I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
Knocking on a door. It opens:
I’ve been knocking from the inside.
—Jelalludin Rumi
The regular practice of mindfulness teaches you how to welcome thoughts, feelings, and other experiences without necessarily identifying with them or acting them out. By cultivating a kind of spacious awareness that does not attach to objects or experiences, you gradually become freer from the mind’s conditioning. Even though habitual patterns of thinking and feeling keep arising, you don’t necessarily get seduced by them.
But mindfulness alone can’t offer stable, enduring peace and well-being because it’s a state of mind that you believe you have to cultivate, sustain, and protect. For this reason, many mindfulness practitioners become dependent on their meditation and feel they need to return to it again and again to settle the mind down whenever it becomes agitated. Like every other mind-state, mindfulness is impermanent and arises and passes away depending on the strength and consistency of your practice. If you slack off, your mindfulness fades, and you fall back into the cauldron of negativity again.
In fact, the very notion that your mind needs to be settled and calmed or that negative emotions need to be eliminated, based on some predetermined standard of how your mind should look, marks a major distinction between the path of mindfulness and the direct approach of awakened awareness. From the perspective of unconditional openness, every thought and feeling that arises, no matter how seemingly negative or discordant, is welcomed just as it is, and this very welcoming reveals an equanimity that can’t be disturbed even by the most turbulent experiences. By not preferencing one mind-state over another, so-called positive over so-called negative, awakened awareness moves beyond dualistic thinking to encompass life fully, in all its richness and complexity. Yet awakened awareness is not a state you can cultivate, but your natural state that’s always already available and just needs to be acknowledged and accessed.
For all its wonderful benefits, the practice of mindfulness has another downside: it tends to maintain the subject–object split, the gap between the one who’s being mindful, the act of being mindful, and the object of mindful attention. In other words, no matter how mindful you become, there’s always a you that has to practice being mindful of an object separate from you. As a result, mindfulness perpetuates the very sense of separation it’s designed to overcome. This point may be a subtle one that’s not particularly relevant in the early stages of practice. But as your practice matures, you may eventually discover that you’re trapped in the detached witness position and have no idea how to break free; the more you practice mindfulness, the tighter the trap becomes. Witnessing has become another identity or point of view that you ultimately have to relinquish.
Only when you realize the awakened awareness that does not come and go but abides as the background and essence of every experience can you finally free yourself from the witnessing trap and achieve the lasting peace and happiness you seek. Awakened awareness—also known as consciousness, eternal wakefulness, pure presence, true nature, the I am—doesn’t foster division because it’s not separate from what it’s aware of and does not prefer one experience over another. Because it exists prior to all thought or activity, it can’t be created, manipulated, fabricated, or sustained; you can only recognize it, immerse yourself in it—and ultimately realize that it is what you are. Paradoxically, if you want to step into the freedom and happiness to which mindfulness points, you have to let go of the practice that mindfulness requires and let yourself fall into awakened awareness.
Unlike the cultivation of mindfulness, however, which you can learn and practice methodically, the path of discovering awakened awareness tends to be more circuitous, serendipitous, and idiosyncratic. That is, it generally differs from one individual to another and doesn’t have universally applicable guideposts or milestones. Again paradoxically, it’s often called the direct approach, in comparison to the progressive approach of practice and cultivation—and it’s certainly direct in the sense of pointing clearly and without hesitation to the nature of mind, our natural state of awakened awareness, and inviting an instantaneous realization that requires no preamble or preparation.
At the same time, the path of discovery can be more indirect and hit-or-miss from the point of view of the seeker, who may not have the comfortable sense of progress that mindfulness affords. You may sit quietly, listen to teachings, contemplate, and inquire, yet have no sense of advancing or improving in any way—until suddenly you catch a glimpse of awakened awareness. Author Stephen Levine calls it the “high path with no railing,” because you have no landmarks or structures to support you on your way. Traditionally, the realization of awakened awareness is transmitted in person from teacher to student in intimate dialogue and exploration. For those who are interested, I offer individual and group sessions and retreats that afford this kind of intimate opportunity. But for those who are unable to avail themselves of a living teacher, the direct approach includes practices you can play with and portals or doorways that you can approach which, once opened, provide entry into a whole new way of being.
