We tend to assume that seeing is the simplest thing we do, but in fact it may be the most deceptive.

It’s easy enough to say that we live in a time of crisis; what’s harder is to name how deeply that crisis is rooted in the way the world appears to us. We hear every day about climate change, political fragmentation, and spiritual exhaustion; many of our conversations touch on or revolve around these and similar issues. Usually, solutions are proposed at the level of policy or discourse as well as personal behavior; but beneath these, there is a more basic difficulty, which is so constant that it rarely comes into view: we do not see the world as it is, and we do not quite notice that we do not see it.

There is no “view from nowhere.” All perception is actually already interpretation. What we call “the world” is given through habits of attention that we neither choose nor fully understand. We seem to encounter ourselves as bounded subjects, set over against an external field of objects; we experience mind and body, self and other, human and nature, as if these were simply there, as though these categories were obvious and unquestionable. Of course, these distinctions have some value; they make orientation, action, and survival possible, but they aren’t merely functional. They end up solidifying and being reified, taken less as useful differentiations than as fundamental separations that define the structure of reality itself.

I think this is where something goes sour—but it’s often not in a dramatic or easily recognizable way. The very structure of language predisposes us to dualistic thinking, so that the shift from perceived difference or distinction between “earth” and “sky” or “me” and “you” becomes, over time, a feeling of full separation. Even our notion of self emerges through processes of differentiation that enable survival and the experience of agency, but the “self” becomes problematic when we give it too much primacy. We can tap into the fact that the self is constituted in and through its relations—with other life forms, with the body, with the environment—and it is always relating. Every breath relates your lungs to the wider world, for instance; every thought comes to you from “somewhere” and relates to something in the world, or in your mind, in your imagination.

There is no pure interiority and no purely external world; both emerge together within the same relational depth. Yet how easily we forget this in our busy lives. We come to inhabit a world in which the human stands over against nature, the self over against the other, the mind over against the body; and because these divisions feel immediate, we rarely ask whether they are true or final; we don’t think to look behind the curtain. This leads to conceptual confusion and a deformation of experience. We do not just think in divided terms; we perceive a divided world.

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What appears “objective” in our picture of the world may in fact be a projection of our own assumptions; as Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák observes, it is the image of nature as “dead and mechanical” and of the human as either “robot or rebel” that is most deeply subjective, a construction mistaken for experience. This matters more than we usually admit, for if the world seems given as fundamentally separate, then our forms of action will follow accordingly. We will tend to use and consume “nature” if it appears as external and inert rather than vibrantly alive and part of us; we will tend to manage or exclude an “other” that appears as totally outside us, rather than recognizing the shared reality of our existence; and a “self” that is felt to be an isolated being will turn inward, intent on securing itself against what surrounds it—an anxious, self-protective move. We cannot relate to the Real in this way. Even our attempts at care are shaped by the very divisions they seek to overcome: we try to repair a world that we have already learned to experience as broken.

There is a familiar response at this point, one that is both understandable and insufficient. We are told that the problem lies in our behavior; we need to act differently, to choose better, to adopt more ethical practices. Buy less, recycle more, be kind… There is truth in this, but it doesn’t go far enough: action follows perception more deeply than it follows intention or decision. We don’t first choose how to see and then act; rather, we act out of how the world already appears to us. If that appearance is structured by unnoticed separations, then our actions (however well-intentioned) will remain caught within that paradigm.

I don’t ask this question to suggest that we abandon distinctions; the ability to differentiate is obviously necessary to navigate embodied life. And I don’t want to collapse everything into some vague unity, with all differences dissolved into sameness. The issue isn’t difference itself, but the tendency to convert difference into division, and division into an account of reality. To see differently would be to recover a sense in which distinctions can hold without solidifying and becoming separations. To see differently would mean encountering self and world, human and nature, as internally related rather than externally opposed.

Easier said than done, usually. It is not a matter of adopting a new theory, or affirming a different set of propositions. It has more to do with the discipline of attention; with slowly learning to notice, with open curiosity, how the world is given, and how quickly that givenness is organized into familiar patterns. Can we learn to heed the Heideggerian call to “let what shows itself be seen from itself”? Can we see that paying attention is a form of prayer?

The ethical and the perceptual can’t be cleanly separated. To attend well is already to begin to respond differently; to see more truthfully is to loosen the grip of those divisions that shape our behavior without our conscious awareness. Moral transformation may depend less on isolated acts of will than on the ongoing formation of vision, on what Iris Murdoch calls the “quality of our habitual objects of attention,” which quietly shapes what we are able to see—and therefore how we are able to act. She suggested that the just and loving person is one who sees more clearly what is there. The claim is easy to mishear, as if it referred to a kind of refined sensitivity or heightened awareness. In reality, it’s different from that; it asks whether what we take to be obvious—the separation of self and world, the discreteness of things, the isolated estrangement of humanity—is in fact the result of a partial and habituated way of seeing.

A similar intuition appears if we attend more closely to perception itself; what seems like a relation between a subject and an object begins to look more like mutual participation in a field that exceeds both. David Abram gives this a particularly vivid expression, describing perception as an involvement in a more-than-human world from which neither “subject” nor “object” can be cleanly abstracted.

Relation is primary, and what we call “entities” emerge within it. This might sound unfamiliar, but mystics have been saying it for ages. The Buddhists call this dependent co-arising, or pratītyasamutpāda. If this is even partially right, then the separations we take for granted aren’t so much false as derivative: they describe something that’s been abstracted out from a more basic interbeing.

What happens when we notice what these claims make possible? If our experience of the world is shaped by our habits of attention, which render difference as division, those habits can be retrained. This doesn’t deliver us from ambiguity or conflict; life, the world, and our place in it are still complex. But noticing and adjusting our attentional habits opens the possibility that we might encounter the world otherwise than as disconnected parts, and this kind of encounter with the world bears directly on how we live within it.

The crises we face are real, and they call for response. Our most immediate task may not be to act more urgently within a divided world, but to see how that division is created and sustained. As long as we take separation to be the basic truth of things, we will continue to reproduce it, even in our efforts to overcome it. The work for us is unpretentious, and perhaps more subtle than it first appears. To enact a lasting transformation of the world towards a place that truly cares for all, we need a transformation of the way the world is given to us, the way we take it to be. That change, if it occurs at all, will take place in and through the loving discipline of attention to reality.

We may not yet clearly see what is Real; but the work of learning to see has already begun. Attention, after all, is our most authentic and our purest prayer.

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This is based on personal experience and reflection, and expressed in accordance with my current views, which may, of course, change and evolve. Pretty much nothing is final, and life is constantly unfolding.

Nothing changes. Everything is changed.

One day, I was out for my morning walk, and a portal appeared. I don’t mean literally appeared, because it wasn’t exactly visible, but more like I sensed it; almost like intuiting a doorway in the dark, but outdoors, in the middle of the quiet street, with morning sun shining everywhere.

So. I was out for a walk, and a doorway ‘appeared.’ I hadn’t seen it before, but it was familiar anyway. And there was the feeling that I’d been given this choice before, whether to walk through it or not, and now it was time; the portal pulled on me gently.

