If you’re mindful, you’re already creating a separation. Don’t be mindful, please! When you walk, just walk. Let the walking walk. Let the talking talk. Let the eating eat, the sitting sit, the working work.
—Zen Master Muho Noelke
Letting go of your identification with the dream character and returning to your true home as the unconditional openness of awakened awareness have a powerful impact on your life at every level. Suddenly the burden of a lifetime has fallen from your shoulders, the dense filters of conditioning have dropped from your eyes, and you experience life with a new freshness, vividness, and clarity. Each moment has intrinsic meaning and value because it shines with the light of awakened awareness, and a subtle, quiet joy becomes your constant companion. Indeed, you realize that happiness is not something you need to earn or that comes and goes capriciously, according to circumstance—it’s your natural state, which the conditioning of a lifetime has heretofore hidden from view.
Because the boundaries between inside and outside have dissolved in the light of awakened awareness, you now recognize that everything you encounter is an expression of what you fundamentally are, your essential true nature and the source of everything. As a result, you meet each situation with an intimacy and a newly discovered confidence and trust that everything is unfolding as it was meant to, informed by a mysterious order that your mind can’t comprehend. Because you no longer need “outside” conditions and people to make you happy, you’re free to enjoy life just as it is, without having to impose your agenda upon it. Relinquishing your ongoing argument with reality—your struggle, however subtle and insidious, to manipulate it to live up to your expectations—you find yourself welcoming what arises as you would a close friend, never knowing who may appear but remaining open, curious, and unafraid of what the next moment may bring.
Aligned with the natural flow of people and situations, you move through life with ease and a minimum of effort, instead of constantly forcing yourself against the current in order to get your way. Rather than experiencing life through the narrow, me-centered perspective of the separate self, you view it from the expansive, global perspective of awakened awareness and respond appropriately based not on your own personal wants and needs but on the demands of the situation as a whole. Ultimately, the sense of being a separate doer or chooser drops away, because you realize that life is living itself through you, and this bodily being is just a vehicle or vessel for the deeper, all-encompassing wisdom of awakened awareness. Despite the illusion of control, you’ve never been in charge of your life anyway, never been steering the ship, and now you can trust in the greater movement of life.
In the past, for example, you may have failed to enjoy the fullness and richness of your life, with all its ups and downs, challenges and gifts, because you were so preoccupied with what was lacking and what you could do to make it better. How can I get people to love me? How can I make myself physically comfortable? How can I be a better person? How can I profit from the situation, stand out, gain attention, get ahead? Nor could you appreciate the people closest to you because you kept finding fault and expecting them to change. Now, with the dawning of awakened awareness, you’re open to embracing others as they are and receiving what the moment brings, without judgment or manipulation, as you appreciate its perfect imperfection, the radiant indivisible beingness of what presents itself right now. In this open, unconditional, listening presence, everything and everyone unfolds naturally and gracefully without need for constant doing, tweaking, or improving.
Of course, problems continue to arise as before, but rather than being seen as problematic, they’re taken as opportunities to stay home and rest in awakened awareness, rather than wandering off into the impenetrable jungle of judgments and reactivity. For example, someone cuts you off in traffic, and the old impulse might be to flip them the finger and let loose with a string of expletives. Instead, you feel the wave of feeling rising and rest back into your own innate happiness and openness and let the feeling move through as you embrace the situation without reacting. Perhaps you’re able to recognize that you might have acted exactly as they did, and their inconsiderateness is just a reflection of your own, since we all share the same human impulses and foibles. The old tendencies and reactions may arise briefly but then dissolve in the penetrating light of awakened awareness as you see them for what they are, without indulging or rejecting them.
Meditation: Dying into the nondual
Combining elements from several other meditations, this one guides you into a full realization of the boundless, nondual nature of reality, the inseparability of self and other, subject and object, experiencer and experience.
Shift your attention from your thoughts to your bodily sensations. Be aware of the sensations of your body against the chair, your feet against the floor, your hands against your thighs. Be aware of the sensations of your arms and legs, your chest and belly, your neck and head. Be aware of the play of sensations, how they’re constantly shifting and changing, and how your awareness dances from sensation to sensation.
