formative years, it’s pretty easy to see that we’ve been conditioned by society, our parents, teachers, and friends to identify with our material selves—our names, socioeconomic positions, bodies, sense perceptions. I’m not trying to bash society or anyone else, because they were simply teaching and instilling in us what was taught to and instilled in them. For the most part, they did so believing it was in our best interests (which in many cases it most certainly was, like not touching the stove when it’s hot or getting into a stranger’s van when they offer you candy).

As a result of identifying primarily—if not exclusively—with our relative selves, we’ve spent so much of our lives living from a place of separation, personalizing the stories our thoughts create about our material selves. Then we identify with the emotions our thoughts produce, believing that’s the totality of our experience, which leads to living in aloneness, as singular, isolated beings.

When we live from that place, we’re not aware that there’s more than relative truth (form); and for many of us, the absolute truth (formlessness) of our experience goes by completely unnoticed. We’re not in touch with what the Hindu tradition calls the atman, the indwelling Spirit that stirs within us. It’s this disconnect—this place of forgetfulness—where our experience of fear, pain, and suffering arises. When we completely identify with the physical realm—the world—we’re relying on impermanent things to fulfill our internal desire to find peace and refuge. But life doesn’t work like that.

As we take a deeper look into the nature of the relative, the world of form, we begin to see the interconnectivity of all things, which depersonalizes much of our life experience (in a good way that creates freedom from the suffering that results from attachment and aversion). This becomes a gateway for us to enter into the experience of ultimate truth—that the objects “out there” aren’t really out there, but rather they’re “in here,” in our awareness of them as they arise. The totality of life is arising within our awareness. So ultimately speaking, we are not in the world; the world is in us, it is occurring in our Witnessing Awareness. (But more on that later.)

There’s a Sanskrit phrase, neti-neti, which means “not this, not that.” When it comes to cultivating our experience of ultimate truth, this practice of negation is exceptionally helpful. Traditionally, neti-neti refers to things like our body, name, senses, and thoughts. As we dis-identify from these as the be-all and end-all of who we are, we find that the only thing left is emptiness, the ground of ultimate reality, the place of pure, infinite Spirit.

There is another saying, from the ancient Hindu text Chandogya Upanishad, which can also be extremely helpful in coming to experience the ultimate truth. It is tat tvam asi, and means “thou art that.” Sounds contradictory to neti-neti, right? In actuality, it’s not. Each is addressing a different level of reality. Neti-neti is used on the relative level to negate all material things as the totality of who we are. Whereas tat tvam asi is used on the absolute level, saying that you, yes, you reading these words right now, are one with the All, the Everything, the entire Cosmos that predates even the big bang, in every waking second of your life.

Ultimate truth is infinite and completely free from all finite qualities or characteristics. It’s formless and timeless, having no space and never changing. The relative world and its manifestations are but ornaments of this ever-present everything that is the ground of all being, of all forms.

In Buddhism, the ultimate or absolute truth is called dharmakaya, which, while recognized as the formless, ultimate nature of all things, still has an aspect of cognizance, one that incorporates all material things and is the ground of their manifestation. As Vajrayana master, scholar, poet, and head of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism Dilgo Khyentse teaches in The Hundred Verses of Advice, “The dharmakaya, the absolute dimension, the ultimate nature of everything, is emptiness. . . . It has a cognitive, radiant clarity aspect that knows all phenomena and manifests spontaneously. The dharmakaya is not something produced by causes and conditions; it is the primordially present nature of the mind.”2

As we see from Dilgo Khyentse’s words, this ultimate truth of dharmakaya is the ever-present nature of mind and is beyond the effect of any cause or condition. It simply is as it is. Dharmakaya is only one third of the Buddhist Trikāya doctrine (three bodies or three aspects of personality), however. There is also the relative, or form body, that is known as nirmanakaya, an example of which would be Shakyamuni Buddha, who took birth to teach and liberate others. Then there’s sambhogakaya, which is the body that brings together the absolute (dharmakaya) with the relative (nirmanakaya), in a way that the relative body experiences the bliss of realizing the absolute.

That’s just a Buddhist example, one that not even all schools of Buddhism would necessarily agree on (which is fine because, remember, it’s all about honoring our own truth). In Christian mysticism, the absolute is often referred to as the Godhead; in Hinduism, it’s Brahman; in Taoism, it’s the Tao, and on and on the examples go. What all of them share is the core teaching that there is a source, a place of complete nonduality from which all things rise. This place is one to which we’re always connected. It’s our own original, perfect, infinite, and boundless state.

Okay, so which is it? Are we that, or aren’t we? Well, you’re gonna hate me, but it’s actually both . . . and it’s neither, and I’m sorry, but I’m actually laughing a bit at the absurdity, the madness of all this as I sit here typing away. Yet, as I laugh, I honor that it’s the crazy-ass truth that I’ve come to experience in my heart as the absolute realest of real experiences.

Who we really are, the formless, Witnessing Awareness, is never born and never dies. And we’re able to have that experience of this Self, our truest Self, in this lifetime. For most people, it takes time, practice, compassion, and patience—lots and lots of patience—to get to this place, though in reality, it’s already right here, right now, within us as Everything Mind.

So let’s take a nice, deep breath now—I imagine some of you are a bit frazzled at this point. (I know I am.) Much of this material seemed nonsensical to me at first, and occasionally, some of it still does, but isn’t life pretty nonsensical? If we take an honest look at life for what it really is, most of us would agree that it’s an epically strange experience.

Maybe the mystics, saints, yogis, and scholars who came before us really were onto something with their crazy wisdom teachings: fighting fire with fire, which is to say, meeting this fluid and strange human existence with fluid and strange teachings.

I know all too well that processing some of this material can be tricky. It’s not always easy to dig deep and open our minds to new ideas and concepts, especially the ones presented here. But as we continue exploring and working with them, they will create a true understanding and experience of peace, compassion, intuition, and overall greater well-being. We’ll begin to experience life as no longer happening to us but, rather, through us, and there’s so much freedom in that. These aren’t empty promises. Please, try this stuff out and see for yourself!

I suspect that many of you reading these words already intuitively know, or more importantly feel, what’s meant underneath the abstract teachings and strange implications I just shared with you. So all I ask of you now is to please sit with what you’ve just read, take it all to heart, and then, when you’re ready, turn the page.