Somehow I knew it was like an expiration date had come for this side of things; on the other side was spaciousness, lightness, and a way of being without the weight of the idea of me or the need to maintain a self.

How to explain this?

It felt like going through that doorway meant no longer fighting with reality but participating fully in it; no longer conspiring against but allowing myself to conspire with Things As They Are.

I’ve experienced some really surprising changes over the years that I’ve been engaged in spiritual and psychological development work—and particularly over the last several years. Some things that seemed likely to be permanent have dropped away; some ways of being that didn’t seem accessible to me before are now the new normal. Certain structures of reality and categories of being have shifted radically; certain boundaries that seemed immutable are seen through completely. The sense of personal identity rearranged itself from something I'd never even noticed was so tight and heavy, to something more like an open field, or an ocean; pure spaciousness.

I know this probably all sounds a little weird.

A couple of years ago, everything fell apart. The life I had built up was lovely, though not without challenges, yet I had outgrown it suddenly—so suddenly, it seemed, that the feeling was of rapid shedding, splintering, shattering.1 I think of cicadas when they shed their exoskeletons, or hermit crabs when they outgrow the shell they’re in and have to find a new one: there’s an in-betweenness, a liminal space in which the old doesn’t fit and the new is still being sought out, or adjusted to.

In retrospect I actually knew for quite a long time that big changes were coming, but nonetheless I remember intimate discussions with friends about feeling almost on the brink of madness, living on the edge of something surreal.

The abyss is my terror and my friend.

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The closer we get to the light, the sharper seems our shadow.

The personality structure naturally resists annihilation: it fears its own dissolution; it pushes back against negation or disappearance. And, I think the journey of spiritual, perhaps even human, development may eventually require shedding the burden of believing in the persona: the ego; the crafted and created self. The thing is, we usually don’t realize the ‘self’ is a creation, a useful fiction; we hang on to it for dear life, mistaking its sense of reality and ISness for our own being. Or rather, it hangs on for dear life and we don’t realize yet that ‘we’ aren’t it.

Our stories and our notion of selfhood are fictions, which doesn’t mean they aren’t real, it just means they aren’t true.

Life began pulling rugs out from under me—the personality suffered quite a bit from professional changes, personal predicaments, interpersonal irritations, financial and health and life logistics issues, burnout—and toss in a global pandemic, the climate crisis, multiple wars and sociopolitical chaos… It was a Challenging Time in my life.

In one way or another, I lost jobs, friends, relationships, living spaces, and more, along with much of who I had thought I was. Some of this was Totally Fine; life happens, and change had long been a huge part of my life, so to some extent I could take a lot in stride. Some of it, however, was Not Fine: very difficult, unpleasant, no bueno, and just Too Much At Once.

And then: the portal.

Somehow, after walking through that portal (not sure how else to explain it), there arose a new awareness of the ‘self’ that felt like realizing I was wearing a heavy, bulky coat that I could just…take off. I now could, to some extent, choose if and when to wear it, and let it fall when not needed.

It was like peeling off a mask I’d worn so long I forgot my real face underneath; how fresh, light, vulnerable—yet powerful—to remove that mask!

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Nothing changes. Everything is changed.

So what’s different now?

Life continues on, without this ‘personal’ self. Life keeps happening, and Jane simply isn’t the doer. It’s not that there is ‘no self’ as can happen in meditation; that’s fine, and is quite a trip, but that’s not it. The self is still there, for some things for which convention requires a self, but the personal identification with that self was snuffed out in that portal.

From the outside, it seems in many ways there isn’t much difference, at least not obviously. In other ways, my whole life was upended, including my living situation, professional trajectory, personal relationships, spiritual life, and so forth. I’ve gotten much more focused on what feels like my most important work, and let go (for now) of things I love doing but which aren’t such a priority.

The main difference since the portal, for me personally (relish with me the irony of language, if you can), is in how I move through life, and let life move through me.

This difference is almost impossible to overstate. I just wear things more lightly now, which sounds so insufferably simple.

So what is this, really? All I can say is that this is living in grace. Please forgive how pretentious that sounds. I am not special, I don’t deserve this, except that…actually, everyone does, forever. This is not something I ‘earned’ with meditation or prayer; I truly do not believe it can be ‘earned’ in those or any other ways (although yes, you can get some very powerful feelings and states from, for instance, meditation).

As the saying goes, “Enlightenment is an accident, but spiritual practice can make one more accident-prone” (Suzuki Roshi). So practice probably plays a role for many of us who experience something like this, but I am certain that it is simply grace that really ‘does it.’ And at the same time, this is truly possible for absolutely anyone, if you want it. (This gets tricky; if it’s the ego/persona wanting this, it won’t happen, because the ego will resist like hell its own dissolution or being disbelieved or seen through, which is a necessary part of this whole ‘unfolding’ thing.)

I’m still highly volitionally involved in my life; I have not become a potato person2 or a passive lump, but volition feels different. Awareness doesn’t feel like ‘my’ awareness, but like a larger pattern, and that pattern is where volition and decisions and choices arise from, instead of from the ego thinking it’s running the show. It’s a feeling of living in trust and flow, rather than vigilance and control.

More on this soon.

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Our emotions point to our needs, so when we suppress or disconnect from our emotions, our ability to connect with our needs suffers, too. This leaves us, in a way, blind, navigating life without the important inner compass of our fully-present feelings and needs.

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For some of us growing up, in some environments, only some feelings were “allowed” and others forbidden, like if you were not allowed to cry or show anger. Parents might have their own issues here, or be trying to teach strength, resilience, or some other skill, but in fact not teaching children to appropriately feel and deal with emotions leads to children learning instead to ignore these important signals. The result is that children do not learn how to feel and express their emotions in ways that serve life, or how to understand what their feelings mean or what unmet needs they may be pointing to. If we suppress our sadness because crying isn’t ok, or our pain and anger because showing it is not permitted, we lose our ability to feel and process disappointment, loss, and the difficulties of life. We lose access to vital dimensions of life, and essential tools for skillfully navigating the world and our relationship with it.

It’s also possible that we grew up in a rewards-and-punishment environment. This is still so incredibly common! However, this, too, can cause disconnection: if we were rewarded for doing what our parents or teachers told us, we were conditioned to seek approval, and our motivations become externally-oriented. On the other hand, when we were punished for not doing what our parents or teachers wanted, we might have prioritized our needs for connection and belonging by going along with the punishment, buying into the thinking that “I was bad.” Or, we might have prioritized our needs for authenticity, dignity, or autonomy, and rebelled. Both these strategies lead to disconnection from some emotions and needs in favor of others. While it’s true that under certain circumstances, we may not be able to meet all our needs in a given moment, we can connect momentarily with those unmet needs and acknowledge them. On the other hand, if we live disconnected long enough, we may develop deep feelings of numbness, shame, anger, or self-hatred, and this, too, has serious consequences.