If you look closely, you may come to realize that all you can really know of your body are the sensations you’re experiencing right now. Everything else is your projection, the image your mind uses to fill in the gaps. For example, you don’t experience your whole arm, you just have certain sensations in the vicinity of where you presume your arm to be, and you project the image of an arm upon it.
It’s like an impressionist painting. There are thousands of points of color onto which we project a water lily, or a woman, or a building. In the same way, you project the concept “leg” or “head” onto a collection of sensations. Let go of these projections, these concepts, and just be with the sensations as they are, without interpretation.
Notice that surrounding these sensations is open space where no sensation exists at all. In fact, there’s far more space than there is sensation, and the sensations are playing or dancing in this space. As you notice the play of sensations in the limitless openness of space, you may become aware that you can’t really find a clear dividing line between inside and outside the body; there’s just the unbroken field of sensations in space. Notice that thoughts and feelings are playing in the same space, just like sensations.
Now shift the emphasis from the sensations to the space itself. Rest as the awake, aware space in which thoughts, feelings, and sensations arise and pass away. Be the open, unfurnished, limitless, ungraspable space.
Resting as the space, examine the experiences that play in the space. Aside from these experiences, is there anything more you can know directly about the outside world that isn’t just a thought or a concept? Doesn’t the outside world exist merely as your experience right now? Everything else is a projection, a story.
As you examine your experience, can you find any distinction or difference between the aware space and what arises in the space? Since the world exists only as your experience right now, is there any solid substance out there that’s different from the awareness or space in which it’s arising? Or are awareness and experience made of the same insubstantial essence?
Sense the inseparability of awareness and the experiences arising in awareness. Inside and outside one indivisible essence. The looker and what’s being looked at, one and the same. Rest as the undivided, nondual space of awakened awareness.
Needless to say, relationships with self and others are transformed in the light of awakened awareness, as you realize that you and the people you encounter are expressions of one undivided reality, the source and essence of all. When you recognize this essential inseparability, the inherent oneness of self and other, not just as a concept but as a direct apperception, an immediate experience, unconditional love naturally arises in your heart not only for others, but for yourself as well. In fact, you recognize that love, like happiness, is your natural state that only a lifetime of conditioning has hidden from view and enclosed and walled away in the heart.
From the perspective of mindfulness as it’s generally taught, caring feelings like loving-kindness and compassion must be deliberately and painstakingly cultivated through specific meditation practices—which certainly can have a powerful beneficial effect in enabling you to access the dimension of love. But from the perspective of the direct approach, the realization of your inherent inseparability directly releases and reveals the unconditional love and compassion that already characterize your natural state of open, listening presence. Nothing needs to be developed or cultivated. Just by returning home again and again to awakened awareness, you’re bathed in a flow of loving-kindness, appreciation, gratitude, joy, and the other subtle qualities of an open, awakened heart.
No doubt you’ve had glimpses of this spontaneous arising of unconditional love when you’ve “fallen in love”—that is, fallen into the love that’s always present and available to you. But, like most people, you probably ascribed this powerful feeling to the allure of a significant other and failed to recognize its true nature. When you’re in love, you see the beloved not through the lens of conditioned judgments and personal history, but with fresh eyes that see beyond the imperfections to the essential nature that lies at the core. Awakened awareness gazes upon itself through the eyes of the other and falls in love with itself. Generally, this unconditional love fades as the relationship accumulates a history, you begin to focus on one another’s apparent imperfections, and old conditioning kicks into gear once again.
