What’s it like living a human life after the mind has ceased running the show — once radical freedom has entered the picture and mental suffering has unwound to stillness? When someone not “there” considers such a change in condition, there can be certain assumptions. One thing often supposed is that a life of steady wakefulness consists of uninterrupted happiness. That existence is entirely pain-free.
Underlying this imagined picture are a couple of mistaken beliefs. One is that being awake must involve a remoteness from ordinary life, which appears to have been the cause of suffering. So if suffering has come to an end, that must mean regular life feels like it’s “over there” somewhere. A fully conscious person is apparently immersed in a blissful alternate reality at a distance from familiar experience, with its ceaseless flux, its challenges and losses.
But one revelation of steady consciousness, and the dis-identification with the personal self, is that life itself never was the actual cause of suffering. It was, rather, the ceaselessly intervening mind, with its ego-driven habit of interpretation, resistance, belief, fear, and hope. All of that giving rise to distressing emotions, holding peace at a perpetual distance. None of which (it turns out) was in fact inevitable.
If only the mind could simply be at rest in the presence of unfolding reality — to fully allow it, just as it is, without any sort of “handling.”
The ego is devoted to protecting us from painful moments of life. When the mind gets busy, it’s very likely in response to some underlying discomfort we don’t want to surrender to. A feeling of loss or vulnerability, perhaps. Something unnerving: the discomfort of change, of uncertainty, perceived threat. The ego-mind scrambles to put up shields, piling on an additional layer of misery, the one made of argument, story, denial. The mind doesn’t really protect a person; the underlying feeling doesn’t disappear. The original pain is only driven deeper underground, awaiting eventual eruption. Each episode of this pattern increases the emotional burden we haul around.
The worst thing about being lost in thought is that it means a person isn’t really living. Mental activity is a filter keeping a person at a distance from the now — from life itself. Any moment of being in the head is not a moment of being, since you’re at a remove from the present-moment experience itself. Being one with the now, just as it is, is the only way it’s possible to sense you’re really here. It’s what it is to experience aliveness.
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The other assumption underlying “awakeness = always happy and pain-free” has to do with the confusion of pain and suffering. But isn’t that two words for one thing? That unexamined confusion makes it vivid why most of us remain in the mind’s steady grip — why freedom is elusive, all the way to the grave. The teasing apart of suffering from pain is liberating.
Sometimes it’s painful to be alive. If you’re on a spiritual path to stop all hurt, there’s learning to do.
One thing about radical aliveness is this: sometimes being alive hurts. Loved ones die. The body can experience physical pain (even though — yes — it “isn’t you”). People everywhere, in any direction awareness gazes, are in terrible agony and confusion. Including people dear to you. If your heart is open to them, it will likely break.
To the extent that you try to distance yourself from these realities, via mental handling or spiritual bypass, you are not really living. Bypass being the application of some “spiritual” idea having to do with reality: “If it hurts, it must be of the ego, and so is not the truth of being. Therefore any feeing is evidence of something unreal, and so should be ignored.”
While the vast majority of our miserable moments have their roots in the mind’s response to something, life itself (unmediated by the mind) is sometimes inherently painful. Real spiritual maturity is learning to recognize the difference.
Liberation does not guarantee uninterrupted happiness so much as the deeply restful well-being that comes of non-resistance, surrender to not-knowing, not being in control. Freedom consists of the absence of belief and attachment, of making each experience about me, taking twisted “refuge” in ideas about what should be, or what once was.
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When a person has lost the habit of thinking as a substitute for living, then also evaporated is the illusion of separation. Gone is the impression that “you” are somehow apart from the moment in which you can feel yourself being here. Nor are you separate from others.
Given this felt unity, unconditional love can be felt to flower. A novel experience, to be sure, after decades in which love has been about need, interwoven with fear and attachment. Before opening occurred, what was called “love” was severely boxed in by conditions: If you behave according to my expectations, I will love you. I’ll love you so long as you’re loyal, if you promise to never leave me. All elements of the relationship are drenched in the density of ego, each thing having to do with “me.”