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The more disconnection we learn to maintain, the more likely we are to somatize our emotions. The suppression or ignoring of psychic pain may manifest as anxiety, depression, addiction, physical pain, or behavioral issues like violence. When we are disconnected from our feelings and needs, we don’t have easy access to compassion, care, and emotions like regret or guilt—emotions which can serve as a useful compass to orient us toward right living. (We feel guilt when we’ve done something not aligned with our values, for instance—which can become shame if we believe we’re fundamentally bad for doing something or being a certain way.) It’s common enough to hear of people using food, alcohol, drugs, or screens to numb out and disconnect from pain, or as a way to experience some strong sensory stimulus to distract from what’s underneath. Others may engage in hyper-productivity, serious sports, or overwork as strategies to avoid feeling pain.

To connect with our pain, which will eventually lessen it, requires mourning. This can be simply feeling the unfelt pain, little by little, and allowing it to move through instead of sticking and showing up maladaptively in our behavior or our body. It means letting yourself feel sad, or angry, or whatever it is, letting the feeling be without needing justification, and without rushing to soothe the feeling, distract from it, or try to problem-solve it.

Our society seems to only permit mourning when someone dies. Even then, there are apparently “right” and “wrong” ways to mourn. But mourning can be a regular emotional hygiene practice. It’s a powerful way to meet our very human need to be fully human. The mourning process is highly personal, so what it “looks like” or how long it lasts will vary. The less we resist the process, the lighter it tends to be.

Mourning as a practice can be particularly useful for feeling the “everyday things” (which is anything that feels like it wants your attention, even if “other people” might not think it mourning-worthy). We may feel tremendous fear at the idea of touching into sadness or rage, because we might think it will totally overpower us, or we're afraid of what we might do or feel if we allow those emotions the space to be. But what if we give that feeling a dedicated space, and follow through with it?

You can set a timer, and say “I’ll give myself 3 minutes to feel angry about that thing at work” or “For just 5 minutes, I’ll cry all I want about that breakup” and let that time be fully dedicated to the feeling. You can always come back to it, for another few minutes, and if you keep your word to yourself, you may be surprised that having a dedicated time for mourning can be quite effective at preventing it from fully incapacitating you at other times, while still allowing the feelings to live and flow and not stagnate as illness or dis-ease. And don’t be surprised if some feelings need lots of little 5-minute windows, or only a few—sometimes we carry the fear of a feeling for so long that the original feeling ends up actually being quite manageable in comparison.

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Silent empathy can be a great ally in the mourning process. Accompaniment is enormously beneficial, especially if you’re really concerned about touching into your feelings, or having trouble doing so. Mourning helps restore balance and integrity to the body-mind system, and increases resilience. Mourning helps enhance our capacity for joy and meaning because it helps us reconnect with our inner guide, our innate wisdom. We can grow in compassion and care for ourselves, which leads to greater compassion and care for others: we aren’t “pouring from an empty cup.”

If you think accompaniment would be supportive, I’d love to help you. I offer non-directive, non-judgmental, presence-centered empathic listening. Drop-in or regular sessions are available. You can contact me directly or read more about me and my work here.

Let’s take the radical position that a gift is something freely given, with no expectation of exchange, including no expectation of receiving acknowledgment, status, merit, or recognition for having given the gift. What’s more, we can say a true gift is something freely given with no expectation of it being given at all. The key here is this: a gift is not transactional.

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If I give you something, a book for instance, I can examine what it is that is really going on. I have chosen a book to give to you: is this a book I want you to read because I think you’ll enjoy it? Do I want to sway you to a particular view or position by having you read this particular book? Do I want you to think something of me for having given you this particular book? Is there an intellectual, social, moral, or other dynamic at play? Am I giving you this book on a socially-mandated occasion like a birthday or holiday? What would happen if I don’t give you anything on such an occasion? What social or reputational effects are at stake? Am I hoping for or expecting you to fulfill the basic social script of acknowledging what I gave you and thanking me for it, and possibly giving me in return something broadly equivalent in value? Do I hope you will think more highly of me for having given you something; for having given you a book specifically; for having given you this particular book?

There is nothing morally wrong with any of this, and/but in our common language we call a “gift” that which is not, in fact, really a gift at all.

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When we engage in ritually-prescribed “gifting” on particular occasions which demand the “exchange of gifts” (a telling phrase), like birthdays or the rote rite of family Christmas, I would say we use the word ‘gift’ incorrectly. If I give you something in order to fulfill a social role, I am engaging in role maintenance, social cohesion, and performance; not truly gifting. And at the holidays, there can be tension over whether you got the right kind and number of “gifts” for each child, for instance; are you giving evenly to all three siblings, for example. These kinds of concerns have nothing to do with true gifting at all.

Transactional tallies, like “am I demonstrating enough of my love and generosity without any partiality and favoritism”, are a landmine, and it’s awful. I think if you’re coming at it with that kind of mentality, it’s really hard to enjoy the process. Are you concerned with demonstrating appropriate (what does that even mean, really?) generosity? Are you worried about fairness? Do you want to be loved and appreciated because of what you give?

A gift is an opportunity to help someone discover something new about themselves, not only to affirm and entrench the idea they already have. So we can feel seen, or correctly identified, or surprisingly identified, by a gift and what it symbolizes about our relationship with the giver.

This means it’s easier and a lot more enjoyable to give gifts to someone who’s open to discovering things about themselves, someone who’s more open minded, because they are likely to be curious and excited by whatever the gift is.

A great gift is something that both affirms your identity and expands it. For instance, if I give you a perfume you like the smell of, but you don’t like the brand because it’s not cool (or whatever), you might feel offended because I’m disaffirming your identity. You aren’t a Brand M person, you’re a Brand Z person! But, for example, if you’re a person who likes creative things, and I give you something creative that you’ve never tried before, like an origami kit for instance, I’m both affirming your identity as creative and expanding it: I’m giving you the opportunity to try something new, aligned with your idea of who you are but taking it further, opening a new possibility.

There’s something important about feeling correctly seen by the gifts that you receive.

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I will just mention that if your identity is wrapped up in a brand or something like that, it’s not a full identity. I don’t mean you’re not allowed to have brand preferences—I do. There are brands I buy and others I avoid because they align or don’t, respectively, with my ethical principles, dietary needs, price preference, and so forth. What I mean is that if someone gives me something that I like and I can use, and that was ethically produced, I won’t care if it’s “the wrong brand” because I’m not identified with that.

Brand-identity is a label that you wear while you still don’t know who you are; while you still don’t dare to allow yourself to discover real interests and preferences, or while you’re still very focused on fitting in. This is totally normal for preteens, for instance; there’s a developmental stage where fitting in is of utmost importance, often trumping (or even precluding consideration of) actual preferences or ethical considerations. The brand-identity thing is something that most younger kids haven’t quite fallen into yet, and something that —if we’re lucky— we grow out of as we move through adolescence. This will partly depend on the maturity of the environment we are brought up in, but that’s not the only factor.