When you recognize and abide in awakened awareness, you see everything and everyone with fresh and open eyes and, as God did in Genesis, find it good, and complete, and inherently lovable. One particular person may elicit in you especially strong feelings of love and attraction, but you know that this person is not the cause of your love and therefore not responsible for how you feel. Rather, you know that love is what you are (and what everything is), and your relationship gives you the possibility of sharing and enjoying this love with another. Paradoxically, you and your beloved are both one and two, separate and inseparable, and relationship offers you the opportunity to dance with this paradox. If you weren’t separate, there would be no relationship, no back and forth, no exchange and interaction, no dance. But if you were only separate, there would be no love, or at least the love would be conditional and characterized by constant conflict and negotiation. The beauty of awakened relationship lies in appreciating and cherishing your otherness in light of your oneness, your twoness in light of your inseparability. By maintaining fresh and open eyes and not falling into old patterns, you can keep the relationship perpetually new, alive, and deeply fulfilling. The secret doesn’t belong to the other person—it lies in abiding in awakened awareness.
Differences—of preference, predilection, point of view—inevitably arise, but they’re not necessarily divisive, because awakened awareness embraces life exactly as it is and has no fixed opinion for or against anything. You like vanilla, and I like chocolate? But of course! You prefer to spend the weekend at home relaxing, but I’d like to take a trip to the country? Naturally, no problem, no reason to argue. Let’s listen to one another with open awareness and stay attuned to the flow of the interaction and the resolution that presents itself, rather than attaching ourselves to fixed positions and getting bogged down in conflict. As the French say, vive la différence!
Of course, old conditioning inevitably gets triggered, especially in romantic relationships or close friendships, affording you an opportunity to welcome this too just as it is, without judgment or rejection. In fact, once awakened awareness has dawned, intimate relationships offer a uniquely powerful mirror that reveals your stuck places, the areas of your heart and mind where you’re still identified with a separate territory and agenda. Rather than hunkering down and defending your position when conflict occurs, your commitment to truth at every level prompts you to investigate in order to discover where you’re holding on. Whenever you find yourself reacting with any of the basic conflictual emotions, like anger, fear, hurt, jealousy, or impatience, you have an opportunity to stop and reflect on where you’re creating separation, welcome the feelings without acting them out, and investigate the deeper beliefs that perpetuate them. As you ground yourself in the understanding that the problem doesn’t lie outside you, but rather arises from the limitations of your own me-centered perspective, you recognize your partner, friend, or family member not as an adversary, but as a ruthless and compassionate teacher in the ongoing process of returning home and abiding in unconditional, nonjudgmental presence. Relationships become profoundly humbling in the best sense because they strip away every identity or position you’re attached to and leave you with nothing—except the rawness and richness of this precious moment just as it is.
Meditation: Gazing into the eyes of awakened awareness
The very same awareness looks out through every pair of eyes.
Invite a partner or close friend to participate in this meditation with you. Sit face to face, upright yet relaxed, with your knees almost touching. Spend a few minutes with eyes closed as you shift your awareness from your thoughts and feelings to your bodily sensations: the contact of your back and bottom against the seat, your feet against the floor, your hands in your lap, the coming and going of your breath.
Now open your eyes and gaze softly into one another’s eyes. The point is not to stare or concentrate, but to extend a relaxed, heartfelt, loving gaze to the eyes of your loved one. If your attention fixates on a particular point or you have difficulty staying present, gently come back to gazing softly into the eyes of the other.
As you continue to gaze, notice what happens. Do you feel uncomfortable, tense, anxious, or ashamed? Do you have judgments or interpretations about yourself or the other person: I’m not doing it right, he seems angry to me, or I don’t get the point of this exercise?
Do you notice any emotions, like flashes of anger, sadness, or regret or waves of joy, gratitude, or love? What happens to the boundaries between you and the other person? Do they become more rigid, or do they begin to blur and dissolve? Continue to gaze in this way for five minutes or longer, welcoming whatever arises without judgment or resistance.
Now consider that the awareness that’s looking out through the eyes of the other is the same awareness that’s looking out through your eyes. Awareness is gazing upon itself in the form of another. If you feel ready, allow any remaining traces of separation to dissolve in the light of awakened awareness. Inside and outside, self and other, are one undivided field of awareness. Notice any feelings that arise in the heart as you continue to rest in the nondual field for as long as you like.
When you’re done, take some time to share your experiences and insights with the other person, as much as you feel comfortable.