The realization of awakened awareness generally involves a sudden, often surprising, sometimes even shocking figure–ground shift. One moment you’re going about your day taking yourself to be a separate person, a locus of identity centered in the head, and the next moment you recognize that you’re the vast openness in which this apparently separate person and every other object of experience occur. From thinking of yourself as a body–mind with a personal history and an imagined future localized here, you realize that you’re this insubstantial but all-pervasive awareness in which life unfolds in some mysterious and ungraspable way. The center of your universe has shifted dramatically—in fact, you may have lost your center entirely—and you can never quite return to your old way of experiencing life again.
Though this shift may sound like a mystical experience, a glimpse of another, more spiritual dimension of reality, it’s actually a profound insight beyond the veil into the nature of reality itself. Just as scientists over the centuries have used the scientific method of objective experimentation to gradually unlock the secrets of the physical universe, so have meditators, yoga practitioners, and sages used a similarly scientific method of subjective investigation to discover the metaphysical ground of existence. Like experiments in physics and chemistry, these exercises and meditations have reproducible results, though some may prove more effective for a particular individual than others. Choose the ones that seem to work best for you, follow them carefully and wholeheartedly, and you’ll eventually realize what the great masters have realized before you. In this chapter, I offer experiments and pointers you can implement for yourself.
At the heart of the direct approach lies a paradox: How can you possibly become what you already are? If awakened awareness already exists as your natural state and can’t be cultivated or practiced, why must you approach or become it in any way at all? Why not just be it? Well, the fact is that you already are it, at least intrinsically, yet you continue to suffer because you don’t consciously recognize what you are. Clearly you need to do something, change your point of view in some way, to be able to align yourself with what’s already the case. That is, you need to be it knowingly—awareness has to awaken to itself.
In Zen, this paradox, of being it but not recognizing it, is known as the gateless gate. You find yourself outside a gate that appears to separate you from the fundamental truth at the heart of reality, and you try every possible method to break through. When you finally reach the other side and discover what you were trying so hard to achieve, you realize that the gate was just a figment of your imagination, and you were never outside of it even for an instant. But without the exploration and investigation, the sitting and inquiring, you may never have recognized that the gate didn’t exist.
None of the descriptions and explanations I offer can crack this paradox for you; only direct, immediate experience will do the trick. The exercises in this chapter invite you to enter the gateless gate for yourself.
Since awakened awareness has no opinions for or against anything and welcomes everything just as it is, without judgment or interpretation, you can approach it by sitting quietly and opening to reality in a welcoming, nonjudgmental way. The risk of this approach is that the mind, a consummate mimic, can do an excellent imitation of welcoming and appear to be unconditionally open, while actually harboring judgments and maintaining a limited point of view. The secret is to stop controlling your attention and allow it to function effortlessly, without the intervention of the mind. In a sense, you have to fail as a mindful meditator in order to go beyond mindfulness; that is, your mindfulness has to give way and spontaneously open to reveal the unconditional openness prior to mindfulness. Any attempt to “do welcoming” is doomed to be a dead end that leaves you stuck in efforting and has nothing to do with unconditional, unlimited openness.
If this undertaking sounds tricky, subtle, and (once again) paradoxical, you’re on the right track. As Lao Tzu, the great sage of the Tao Te Ching, advises, you have to learn how to “do nondoing” for awakened awareness to flower. But sitting quietly can invite this shift to nondoing, as long as you let go of your habitual attempts to get somewhere or accomplish something by cultivating a particular state, even if it’s greater presence and peace of mind. (As you may have noticed, when you’re efforting to get your mind to settle down, you’re just stirring the waters and causing more turmoil.) Let go of your mindfulness and just be. (For instructions in just being, see chapter 3.)
As I mentioned in a previous chapter, your natural state of open, awake, unconditional awareness is like the sky—it doesn’t have to effort or try in any way to welcome everything without judgment or discrimination in its limitless embrace. Welcoming is the spontaneous and effortless nature of the sky. Planes, birds, skydivers, and balloons don’t need to ask the sky to open and allow them to pass through. Permission has always already been granted, and the sky just receives them without being disturbed in any way.