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We live in an age of the commodification of desire; we are led to want anything that pulls a profit. We are algorithmically driven to constant —and usually conspicuous— consumption. We live as though the earth’s resources were not renewable but unlimited, and we consume as if our choices had no wider impact on ecologies both near and distant; on lives both human and other; on the continued viability of our planet’s habitability for ourselves and others.

We live near-sightedly, dopaminergically induced to seek, at seemingly any cost, the next hit: the next like, the next follower, the next purchase, the next present to unwrap. We are also intrinsically social creatures, with strong drives to create and sustain social bonds, and we engage in intense, constant signaling —linguistic and otherwise— to that end.

Exchanging goods, or “gift giving,” is an important feature of our social landscape. Consider that sometimes this is about redistribution of resources. For instance, parents usually give more to children than the other way around, and it’s traditional to give to newlyweds and new parents to help bolster them in the big transition. (For another time: the discussion of the social and structural imbalances and prejudices against those who never marry or have children, for instance. The wealth transfer to new couples, especially new parents, continues in many families throughout the child’s and grandchild’s life.)

If we consider that there are myriad facets that underline (and occasionally undermine) our relationship with exchanges and with true gifting, we can perhaps better understand how we move through, and dance with, the social complexities we live in.

There is a god, and eternal life, and a serpent.

In one story, you are created from clay in the garden of the gods, there to dwell peacefully within that place and care for it.

Later, there is sweat and travail, and a blooming chance at infinity — and a serpent snatches it away.

After the Great Flood, the god-chosen survivor is rewarded with eternal life for his troubles. Having heard of this, you, after much toil and much difficulty and loss, arrive to ask him for the key to immortality.

The test: you must defy sleep for six days and seven nights. You fail.

In consolation he tells you that there is a flower in the garden at the bottom of the waters of the world, a garden that was once a paradise and is now hidden under the remants of the Flood. In that place grows a flower which, while it cannot bestow immortality precisely, may grant a return to youth, eternally.

You risk it all to find that flower and bring it back, only for a serpent to steal it and leave you bereft.

In another story, you are created from the dust of the earth and placed in a garden, there to live in a state of nature with the rest of the garden’s inhabitants.

A god grants eternal life, and forbids ultimate knowledge; a serpent offers a tempting alternative.

Long before the Great Flood, in a garden, two trees grow: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge (the ultimate knowledge that confers a death of a sort: the death of unity, and the creation of the separate self).

The test: the tree of life is fair game, but of the particular fruit of the tree of knowledge, God has forbidden you to eat.

Like any child, you reach for that which has been forbidden: enticed, you devour that particular prohibited fruit, tempted to transgression by a serpent, that timeless trickster.

God condemns you for this, thrusting you from paradise and eternal life, and leaving you bereft.

There is much, much more to say, and many have indeed written much on the comparative mythology of Mesopotamia and its neighbors. The very name Eden may derive, in fact, from a Sumerian word, edin, meaning “steppe” or “plain”, or it may derive from a Hebrew word ultimately meaning “paradise”. The word “paradise” itself comes from a root meaning “walled garden”.

We can dance in this multiplicity of meaning: the garden, walled off from the surrounding wilds, is a haven of pleasure.

The Mesopotamian garden was a playground for the gods, and humanity was created to help steward and tend this garden for the pleasure of the gods. In the Genesis narrative, the garden was created for God and company to enjoy, for Adam and Eve to enjoy, for eternity — eternity, that is, until the humans took too great a liberty.

The blessed earth from which we were made is now cursed by God in our name for our blunder. This blessed earth is meant to become a bane to us: ours is no longer an innocent and infinite life walled off from the wilderness; now it is to us to toil for a living as we go out into the wider world. Thenceforth humans must procreate and struggle against the elements in order to ensure our survival and thriving, for, after all, now death is part of our life.

From blessed earth were we formed, and indeed, to blessed earth shall we return.

In both stories, some form of eternity was within reach: the flower of youth, or the tree of everlasting life. In both stories, the serpent was the messenger: your life must end, eventually. The serpent took the flower of rejuvenation from you, shedding his skin as he went and leaving you to age and die; or the serpent made sure the forbidden fruit was so appealing that your choice, and its consequences, would lead to eventual death.

To live, and love, and enjoy, day and night and night and day; to fully embrace the joys and pains of being alive: this is the simpleton's way, and this is the way of the sage.

Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

But before, we do not realize the strength of that wood, the weight of that water, the price of that fruit.

Once we know; once we have plunged to the depths of the world in search of that eternal flower; once we have tasted the fruit of the tree of truth; we realize the weight, and the burden becomes almost unbearable.

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Partially inspired by this lovely article by .

“Shoulds” usually conceal unexpressed needs, preferences, priorities, or values, which we are often unaware of on a conscious level. We commonly use “should” when we are judging someone for not doing something the way we want, or not being the way we would like them to be.

It can be really helpful to move away from this posture of judging to a more neutral posture of observing our own inner state and how the external world affects it. I mean, unless you enjoy living as a judgy person; whatever floats your boat. But those around you (probably including you, too) will likely be better off if you notice what’s underneath the judgments and the “shoulds”, and the story you’ve chosen to tell about it.

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Notice that if you stay with what the other person “should” do, you are framing a narrative in which you don’t have much ability to influence anything, except through judging or possibly shaming the other person. Have you noticed judging and shaming to be effective in the past? And how do they make you feel, when you’re on the judging or the receiving end?

Saying something like “she should come to lunch on time” might really be pointing to your need for accountability or reliability; or it might demonstrate a preference for punctuality over flexibility; or mask a priority for feeling cared for and respected by someone meeting your standards for “on-time” arrival.

If you examine this more closely, you might see that what’s important to you in this situation is reliability, for instance, because you have other things to plan in your day and you want to fit the pieces together; the other person being dependable and showing up on time helps you keep on schedule. If you spot this, you can work with it and request punctuality from the other person, within that framework.

However, if you notice that you prefer punctuality because you’re used to it and have learned to take tardiness as a sign of disrespect, then it’s workable in a different way. The other person might have other ways of demonstrating their respect and care for you, even if they’re late to lunch, and you may be able to understand that their tardy arrival doesn’t necessarily indicate anything about your friendship.

Another example: “The neighbors should get rid of all the leaves in their yard” might really mean, underneath, “I like looking at tidy yards, because I value neatness, and their yard is not in line with that.” Well, it’s their yard, isn't it? Maybe they value seasonal cycles and want to allow for the natural decomposition of leaves that will nourish the soil. Or maybe it’s an elderly neighbor who can’t care for their yard the way they used to.

Your valuing neat appearances might belie an anxiety you feel at things you can’t control, or maybe you hold an unexamined belief that tidy yards somehow demonstrate a person’s goodness or worth. Get curious about what’s really going on beneath the “should”.

Or another example, “I shouldn't have said that dumb thing at work today” could really mean, “I blurted something out today and I prefer to be more measured and careful with my words in work settings.” Maybe in the past you’ve blurted something that had consequences you didn’t want, or you’ve learned it’s usually more beneficial to take a moment before speaking in a meeting in order to adequately get your point across in the way you mean.