As you can see, living from unconditional openness and presence is not about pretending to be some perfect spiritual being surrounded by an aura of love and light—it’s about welcoming all of who you are, with all your human baggage and imperfections. Any attempt to live up to some standard of spiritual perfection just mires you in a mind filled with comparisons and self-judgments and sets you at odds with yourself. When you let go of trying to be perfect according to some predetermined idea and let yourself be just as you are, warts and all, your inherent perfection naturally reveals itself, just as the perfection of a tree or a bird reveals itself to your open, nonjudgmental regard. This perfection has nothing to do with the dualistic polarities of perfect and imperfect, good or bad, but refers instead to your precious uniqueness—the fact that no being expresses the same incomparable mix of qualities as you do.
As you rest in this unconditional openness, you no longer feel the need to project an image or defend a position or point of view, and the artificial boundaries between self and others blur and dissolve. As a result, you become more sensitively attuned to the moments when you’re acting out of alignment with the truth of your being, not because you’re trying to live up to some spiritual ideal but because you can feel the defensiveness and separation arising once again. Out of this natural attunement emerges appropriate action, based not on preestablished precepts of right and wrong, spiritual or nonspiritual, but on the global, all-inclusive view of awakened awareness.
In the eyes of awakened awareness, as I mentioned in chapter 3, “every person and thing, no matter how seemingly flawed or problematic, is perfect in the sense that it simply is as it is, it couldn’t possibly be otherwise, and it radiates the essential perfection of Being itself. As a natural response to this recognition there arises a subtle mix of love, wonder, gratitude, and joy.” But you may find it far easier to recognize the inherent perfection of plants and animals, sun and sky, loved ones and friends, than to acknowledge and appreciate your own. Indeed, your relationship with yourself may prove to be the most challenging relationship of all—and also the most important. The key is to avoid getting caught in self-judgment and instead welcome your experience just as it is. (For more on relating with emotions and fixated patterns of thinking and reacting, see chapter 7.)
Meditation: Welcoming your experience without judgment
Instead of subtly rejecting or attaching to every experience, as you do most of the time, you can practice welcoming it just as it is—another opportunity to rest in the all-inclusive embrace of awakened awareness.
For the next two hours (or longer, if you like), say yes to whatever you’re experiencing. Say yes to the difficult feelings, the negative thoughts, the challenging tasks, the people, the weather, the news, the sounds, the smells. By yes, I mean not resignation or defeat, but heartfelt acknowledgment.
In the process, you may notice the many ways your mind keeps saying no to life—suppressing your feelings and thoughts, judging other people, refusing to accept the way things are. You may be amazed to discover how much energy your mind consumes by refusing to accept what’s actually happening right in front of you.
Instead, for the next two hours or longer, notice your tendency to resist or deny and instead say yes: yes to your hunger and longing, yes to your anger and fear, yes to your partner or kids, yes to your body and face, yes to your life. As much as possible, rest in the unconditional openness of awakened awareness. Of course, you’re welcome to say no as necessary or change what you don’t like, but take a moment to say yes first.
You may be so accustomed to saying no that you don’t know how to say yes at first. So feel free to repeat the word “yes” to yourself to help get you started. Maybe you’ll end up enjoying the dance of yes so much that you extend it to every area of your life. Yes, yes, yes!
When you discover that you’re not the contents of your life—the body, mind, thoughts, feelings, family, friends, accomplishments, relationships, and material possessions you took yourself to be—but the boundariless space or context in which your life unfolds, you die to an old, time-bound identity and discover yourself as the eternal. Recognizing that who you really are is the ground of being—the ungraspable, immaterial, indestructible essence that remains, unchanging, when everything else is stripped away—you discover a confidence and a courage in the deathless that pain, disease, old age, and death can’t shake. As the old Zen masters say, “Die before you die, and mortality can’t disturb you anymore.”