Likewise, when you let go of your effort to be mindful, you can sit quietly and imagine that you are the sky, without center or boundaries. Thoughts, feelings, images, memories, and judgments come and go in the boundless presence of awakened awareness—which is what you are fundamentally. Everything is happening in you! As your understanding deepens, you shift from practicing mindfulness, to cultivating spacious awareness, to resting in openness, to realizing that this skylike openness is your very own true nature. The final realization that you are the openness, the boundariless space, and at the same time you’re inseparable from what arises in this space, marks the full flowering of awakened awareness.
Meditation: Resting as global awareness
Most of the time our awareness is contracted and fixated on particular objects. But awakened awareness is all-inclusive, like the sky.
Take a few minutes to sit comfortably and shift your attention from your thinking mind to the coming and going of your breath. Now, instead of practicing your accustomed meditation technique, I’d like you to sit quietly and let everything be the way it is. Don’t focus or manipulate your attention in any way, don’t follow your breathing, don’t do anything in particular; just let everything be, without trying to change or avoid or get rid of anything.
Let yourself rest as this silent, open, unconditional awareness or presence for five minutes or so. No effort, no manipulation, no cultivation, no doing, just rest as awareness and let everything be as it is.
Now imagine the space directly in front of your body. Objects in front in no way interfere with this space. Feel into this space; as you breathe, allow your awareness to expand to include this space.
Now imagine the space directly behind your body. Objects behind in no way interfere. Feel into this space; as you breathe, allow your awareness to expand to include this space.
Now do the same with the space to the right of your body, the space to the left of your body, the space above your body, and the space below your body. Sense this spacious, global openness in every direction. Is it conscious or unconscious? Does it have any limits or boundaries? Does it have a center? Where does it begin and where does it leave off? Does it reject or hold onto anything?
Remain as this global openness—limitless, unattached, all-inclusive, like the sky.
Another powerful doorway to awakened awareness involves contemplating the direct teachings of the great sages from every tradition who have intimately understood and lived it. These teachings are sometimes called pointing-out instructions because they direct awareness back upon itself to discover who or what is being aware—that is, awakened awareness. If you’re especially fortunate, you may actually hear these words from the lips of a living teacher. If not, you may stumble upon pointing-out instructions in books and find yourself spontaneously responding to their invitation.
In my own case, I met a teacher who told me, “The seeker is the sought. The looker is what he or she is looking for.” This dictum resonated deep inside and initiated a kind of spontaneous wondering, as pointing-out instructions often do. But it was months before it bore fruit in a sudden, enlightening moment of insight into its deeper significance.
If you want to reap the wisdom of these pointers and don’t have a living teacher you can visit in person, you can find excellent instructions online or in books. The secret is to avoid teachings that fill your mind with information and interpretation, and instead to gravitate to those that point directly to awakened awareness: the timeless presence beyond the mind. In Zen, these direct pointers are known as turning words, because they turn the mind toward the truth. They’re also called live words, because they’re infused with the vibrant energy of their source, as opposed to the dead words that just convey thoughts and concepts. Koans, the enigmatic stories that Zen students contemplate and endeavor to resolve, often culminate in a turning phrase, though many use a kind of Zen jargon that makes them difficult to decipher. Classic turning phrases arise spontaneously in the moment in response to a student’s core question and are uniquely suited to the situation and the needs of the questioner.
In addition to contemplating the direct pointers of others, you can actively inquire into the nature of the one who is aware. The classic approach is to ask some variant of the question “Who am I?” with the understanding that the usual answers—for example, I’m a woman, a dancer, a teacher, a father, an entrepreneur, a meditator, a Christian, a tennis player, an artist—are not who you really are. The point is to direct attention beyond all the stories, roles, and identities you’ve accumulated over a lifetime to arrive at who you are essentially, prior to your life history and conditioning. In Zen, they call this fundamental, essential nature your “original face before your parents were born.” For the purposes of this book, we call it awakened awareness.
For many people, the question “Who am I?” is too abstract and doesn’t have any resonance or traction. If so, you can use something more concrete and experience-near, like “Who is experiencing this moment right now?” or “Who is looking out through these eyes right now?” The purpose is not to engage the logical, deductive mind but to ask a question that goes to the heart of the matter directly and elicits a resolution through another, more unmediated way of knowing. You need to ask the question with your whole being and let it resonate energetically, throughout your body, as if you were dropping a pebble into a pond and allowing the ripples to radiate out unimpeded. Eventually the answer reveals itself in a way that you couldn’t possibly have anticipated.