Look behind or underneath the “should” for the value, need, preference, or priority it is concealing. That’s where true self-knowledge lies, and there is the key to understanding, growth, and peace.

I think spirituality is such an important, or even essential, facet of human life —and so many folks today come from either a strong, specific religious background or from a rigidly anti-spiritual/anti-religious environment. Rigidly secular cultures think that a “nonsectarian” society means full separation of church and state —which, instead of leaving us all free to pursue our own spiritual path, often leads to us coming to think that nobody’s spiritual beliefs are valid except in the private sphere. Your own dirty secret.

On the one hand, spiritual people who disdain religion are, ironically, often the most rigid believers (common in the “new age” and adjacent crowds), and can be just as fundamentalist in theory and practice as many religious people. On the other hand, religious or nonreligious people who leave no room for spirituality, which is inherently embodied and therefore has a personal component to it, can become dogmatic and inhumane. I advocate for a mature spirituality that can leave space for religion, and a mature religion that leaves space for spirituality. Nobody has to be “right”, as in fact, usually in metaphysics and religion, ya can’t “prove” it anyway.

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In a recent conversation in a meditation group, someone mentioned that the Buddhist path to “enlightenment as the end of suffering” couldn't be true. He said he saw no way that suffering could ever truly end in life, that suffering “seems to be the Christian way”, and that Christianity makes more sense to him as it centers suffering.

What I understand is that he feels that Buddhism is bypassing or negating something that he views as an essential feature of life, and that, for him, Christianity makes space for that feature in a way that feels more real to him.

While I think he has quite a different understanding of Buddhism, Christianity, and suffering than I do, nonetheless the exchange prompted me to write this essay.

Here, we’ll discuss the end of suffering; spiritual bypassing and the scapegoat; and atonement. We’ll look at the transactional mentality; real spirituality; and maturity in the arc of humanity and the individual. We’ll dive into the invention of the idea of “original sin” and the implications of this idea for later Christian ideas of suffering and redemption. And we’ll wrap up with a (hopefully) more-encompassing idea of the place of pain in life and how to just put an end to suffering.

In this essay, I will touch on Buddhism briefly and on the Christian viewpoint (or rather, my take on some aspects of it). Some key ideas from the Christian tradition have seeped deeply into our collective subconscious, so I’d like to bring a little light to a couple of those issues here. And while Buddhism and Christianity may share many ideas, just one of the areas of significant difference between Buddhist and Christian thinking is the Christian story of the crucifixion of Jesus and the idea of atonement; I’ll discuss both those ideas in this article.

Christianity is the cultural inheritance of the “West”, and therefore what we’re most familiar with —at least superficially and in a background way. Christianity is an important part of our cultural substrate, and provides a rich myth, complex and contradictory stories, and lots of room for unspooling, if you’re willing to dive in.

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Welp, “suffering” is a whole can of worms, as they say. Let's bite off a little bit of this mixed metaphor and see where we land.

First off, I make a distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is unavoidable in life; suffering, however, is not —at least not under our modern understanding of the word “suffer”.

So, in Buddhism, duḥkha/dukkha (Sanskrit/Pāli spelling) is the usual word for “suffering.” This word literally means unease/unstable standing, the way a table with uneven legs always wobbles, for example. However, it seems we’ve taken suffering to have a very different meaning. Consider that the meaning of suffer in English has shifted, and originally it also meant something more like “undergo” or “to bear, carry”. The modern meaning, with a more anguishy flavor, actually comes from the medieval Christian era, when the association of the word suffering with the crucifixion story began to affect the meaning of the word.

THE END OF SUFFERING

To me, pain is part of life, but suffering does not have to be. That's what it means when Buddhists or whoever talk about “enlightenment” meaning “the end of suffering”: it's the realization that suffering is an attitude towards pain or discomfort. We can decouple the sensation or event which causes pain (mental, physical, or emotional) from a bio-socially programmed attitude about pain or discomfort.

Another way to put this is, when we’re in pain, it only becomes suffering if we make a story out of it: “I should be able to handle this difficulty and shouldn’t be struggling” or “this should not stop me or be a problem” or “she doesn’t deserve this awful situation” or whatever it is. No story, no suffering. So simple, but obviously not easy.

I’ve used this idea myself over the years to deal with challenging situations, difficult changes, debilitating chronic pain, and so forth. It’s almost indescribable, the relief and lightness that comes from this paradigm shift. Of course, we may still sometimes find ourselves with an attitude of suffering! We might be enduring a pain, an iniquity, a discomfort, but enduring it poorly, with little patience or compassion. We’re human; it’s a process.

The end of suffering, understood this way, is what it means to “die before you die”: the death or end of the fiercely-held notion of a separate “self” (which I've written about before). The pattern of life, of reality, is never static, so each moment is a death, transformation, and rebirth. By resisting that pattern, you create pointless pain and probably suffering. When you learn to stop resisting the pattern, suffering ceases along with that resistance, because the attitude or perspective that created suffering has nothing to hold on to anymore.

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THE SCAPEGOAT AND SPIRITUAL BYPASSING

Well before Jesus' time, the Israelites and others –including “pagans” around the world– had methods of appeasing their God(s) and atoning for humanity's bad behavior (methods that mostly didn't involve crucifixion, btw). Usually, there was a sacrifice involved: humans would shed the blood and offer the life of an animal (or several, or some humans) to God(s). One time, on the Israelite people's Day of Atonement, several animals were ritually sacrificed for the atonement of the sins of some folks, and the sins of a whole people generally were laid on the head of a particular goat. That goat was sent away to a wilderness of barren land, to escape the physical sacrifice and carry all the weight of the sins of the people away with him, leaving the people ritually purified and light. The “escape goat” comes from early translations of this Hebrew tale into Old English via Latin.

So, instead of owning one's transgressions and taking responsibility for sin1, we could interpret scapegoating as bypassing, loading the weight of iniquity and transgression onto someone/something else and calling it a day. It's outsourcing the consequences (which we still do today, on a global scale, to feed consumerism and late-stage capitalist markets, which built on the scale and structure of extractive empires). It's crucifying an archetype instead of admitting your own imperfection.

Maybe this is understandable in a transactionally-oriented, fear-founded style of relating to God, where mistakes must be redeemed through penance and sacrifice. Personally, it’s not my kind of relationship to the sacred.

AN ASIDE ABOUT ATONEMENT

The original meaning of atonement is at-one-ment, a condition of being at one with others.

We can't reach atonement by behaving in any ol’ way that suits our whims, and then simply dumping the consequences all on some poor old scapegoat (literal or metaphorical). In a mature person, sin, missing the mark, is its own punishment, and virtuous behavior its own reward. It is through orienting to the Self, the Allness, that we build the inner compass to know what is “right” or “wrong”. This compass orients us towards what we inwardly know to be right, good, virtuous; thence such behavior is inherently rewarding for us. It’s aligned with the pattern. And the inner compass orients us away from that which we know is wrong, bad, “sinful,” and so such behaviors are truly a punishment in themselves. Again, simple; not easy.