At the same time, you may still have strong preferences for being healthy, vital, and free of pain, and you may feel disappointed, frightened, frustrated, or grief-stricken at the onset of serious illness or infirmity. Sickness, old age, and death are among the most intense and relentless of human experiences. Yet beneath the waves of natural human feeling lie the deep peace and surrender of awakened awareness, as well as a deeply rooted trust in the sacred mystery of life. “Not my will but Thy will be done” is not merely a prayer of complete obeisance, it’s a description of the way things actually are. After all, you’ve never been in charge, even for an instant, and surrender is just an acknowledgment of what has always been the case.
The more steadily you abide in awakened awareness, and the more consistently you come home once your attention has strayed, the better able you are to meet even the most challenging life circumstances with grace and ease. In the beginning, however, as you’re still learning to live from this radically different perspective, you may find it helpful to simplify your life as much as you can and afford yourself ample time for quiet reflection and self-inquiry. As one of my teachers used to say, work as much as you need to, and spend the rest of your time living in beauty. Otherwise, the complexity of life’s demands may become so pressing that you’re left with precious little time for just being.
Here are a few things you can do to allow more time and space in your life for living from awakened awareness:
Of course, you can’t get your life to be exactly as you’d like it—in fact, you have precious little control over how circumstances unfold. But you can allow the emphasis of your life to shift from the conventional goals of accomplishment and self-improvement to the subtler and more insubstantial purpose of aligning yourself with the deepest truth of your being. You can’t put a price tag on this approach or easily explain it to colleagues and family members who may think you should put more emphasis on working harder and getting ahead. But once you’ve tasted the peace and joy of your natural state of openness and presence, you’ll find yourself drawn inexorably back again and again—and your priorities and preoccupations will shift in response.
As you rest and abide as awakened awareness, your life transforms at every level. Instead of striving to change or improve it, you welcome it as it is and find joy in its inherent mystery, beauty, and perfection. Relationships that had been marked by conflict and dissatisfaction, including the relationship with yourself, are now filled with mutual appreciation, gratitude, and love. In fact, in the absence of an agenda, an ongoing argument with reality, you naturally fall in love with what is.
I don’t understand how you can face death with equanimity without a belief in an afterlife of some kind.
If you take yourself to be a collection of thoughts, feelings, memories, stories, accomplishments, and beliefs, you can’t peacefully accept the death of the physical body, unless you believe that the separate self that the body apparently contains gets reincarnated or reborn in some way, whether into heaven, paradise, or some future human form. In order to ease the fear of death, many religions, including Buddhism, offer a comforting explanation for what happens after death. But when you wake up out of the dream of being a separate someone bound by the body–mind and recognize your identity with the limitless, formless, all-pervasive essence of what is (which I have been calling awakened awareness), death loses its sting because you realize with every fiber of your being that who you really are can never die. What a liberating revelation!
I know myself too well to believe I’m inherently perfect. If I don’t make a constant effort to improve myself, I’m sure I’ll just keep repeating the same self-destructive behaviors again and again.
The problem with self-improvement is that your constant effort to live up to some idea of how your life should be can be exhausting and generally has only limited effectiveness. Besides, you might want to take a look at where you got your idea. Did you formulate it based on what you read in a popular magazine or self-help bestseller or saw on Oprah or Dr. Phil? Did you glean it from teachings about how a spiritual person should look? Or is it the product of childhood conditioning, rooted in what your parents and their parents believed? You can spend a lifetime in endless dissatisfaction trying to be someone you’re not, comparing yourself with standards that may shift and change with the winds of popular culture or your own interests and life experience. Or you can find happiness and contentment right now by embracing yourself just as you are, which is what the great sages recommend.
The fact is, the separate self you’re struggling to improve inevitably feels inadequate because it has no abiding substance or validity. At best, it’s a flimsy shadow of who you really are, a pale imposter posing as the truth at the core of your being. No matter how much you improve it, you’ll never be satisfied with it because it can’t provide the unconditional happiness and peace you seek. Instead, stop trying to be perfect and let yourself be as you are. Paradoxically, this deep self-acceptance and letting be is the most powerful self-improvement because it puts an end to your divisive, conflictual relationship with yourself. From this place of deep letting go and letting be, happiness reveals itself to be your natural state, and action spontaneously arises that’s appropriate to the circumstances at hand.