It’s familiar territory — love being contingent. The desire to control being a mighty force, along with the denial of anything not in alignment with the mind’s picture of what’s desired, what’s believed to be true. How swiftly “love” morphs into loathing and rejection, when things don’t go well.
Even if those obvious constraints don’t appear to be dominant in a relationship, fear almost certainly is in the mix of potent love, as in the love of parent for child. There’s a good reason fear is said to be love’s opposite.
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I’d heard that idea, but it had always confused me, since I supposed love’s opposite to be hate. Though I had no trouble seeing how one could turn into the other, as when a romantic relationship disappointed.
If anyone had told me, before things changed, that my love for my children was not unconditional, I’d have flown into a defensive rage. But if you’d asked me whether fear saturated every particle of my mother love, I’d not have denied it. Yet wasn’t fear inherent to love? How could I love my son and my daughter as I did and not live in terror that something awful would befall one of them?
The inevitable interweaving of love and fear turns out to be another mistaken assumption loading the mind’s heavy luggage. When the heart, liberated at last from the merciless squeeze of the mind, is finally able to open all the way, without fear or attachment, then it knows, for the first time, the magnificence of loving without condition. It knows what it is to love another in the fullness of what they are. To love no-holds-barred, even as you know something awful could happen. Knowing you cannot protect the person from life, from their own interior, and not recoiling from that truth. Loving that’s in no way about you — your need, your projected desire, your ideas. Love without hope! For when the mind stops, time stops too: living in a hoped-for future, in a story of the past. What’s real is the now. When you’ve come to rest in the truth that you cannot control what’s ahead, that life is constant change, you simply are where you are. Radically alive, swimming in cherishing.
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Beginning with my children’s infancy, fear had always polluted love — fear and its companion desire to control, and (where control was elusive) denial and hope. Such a mess. This is what it is to be a parent, when the mind is alive and well, busily manipulating reality.
When my mind at last grew still, both of my children were in adolescence. Among the ten thousand revelations was the discovery that I had not, in fact, loved them unconditionally all those years before. So very humbling!
In the flood of overwhelming, unconstrained love, there was the dawning of one recognition after another. During the interludes of struggling to fathom this new way of being, I walked around in a stunned sort of fog. This “processing” mostly occurred when my children were at school, or with their father or friends. When I was with them, the fog generally lifted, allowing me to just love them, be their mother. Moment to moment.
Meanwhile, they carried on as before. Being teenagers (one in the middle of adolescence, one just at the threshold), they were naturally self-absorbed. That was a kind of blessing, to have them not overly focused on their mother, who was working mightily to incorporate the explosion of one revelation after another.
The blessed relief! Rinsed of the poisoning need to be defined as a good mother — to always see my children’s behavior, their struggles and victories, as a reflection of myself. Me-me-me! So much had long been riding on it all, my precious identity at risk — very little of which was about actual love, as it turned out. Fear had been running the show.
I hadn’t realized what a mighty, defining force self-need had been, how crippled I’d been by it, until it disappeared. So much was becoming vivid, in retrospect.
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What is it to be loved unconditionally? Who of us has ever experienced such a blessing? To feel enfolded in the presence of radical acceptance, in the open-hearted absence of judgment? Who hasn’t yearned for this, all their life? Isn’t this longing what compels about the idea of an all-loving God, who can see clear through our imperfections and love us anyhow? It’s the limitless generosity and cherishing we craved from our mother and father, almost certainly not provided. For Mother and Father were human (conditioned!), with self-interest, need, and fear in the picture. The inability to yield entirely to reality walls off the heart, holding real love at bay.
When the discovery is made (and it’s a bodied discovery, not a conceptual one) that conscious aliveness rests always in reality, then the heart knows what it is to be with someone fully, without judgment or desire for change, or anything to do with identity. Love floods the landscape.
And in such an environment — we return now to the matter of pain – the heart surely does sometimes break.
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As life went on, as I grew accustomed to the profound inner change, there were frequent surges of gratitude. So many times it came to me: If I were who I used to be, this present situation would feel so very different from how it is now. Certain episodes with my teenagers that would surely have sunk me into anxiety or despair. Times I marveled at how the outer situation could look really bad, yet awareness wasn’t polluted by poisonous thought patterns. The peace sustained. Wisdom seemed to enter the picture, in the engagement with my children’s dilemmas. Truly miraculous.