ARCS NOT ARKS

That ritual of the goat was required and indeed dictated by a god who, to me, seems small, jealous, and vengeful. Frankly, par for the course for much of the Hebrew Bible, and for many ancient conceptions of God. The God of the Hebrew Bible was part of the bad-child-misbehaving bit of the human story. It may be an important part of the story, developmentally, but it is not the end. We can view the Bible (and not only the Bible, of course) as an archetype-rich tale of life.

In the arc of a human life, children learn to behave in ways required of them by their social surroundings. Early religions tend, for this reason, to be more performative and perhaps less contemplative: an analogy can be drawn to the child (humanity) trying hard to behave well (performative religion), in order to avoid punitive action from the parent (God).

We spend much of our young lives learning how to behave, which is also how to be, and to an extent, who to be. To oversimplify, it's all transactional: if I behave as expected, I will have a place in my family, society, etc, and will survive and belong; if I misbehave, there will be punishment. We can easily see the parallels with, for instance, the God of the Hebrew Bible and the behavior of the humans in those stories.

Eventually, a very very few humans grow up to move beyond transactional relationships in general, and in particular to a mature spirituality, which involves dropping the performance (though not always the ritual!) and going deep within.

“REAL SPIRITUALITY”…what does it even mean?

One way to think of “spirituality” is as cultivating that inner compass to guide your outer life. It can be very easy to think you've done this, and there are thousands of people eager to sell you crystals, feathers, rituals, meditations, retreats, or teach you light languages and complex mandalas, or a pseudo-nonduality of miracles, or tantra and ayahuasca in Bali or whatever, so you feel properly spiritual. Basically, it’s highly likely that all that does is anesthetize you; if you think you've almost “found it”, you dig in deeper to keep the feeling going.

This is not to say there is no value in any of those things (I wrote a bit about that here). This is why Karl Marx wrote that “religion is the opium of the people” (though GK Chesterton says “The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world.” We see this playing out in the world now; I'll save that for another post.)

If you're busy chasing the next party, or the next promotion, or the next plant medicine high, or the next satsang, or the next jhāna or a “higher” level in your meditation practice, or the next whatever, you are not living Here, Now, which is actually, literally, all there is.

When you stop looking outside for answers, maybe that's a sign of dawning maturity. Not to say that nothing outside seems interesting, but rather to say that you're not looking there for answers or hand-holding to lead the way. Your path is your own. There is no map.

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PERSPECTIVES ON SPIRITUAL MATURITY

For Christians, Jesus fills this role of maturity in the arc of the Bible. Jesus breaks the rules, but not for the satisfaction of his whims; he does what's right even when it's socially, religiously, or morally condemned by those around him (a common theme among prophets and mystics). He ends up inverting the we-sacrifice-to-god story line and, as an archetype of God on earth, instead sacrifices himself for all of creation.

But of course, not everyone understands it this way, and many folks still hold tight to a Father-figure God who sacrificed his own Son to settle some debts with humanity. And unfortunately, many Christians seem to have missed the message that Jesus's exhortation was to follow him: he wasn't here to be the spiritually and humanly mature one just so the rest of us could muck about in the sandbox forever; he was here as a human to serve as a sort of primus inter pares.

SETTLING ACCOUNTS: ORIGINAL SIN AND REDEMPTION

Let’s get a bit of a grip on some cultural basics. The widespread and pernicious ideas of original sin in Western Christianity can be traced to certain readings of the book of Genesis. Original sin is a sin of being, not a sin of doing. Spoiler: the phrase “original sin” comes from Augustine, around the year 400 AD — at least 1000 years after the composition of the Genesis versions of creation and the garden.

Augustine held some potentially conflicting views, as we humans often do, but one of his ideas was that we inherit the first sin of the first humans: upon our individual creation, we already come marked with this inheritance from the beginning, and require redemption to balance things out. Redemption comes from a Latin root that means “buying back,” like a debt.

Perhaps original sin was partly a convenient way for Augustine to account for theodicy. That’s the question of, if God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent (obviously two major assumptions, right outta the gate), then why is there evil in the world? Augustine blames it on humanity’s abuse of free will2 qua original sin…so it’s all our fault, not God’s.

Prior to Augustine's time, nobody held tightly to the idea that we are all cursed with sin from birth3. Over time, people have tried on all sorts of ideas to be able to understand the story of the incarnation and death of Jesus. This was (and still is, for thinkers) an issue in Christology: why did God send Jesus down as a human to die on the cross? What kind of Father is that? (I use the loaded and leading questions for rhetorical purpose.)

Let’s just look at a few of the ways people tried to handle this question.

IT’S ALL A PAYOFF

There was the idea that Jesus died as ransom to pay off Satan for humanity’s “inherited (original) sin” after Adam and Eve sold us off to the devil (after God tricked Satan. It’s complicated.). According to this theory, Satan felt he was owed all sinners’ souls, so God offered up the soul of Jesus so the rest of us could be saved from Satan’s clutches. Since apparently Jesus was a really good dude and never sinned (Son of God and all that), when Satan took his soul it voided his arrangement with God, so all of humanity was redeemed forever. That’s what you get when you do dealings with the devil, I guess. And a tricky God.

This ransom idea was one of the main understandings in Christianity of Jesus’s death on the cross, an understanding that persisted from about 180 AD for almost 900 years, until, in the 11th century, Anselm of Canterbury tried some new logic to freshly interpret the story. It was with our buddy Anselm that the idea originated of Jesus needing to “pay off” with his death the sins of all humanity, in order to appease the honor of his angry Father so as to prevent punishment. Now it’s not so much a deal with the devil but a matter of family honor.

Let’s remember that the idea of a “debt” to be paid off rests heavily on Augustinian-style interpretations of the idea of “original sin”. Anselm was living in a time when honor and shame were predominant social emotions, so squaring the crucifixion story with the honor-bound culture of the chivalric era made sense to him. His idea of the crucifixion was as penance, as atonement, as a way to balance the scales of honor between humanity and God. (Imperial theology understands retribution better than restoration.)

Then in the 16th century, during the Protestant Reformation, the story was reinterpreted again, now not from an honor-code perspective but from a legalistic viewpoint, where Jesus would “substitute” for humanity and thus, with his death, expunge us all of our sins, saving us —doomed sinners all by virtue of having dared to be born— from the wrath of God. God would be angry without some sort of sacrifice, so instead of all of humanity being sacrificed, Jesus stepped up and subbed for us.

So, an angry God, original sin, human sacrifice. Fun times.

We can rewind to a time before original sin was so encrusted in the Western Christian theological map — or in fact, without rewinding time, we can just look at other interpretations of the Genesis story and see that if we don't create “original sin”, the whole idea of Jesus needing to pay off our sinful debts with his human life goes up in smoke.

The original meaning of atonement is at-one-ment, a condition of being at one with others.

STEP UP

“Pick up your cross and follow me” means being willing to step out of the known and accepted, into the unknown, the mystery. It means being willing to risk the comfort zone built by the intellect and the ego, to risk the life and social world you know, in order to undertake the only true adventure. It also means that you stop waiting for pain to stop, as pain is part of life. It means you accept, with whatever grace you have available, that this cross is yours to bear: life is both shadow and light, joy and pain, burden and grace.