Instead of asking “Who am I?” or one of its variants, you can contemplate the following penetrating riddles or paradoxes, which inevitably point in the same direction. Again, don’t waste your time trying to figure them out with your rational, analytical mind. Instead, let them resonate deeply and elicit an answer from another level of knowing, beyond the mind. As with self-inquiry, the answer doesn’t arrive in a neat conceptual package, the way thoughts do; rather, it overtakes you and dawns on you as a profound, life-changing insight or intuition.
Ultimately, there’s no predetermined path or methodology for discovering who you are fundamentally, your homeground of awakened awareness, because no one can possibly know what questions, meditations, and explorations will resonate for you and unlock your gateless gate. Traditional teachings recommend sitting quietly, listening to the words of an awakened teacher, contemplating the teachings, inquiring for yourself, and associating with others on a similar path. But you need to find what works for you by becoming intimately attuned to your own inner knowing and getting an intuitive sense of when you’re getting closer and when you’re wandering away. This kind of deeper resonance is difficult to teach and generally only emerges gradually as you orient to the truth these teachings convey.
In this chapter, I’ve offered a number of meditations and explorations, but they’re not intended to be a systematic practice. Find the ones that appeal to you most and engage in them wholeheartedly, but don’t expect particular results, as that will bias any discoveries you might make. Keep the freshness of “beginner’s mind,” and you’ll eventually realize awakened awareness for yourself. After all, beginner’s mind and awakened awareness are one and the same!
In a similar way, the pointers and descriptions presented in this book are not intended as answers but as hypotheses you need to prove or disprove. For example, you’ve been told that awakened awareness is your natural state, prior to thought, that it’s always available to you, and that it’s the ultimate source of lasting peace, happiness, and love. But do you really know the truth of these statements for yourself? Until you do, everything in this book is nothing but talk.
With a regular practice like mindfulness, you have the comfort of knowing that you’re doing something with well-researched benefits that seem to apply more or less equally to everyone. But as I mentioned earlier, the direct approach is more idiosyncratic. Trust your intuition, be sincere and diligent in your experimentation, and be a lamp unto yourself, as the Buddha advised.
If you’re adventurous, you can try the most direct approach of all, which is also the most elusive and precarious: Just be who you are. Don’t bother with the methods presented in this chapter, let go of all attempts to manipulate your attention in any way, and rest as unconditional openness without preamble, preparation, or practice. Awakened awareness is the eternal, undisturbed, unchanging backdrop of all experience; it’s the light behind all perceptions, the ultimate subject of all objects, the blank screen on which the apparent phenomenal world is projected, the nondual field in which life unfolds. You can’t practice, do, or cultivate it in any way. Instead, just be it.
When I try to let go, as you suggest, I just get tied up in knots and end up feeling more tense and stressed out than when I started. Am I doing something wrong?
The paradox, of course, is that you can’t do letting go, you can only allow it. As long as you’re trying to “do” it, you’re not really letting go, you’re holding on to your trying. Stop trying, and letting go happens by itself. It’s like releasing a ball that you’ve been gripping so tightly: Don’t let go, just stop holding on, and the ball falls from your hand. Sometimes, simply noticing that you’re holding on spontaneously triggers a letting go. After all, relaxation and ease are your natural condition, your default mode, before a lifetime of conditioning taught you that you had to maintain control to survive.
I’m not sure I trust myself well enough to be a lamp unto myself and intuit my own direction, as you suggest. After all, my judgment hasn’t been very reliable in the past; that’s why I started mindfulness practice.
Perhaps mindful attention to your experience from moment to moment has enabled you to become more attuned to your own inner, intuitive knowing, the place beyond analysis or judgment where you sense what’s best for you. For example, how did you choose a career or a partner, or what book to read next, or whom to befriend? How do you know what foods to eat when? You’re constantly consulting an inner GPS to guide you through life, and the process of recognizing your true nature is no different. In the end, only you can know what’s best for you; no one else, not even the wisest teacher, can be an authority on your path to awakened awareness. Of course, expert counsel from an experienced teacher can be invaluable, and there are countless teachings available these days to point you on your way. But ultimately you have to discern which guidance to follow.