The holy of holies, missed. All one’s life, it’s missed. Never entered, embodied. Never even (maybe) sensed the presence of.
Eckhart Tolle tells of a man longing for release from anguish, aching to find that magic something that will rescue him. The man is sitting on a box, never knowing that within it is treasure. To him, it’s just a place to sit, a thing to hold his weary body, while he waits for some miracle to visit him. What could be more poignant?
It seems that the one waiting and hoping for healing or release, or awakening, is incapable of entering that room where the holiness dwells. That one — the person you seem to be, the one that aches — cannot know anything but itself. It can know only dissatisfaction, imperfection, longing.
It can know only seeking. Seeking change, relief, improvement, freedom.
But what’s in that innermost space is not personal. It has nothing to do with “you.” Its presence is experienced when thought and wanting have grown still. The holiness is known in the purity of devotion to the present-moment reality of the now.
The irony: that the longed-for thing is actually within, the truest true thing, and yet it can be missed. (Almost always is.) Meanwhile, the person you appear to be keeps looking out there, toward an image of some possible future.
Sometimes people say they’ve long had the sense that something was just out of reach, intuiting that something to be more substantial by far than all that normally occupies attention. Yet they were unable to touch it, to rest in it. It’s a peripheral vision sort of thing: they know something is there, but when they turn toward where they thought it was, to look directly at it, it cannot be seen. Let alone can they take it into their hands and feast on it, or don it, like a sumptuous garment, and dwell in it. As it.
It’s like the perfect crime: the thing hidden in plain sight, only not seen for what it is. As if some gigantic benign force with a twinkle in its eye set about to invent an intelligent animal having all the riches in the world tucked within, but unreachable (or so it seems).
A human being is a divine piñata, a thing that must be broken for the riches to spill forth. The thing that must break is the enduring reality of the self.
Oh, but we like our pretty piñatas! We are precious to ourselves. We do seem substantial. All the energy we devote to avoiding pain, to pitying ourselves, getting better, being secure, putting ourselves in a good light so others will admire us. It’s all as ultimately pointless as putting make-up on a corpse. In its tireless devotion to sprucing up something doomed to imperfection, it’s entirely missing the point of what life is about.
A human being is a divine piñata, a thing that must be broken for the riches to spill forth. The thing that must break is the enduring reality of the self.
No one is fooled by all the useless scurrying. Yet everybody colludes in the charade. We all secretly know we’re behaving as though our life-long scrambling to “build a life” makes sense. Deeply, we know it to be false, to be ultimately hollow. Each of us knows we ourselves are doing this, and we know those people over there (our loved ones included) are participating in the same charade. But we do it anyway. Everyone silently agrees not to say it out loud, to declare the thinness of all the earnest endeavor. Because if someone stood up and announced the truth, that it’s all a sham, the rest of us would have to own up to it as well. Then what? So we gentle one another along, agreeing to lie to one another and ourselves, inflating the value of each petty victory. We avert our eyes, mumbling something about meaning, about resignation.
The next thing you know, somebody with a small paint brush is applying rouge to your bloodless cheeks. All the heat is gone. Nobody’s home to feel the bristles, but the charade continues. The piñata is being made up to the end, and even beyond the end.
Meanwhile (what could possibly be more poignant?) the whole time, all of life, this innermost room of exquisite stillness, the sweetest possible nectar, has patiently awaited your noticing.
* * * * *
So . . . then . . . what’s to be done? Is there some way other than what you’ve been doing so far?
It’s less about doing something different and more about stopping something. It’s about seeing — really seeing — what you have been doing. Seeing the uselessness of it. Allowing yourself to rest from the charade. Directing your eyes (and your precious attention) elsewhere: to the unfiltered sensation of being here, right now. Allow the body and its senses to be attuned to immediate reality, to what’s here before your mind takes hold of it.
It’s about allowing doubt and questioning to become the atmosphere of your daily experience. If you are to ever know why you were born, what’s asked is to deeply question the apparent reality of you. Discover how your sense of self is entirely mind-made. Far from having any objective reality, it is made up of memory, beliefs, values, impressions of problems. “You” are a story you tell yourself (over and over again).
Learn to see, to question, the beliefs you don’t even realize you have (assuming them to be simply “true,” simply “who you are”). Come to doubt your impression of reality, of what matters. Of what needs to happen so you can dwell in what you’ve longed for: that holy of holies. The sweetness inside your personal piñata, inside that box Eckhart’s guy is sitting on.
* * * * *
It’s so simple we almost can’t believe it could come down to this, but I’m here to tell you it’s so. It’s about sensing — really being with — the now. Just as it is (however apparently imperfect its particulars). It’s got to do with feeling the stillness within, when you allow your mind to quiet and your senses to take over. When the sensation of being alive, of being simply here, is allowed to flood you. Just now. (Now is all there ever is, all there ever has been. Only the now can be experienced. Everything else is mental processing.)
Knowing what you really are has nothing to do with your history or your problems. (See how radically un-personal it is?) Aliveness can sense itself, in the present moment, without needing to remember who you appear to be. How mysterious is that? How utterly miraculous?
* * * * *
But look at what mostly happens. You go around assuming the “you” that you appear to be is real. Then, that you sets about trying to wake up, or to otherwise improve. When it cannot hope to experience what’s beyond itself.
You stay very busy scoring points for the other team. Then you wonder how come nothing changes fundamentally.
Allow yourself to deeply question — to doubt — the authenticity of the self-that-seeks. Don’t do this only at a retreat, or during meditation. Live in the awareness, in the questioning. Tune into this at work, when interacting with another, when you’re swimming in your own thoughts. Notice each time your real-seeming self perks up, expressing itself in one way or another. If you notice yourself assuming that this self is real, that its efforts to “get somewhere” are worthwhile . . .
STOP!
If you notice you continue to have no acquaintance with what’s inside the piñata, realize that your resources are still mostly devoted to maintaining the real-seeming self. Look again, more deeply, to see what you’re not questioning, not doubting. Not willing (maybe) to bring into the light of awareness.
The self that seeks to become free, to know the ultimate reality, is the same self that holds grudges, hopes, feels lonely, wants to heal. All of life is processed through the mind-made lenses of this self, yet seldom is this realized. That self will not awaken. It cannot hope to. If awakening happens, it will be because that “you” somehow ceased to feel substantial.
What’s crucial is to cease looking through the lenses of the constructed self. What is truly illuminating (and freeing) is to look at the thing with the lenses. Please note: when you’re observing the self, the looking is occurring from the space of consciousness beyond the self. When awareness is enlivened, realize this is not the ordinary thinking mind that’s involved.
Ask yourself: What is it that experiences the now? That can sense aliveness? It is not mental processing (the maker of a self) that can feel hereness. But oh, is it ever juicy! It is real, more real by far than the collection of memories and ideas that appears to be you.
Is it comfortable to doubt that you are real? Of course not! (This is why almost everyone stays busy sprucing up the self, fondly supposing the effort can get them somewhere.) To question the reality of the self takes real courage. It invites uncertainty to take completely over. It can tumble you into the stripped-down essence of this moment, unprocessed. You’re left with nothing but the now.
Ah . . .
The holiness is awareness itself. It’s been here all along, alive within. Hiding in plain sight.