The cross may be heavy or light; the way may be steep or flat; but you carry the cross with grace. THAT is the “end of suffering”: carrying the beautiful paradox of loving the full dimensions of life, without any avoidance, shrinking away, bypassing, or painting-over the depth of reality in all its hues and shades. It’s a profoundly powerful view of life.

This is what immanence means; this is the journey of embodied living. It's growing up. No longer expecting things to be simple, understandable, explainable; no longer expecting someone else to do the heavy lifting; no longer expecting that there “should” be joy, happiness, fairness, etc. without their balanced counterparts; no longer expecting that perfect balance should even be attained in this world at all.

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Share The Unfolding

For shorthand, we can call this ever-unfolding Allness “God”. It may be helpful to think of God as a verb —a happening, a becoming— rather than a person or person-like being, or an entity, or noun of any sort. God: the great unfolding.

I know the term “God” is a loaded one. Lots of people squirm at the word, and if that's you, that's ok. I still take issue with the word “god”, as it's been used and abused for centuries, but I find it a useful word and am in a personal process of reclaiming it.

I was recently in conversation with some folks about what it means to serve God. I've decided to briefly share some of my thoughts on that below. Feel free to agree, disagree, whatever. Let's talk about it in the comments!

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You are serving God with whatever you do. How could it be otherwise? God permeates all; God surrounds and infuses any and all things; God is everything, including the fullness of all emptiness and the emptiness behind all fullness.

Every thought, action, feeling, is in service to God. Some things “feel better”; we have a sense of when we are thinking or acting in a way that may be broadly beneficial or only selfishly good, and we have a feeling when our thoughts or actions may not be beneficial at all. Yet everything we think and do is serving God. This includes our notions of beneficial or not, and our ability to act, or not, in accordance with our values.

Maybe it's comforting to think of “good” actions as serving God, so you can “choose” to do more good and say that everything else isn't in service to God, only the good bits. Some people think their art, their prayer, their good deeds, are in service to God, while the “normal” stuff is not. To me, this artificially separates out the “in service” bit to only count the deliberate, conscious parts that feel like they're “worthy” of calling Service, when in reality (as I experience it), it is the totality that is always in service. We can't cherry-pick our lives. The feelings that we get about our thoughts and actions, our intuition about what's beneficial or not, can be a guideline for what to try for more of, what to aim for. That's part of why those feelings exist, is to guide us. Yet everything, everything, everything is in service to God.

This does not mean we should panic every time we have an angry feeling, a judgy thought, or respond carelessly or snappily to someone we love. That's all part of being human. We're eternally unfinished works in progress, and our obvious failings, too, are part of our life in service. Compassion is an important skill for this reason. Each time we fall short (the original meaning, in fact, of the words translated as “sin” in the English bible1) is an opportunity to notice, to hold compassion, and to learn from our humanity.

As long as you have a child-like relationship with a paternalistic deity figure, it will make some sense to view life as transactional. “I will do good things in service of God, so God will protect me and make my life better. If I do not serve God well by doing good things, God will be jealous or wrathful or vengeful.” But when you outgrow this small view of God, it makes no sense to view life transactionally. When you realize that God encompasses, comprises, and subsumes everything that is, you realize that your entire existence is God. All of existence is God. That is the reason to do what you know is right, to the best of your knowledge and ability, whenever you can. And we all miss the mark sometimes.

So yes, please, do good works, but do not think that your banalities belong less to God. Take notice of God in everything: when you open your eyes in the morning; when the wind drops a few more leaves on the grass; when the water boils; when the child cries; when the child laughs; when the clouds burn brilliantly in the evening sunlight. Notice God when you get angry at the driver who cut you off; when someone sends you a funny joke; when you wonder what the world is coming to; when the temperature rises; when the prices rise; when a good friend calls; when you judge a coworker; when there is so much to be furious about in the world; when there is so much tenderness and joy.

God loves to be noticed. It's in the noticing that you can truly feel the pulse of God, in the smallest things. But let's not forget, God is everything, everything, everything.

Venturing into the (slightly) more personal, including actual photos of “myself” (the quotes will make sense after reading, if not before).

Please comment on this article and let me know your thoughts, and if you like and share my writing I greatly appreciate it as this is what helps me reach more readers!

Practice, prayer, and porosity

My first word was “light”, so my mother says, and thus began my abiding desire for truth —and, in fact, to even understand what that means. Turns out it’s so simple I almost couldn’t believe it.

For as long as I can remember, going back to early childhood, I have done something every day, and I still don’t always know what to call it. Actually, it’s more like something I stop resisting for at least a moment, something I “allow” rather than something I actively “do”.

Sometimes I call it prayer1. Sometimes I call it meditation, which has connotations of a mental activity, something you “do”, and it doesn't always feel that way. Perhaps I might call it contemplation, although this word, too, seems to imply an activity, like active observation. Lately it has felt like something I might call open awareness, a “feeling-into” or a “porosity of personalness”.

Many of us think of prayer, contemplation, or meditation as something you do in certain places or at certain times. Maybe only at church or temple, or on the meditation cushion, or in front of an icon, or at dawn, or on particular days… Many people were taught to pray or meditate in a particular way; some were taught that to pray is to request a favor or help from God, or to ask forgiveness for your perceived sins; others were taught that a particular meditation technique is the best for “stilling the mind” or for enhancing productivity or reducing anxiety; and the contemplative traditions offer guidelines for practice and focal points to work with.

Each of these techniques was developed in particular contexts, for particular reasons, seeking particular outcomes. And there are, of course, many ways to pray, many ways to meditate, many ways to practice contemplation; each of these intentional practices has its own historical context and its own raison d’être. And, each of these techniques, broadly speaking, has formed part of my personal practice. Each of these are practices I “learned” or discovered somewhere along the way; they have been refined through use and familiarity, and over the years each took on a life of its own through me as a practitioner.

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And yet… In a way, they felt like costumes, these practices I could do that might have some transactional benefit (like, do the meditation and feel less stress, or do the prayer and feel more connected, or whatever). The transactional nature rubs me the wrong way, like “do this and attain merits” or “don’t do that and attain heaven”. It just seemed intolerably infantile and manipulative. The most egregious were those practices or outlooks that superficially denied all transactionality, while claiming that their correct practice would lead to “enlightenment” or similar. Of course, there is literally no practice that “leads to enlightenment”2.

So there was a strangeness to this costuming, this posturing, this play-acting, which I thought was normal: learning something new often feels strange at first, so I played along3. I’m human, I have a certain biological need for belonging. Yet somehow there was a deep knowing that the practices in themselves weren’t the point; the practices weren’t the truth and wouldn't lead to truth. This knowing seemed to go against socially “received wisdom” and I had some challenges in learning to really listen to this knowing4.

Prayer is a process that re-tunes our thinking, our feeling, our way of moving through life.

There is a way to “pray” that you can do any time, any where, and in fact it’s more like it’s doing you. You are the expression of this prayer.