Some years into all this, in his young adulthood, my son became addicted to opioids, leading to heroin. What could be a more truly dire situation? I was well aware that death could come at any time. And just as keenly aware (after repeated failed attempts) that I could do nothing to rescue him.
His agony was palpable: there was the torment that led him to seek refuge in the drug; the godawful dope sickness during withdrawal; his seeing how he was utterly beholden to the drug, devoted to finding money for the next fix, with all morality, joy, and human connection obliterated under the crushing weight of that need. His self-loathing was exquisite, as he watched himself betray and frighten those who loved him most. He was well aware that death could be around the next corner, yet found it impossible to imagine a way out.
What was it for his mother to be in the presence of such misery (whether in his physical presence or otherwise) — to love him unconditionally, given all this? Was it painful? For I in no way distanced myself from the truth of any of it. I knew I could not help him, and that his life was in peril.
Of course it hurt! I knew better than to seek refuge in hope or any kind of story. My heart broke and broke — open. The love I felt for my son was gigantic. Such love is not contrary to pain. The painful truth is taken in fully, the heart yielding to whatever’s real, including the radical inability to help.
Yet I did not steadily “live there,” in the knowing that my son’s suffering was hideous, that his heart could stop at any moment. While there was always a background awareness of his condition, I was nevertheless able to go about my daily life — to fully be with what was happening each now, in the immediacy of the moment. There continued to be much delight, with frequent surges of gratitude for ordinary things: the movement of clouds, a piece of music, the taste of a bite of food, the company of my beloved animals.
Nor did peace disappear in the presence of the great pain. Talk about a miracle! How vivid it became — that the source of peace is not the absence of pain, but the absence of the mind’s attempt to manage reality. Equanimity comes of surrendering to things as they are — even when the present reality carries enormous threat.
And when it came time for my son to say yes to life, he miraculously said goodbye to heroin, and has never looked back.
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When my sweet old dog died, do you suppose I grieved? Did I protect myself from the pain of missing her by consoling myself with stories about how she’d had a good life? How she was now in a better place, released from the limitation of her declining years? Did I try to distract myself from sorrow by keeping busy, or by getting another dog? The pain of losing her was more acute (I knew) than it would have been years before, had her death happened before my mind grew still. Yet by allowing powerful grief to take me in its arms, my aching heart was saturated in boundless cherishing. For isn’t that what grief is, when not wrestled into “meaning” by the intruding mind? It’s one of love’s most potent expressions. Grief fully felt stirs the sensation of profound aliveness. Even as it hurts.
Sometimes it’s painful to be alive. If you’re on a spiritual path to stop all hurt, there’s learning to do.
As it happened, my dog’s death occurred within days of my son’s liberation from the drug. In the five years since then, do you imagine there’s been a single day I haven’t celebrated my son’s ongoing life, when I haven’t swum in love for my old girl?
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What would I have you take from all of this? Not the particulars of one person’s life events, for we all have our times of terrible extremity: in that, we are the same.
No, it’s this. See if, in your own explorations, you can discover how the pain of life itself (when not resisted) is distinct from the additional pain overlaid by the ego-imprisoned mind. When you observe suffering under way, allow it to gently register that you are doing this to yourself. See how thought — not life itself — is what generates distressing emotions. Explore the felt difference between being in your head and being in the moment. Watch how your mind wants to keep blaming life. Discover how when conscious awareness (blessedly!) reveals the mind’s part in your torment, it then becomes more possible to sink fully into the breaking-open heart of a real loss – the death of a loved one, say. See how peace-inducing it is to allow a painful loss to be what it wants to be: tender love in the form of sorrow.
And notice how the authentic kind of pain, brought about by life itself, differs from the torment of taking a hit to your good reputation, or failing at a job that has defined you. See how these episodes (when consciousness is allowed into the picture) have their usefulness. They can invite you to look more directly at that limited self you seem to keep believing you are. See too — oh please do see! — how indulging all of that keeps you from really living.
Which is, after all, the heart’s deepest longing.