For as long as I can remember, behind or beneath or prior to any of the practices I learned or discovered, there was something else: something I never learned, something that seemed to have always been there. And to communicate this using language, which is inherently dualistic (subject/object, noun/verb, symbol/referent), has its challenges.

At some point, I noticed something, which took me a long time to recognize, ironically because it was unlike what I’d heard anyone talking about or practicing, even in nondual circles: the curious thing is that when I was praying, or meditating, or whatever it was, I was actually feeling into something underneath all the techniques, the supposed benefits, the aims or objectives of the practices5. That was the driving force behind my practice: not the practice itself, or the supposed benefits (calm mind, improved concentration, altered feel-good states, whatever), but that underlying something. Not the contents of experience, but the ground underlying it all.

We might view prayer, meditation, and contemplation as ways to practice our attunement with this underlying “something” in order to realign our default state, our usual way of perceiving and being.

We may understand this as a practice of alignment with what Is (without attachment to prior cognitive commitments or analytic allegiances), and when we are in alignment we couldn't want other than what Is.

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There are hundreds of moments in a day when we could simply open from our habituated actions and ways of moving through life into moments of open awareness. It is very simple, actually, as simple as opening your full awareness to whatever you're doing, to whatever is happening around you, to the fullness of the moment just as it is, and to the ever-changing stillness underneath it all.

Simple, however, does not always mean easy.

Any of the intentional practices may bring some benefits (like meditation helping cultivate a greater resiliency you can bring into your daily life, for instance), but let’s be aware, too, that intentional practices very often serve mainly to reinforce dualistic notions of a “doer” who “does” the practice. This is part of the original “spiritual materialism”, a phrase coined by Chögyam Trungpa. Of course, there isn’t anything wrong with that (and if you’ve read my short series, you’ll know what I mean), but something about these intentional practices seemed to feel very subtly off to me; it was like there was something “extra” in the way: the practices could feel good, but didn’t feel true. This feeling was sometimes less present with more refined practices, or lineage-based practices learned in the appropriate context —and there is great power in many of these practices, to be sure. Yet…

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Often, intentional practices might introduce or emphasize the idea that there is a “me” who needs improving or something in life that needs changing. (I have seen this to be the case even in closed, dedicated practice spaces where there are clear instructions against this type of thinking. Mind plays a strong game.) “Me” only exists as long as we maintain the seemingly-coherent weaving-together of thought, sensations, perceptions, and so forth that constitutes “me.”

But this idea that “me” is an improvement project plays into the subtle but important difference between radical acceptance on the one hand, and passivity on the other. Very briefly, acceptance does not imply approval: there might be a situation in your life that you want to change, but that does not mean you cannot radically accept that, for now, it is what it is. Acceptance is a type of encompassing, a type of embracing, the making of a home for all that is.

An aside about “manifestation” etc: I’ve heard lots of people6 talking about “manifesting” or “ascending” or “channeling positivity” or other similar magical thinking. This is the classic carrot-and-stick maneuver7. It’s not difficult to understand how these methods “work” from a psychological and pattern/energy perspective. These types of maneuvers, like “manifestation” and so forth, can be viewed as “cheat codes” to the energetic pattern of this game we call reality. That’s fine, sure, but if you are reading from the rulebook you really can’t be that effective: you're not really playing yet until you really know the rules and the point of the game (at which point the cheat codes hold no interest, because the playing itself is the point). “Manifesting” and “ascending” and so forth are par for the course for anyone who simply seeks more power, status, etc in the game — or confuses power, status, etc for truth!8 When understanding changes, behavior changes along with it.

We can also notice how all of these and similar approaches reify not only a duality, but also a hierarchy and the specialness of the practitioner and/or their lineage or practice methods. For instance, the duality of what’s here now versus what you might manifest; the duality of this level versus the ascended one; the duality of the current circumstances versus a more positive outlook. All of this can feel very real or important, of course, and none of it is true: what’s here and now is all you know, and what you might manifest is a fantasy; if you imagine truth in levels, that’s already a fantasy or mind-game; your current circumstances are more real than any imagined future outlook ever could be. So if you are seeking truth, caveat petitor veritatis (truth-seeker beware).

Consider prayer as a reminder: a way to relate to the ineffable; to relate to what is "on the other side" of appearance.

On the other hand, the main goal of nondual practice, if you’ll permit me that term9, is to reveal these misunderstandings, dualities, reifications: when we see them for what they are, the delusions (of specialness, of a doer, etc) can no longer hold together; the incoherence of the delusion is revealed and falls away. Truth is uncovered in naked, unadorned splendor: the truth that all is ever-unfolding — even “me” or “myself”, some of our most cherished and deeply-embedded concepts.

We must use discernment in knowing (deeply knowing) which practices, if any, will truly serve us, and for what purpose10; and which practices will simply lead —usually subtly— to more reification. It’s a constant refinement; attunement and re-attunement; an ongoing movement rather than a fixed destination.

So we can think of open awareness as a way to seek greater alignment with reality as it is. This means that we can approach it as autotelic11, something to “do”, free from any agenda or any attachment to a specific outcome, and with no desire for a particular "experience" from the experience. Or perhaps better than something to “do”, it is more like what is occurring underneath all our doing.

On top of this open awareness, we usually layer our “ordinary” or selective awareness12; that is, what we place our attention on, what we consider. Very often, we use our senses almost like active capturing mechanisms: we look at something to pull its image towards us, to grasp it; we do the same with sounds, tastes, and so on. What I mean is that usually we do not stay centered; we “reach out” energetically when we look at or listen to something, we reach out from the deep center of ourselves, the apparent locus of the thoughts, sensations, feelings, and perceptions that we call “myself”, to bring in those apparent objects of our awareness.

Not to mention that modern life is often so loud; there is so much stimulus, so much information as we are bombarded with so much “content” and input. Every moment must be spent “productively” and heaven forbid you remember you’re a human being, so stay busy “doing”, stay busy buying things to help you forget or ignore that piddling little thing called mortality, that small issue of the abyss, or the way it feels to just quietly be for a bit.

Being for a bit is all there is.

Yet behind all this doing, this energetically reaching out to consume the food of the senses, underlying all this grasping: there is open awareness. Maybe you can feel it if you connect with your center, and from there just allow your open eyes to rest and let whatever images come, come. Rest your ears and let the sounds reach you, without needing to “reach out” towards them. This is a very different way of inhabiting the body, a different way of relating to the senses, and a different way of experiencing life. So take a moment to get quiet and listen to what IS.

When we allow ourselves to listen to the light, we learn that which can only be transmitted this way.

Open awareness or prayer is a type of listening. It’s wide open listening. It’s a listening with the whole self, a feeling-into the porosity of your personalness. It’s not a “practice” to “get to” truth, but a listening to reacquaint yourself with the Presence of What Is, to attune with That, simply to gently pay attention to nothing in particular.

Let me know in the comments:

What resonated for you?
Is there anything you disagree with?
How is your practice, if you have one?

I’m also happy to answer your other questions in the comments!