Category: Teachings

There appears to be a you having an objective existence, independent of your mind’s narrative of a self. The further impression is that this you has experiences.

The you looks like a noun (changeable but roughly stable), while the experiences evoke more verbs and adjectives. (Something’s happening to you or by you, and it’s good or bad.)

Supporting the impression of an objectively-occurring you is the physical body. Yet it’s easy to see there’s a great deal more to “you” than bones, blood, electrical impulses, liver, and brain.

If you’re inclined to spiritual inquiry, or susceptible to impressions of varying “levels” of reality, it may appear as though the objectively-existing you has, broadly speaking, two categories of experience.  One is the ordinary (having meaning to the ego-mind), and the other is the extra-ordinary. There will, of course, be a preference for the latter.

The illusory nature of this real-seeming you is where the focus should go, rather than on seeking the preferred type of experience.

The extraordinary is marked by a pronounced relief from the familiar strain and limitation. Time seems to have stopped.  A sense of well-being pervades. The mind is quiet. What have appeared to be problems no longer stand out in the landscape, or carry any emotional weight. The enduring impression of separation has settled like sand in water. “You” don’t seem to be there at all.  

Yet there is awareness.

If you are a truth-seeker, or just weary of regular life, and there’s a memory of the exquisite peace outside the limitations of ordinary mental processing, you may yearn for more of that. You cherish the recollection of what it was like, fondling the memory like a jewel in your pocket. Pursuit of another one of those (or better yet, a sustained “condition”) may become your primary focus.

* * *

The appearance of an objectively-existing you capable of having two kinds of experience is flawed at the start. The illusory nature of this real-seeming you is where the focus should go, rather than on seeking the preferred type of experience. You (as you ordinarily understand yourself to be) are capable of only one kind of experience: the kind the ego can have.

The mind thinks up a you, which appears to have an objective reality, and then that you has experiences. What’s obvious is the part about having experiences. It’s the first part that gets neglected: that your very self is created by the mind, assembled from  mentally-produced material such as memory, label, identity, belief.  

In reality, there is no objectively-occurring you, independent of thinking it into being. There is only this moment, as lived (sensed, moved, felt) by the momentary form “you” are taking. Everything else is mind-generated: story, idea, emotional burden and its physical residue.

If your mind’s content were wiped out, but you were still aware and alert, your brain intact, your experience would be reduced to the sensing of the immediate scene and the sensation in your body. You wouldn’t know the name for anything (yourself included), nor would you have any conceptual framework for anything you perceived. There would be no interpretation, no meaning-giving. Just awareness, observation, sensation. Direct encounter, absent any intervening mental filters. Since your mind would have no prior content to make reference to, you would have — you would be — only this, right here. Knowing would be direct.  Original. Utterly fresh. Like the awareness of an animal, an infant.

* * *

The awareness that “experiences” the extraordinary is an intelligent spaciousness lacking personal features. It does not seek a certain kind of experience.  Let alone does it judge, resist, or attach meaning. The mind-made you can’t do anything but interpret, seek, prefer, be dissatisfied. Being the center of its own universe, it has its eye on self-preservation. Its vigilance is unrelenting.

The two — spacious intelligence and the mind-made self — have nothing whatever to do with one another. One does not touch the other. What each kind of awareness experiences as reality is unavailable to the other. The ego-mind has no access to anything outside itself. Awareness can’t be bothered with the ego’s idea of reality.

The ego-mind can experience only itself and its creations. It is incapable of awakening, of escaping its own gravitational pull.

* * *

If you stood in a town square and stopped passersby to ask how many kinds of experience they’ve had, they’d say “too many to count.” Certainly not just one. At the very least, there are the good experiences and the bad ones. Or the significant ones and the unmemorable ones. Each broad category contains numerous sub-sets: the good experiences having to do with love, with work, with creativity. Then there are the good love experiences that lasted and those that didn’t. And so on, endlessly refinable. What they share: they’re experienced by the mind-made self. They are, in fact, created by it. 

What would life be like if that process didn’t occur?  What would it feel like to be “you”?

During a moment of extraordinary awareness, you may notice that the familiar you is nowhere to be found.  That conspicuous absence has everything to do with the exquisite nature of the moment. You may be saying, If I’m not there at such a moment, how is noticing possible?  Awareness is there. It’s capable of noticing. It’s just that it has no agenda.  

But then, if you ask yourself what sort of intelligence asked that question about how noticing can happen, you will see it’s the ordinary mind.  

If the you that you appear to be has no objective existence, why does it feel so real, so enduring? Subject to threat?  

The evolving human mind became incredibly skillful at symbolic representation of reality. Language and the ability to visualize mean the mind’s illustrated story of outer life seems as real as reality itself. (In fact, the mental rendering tends to eclipse reality entirely, because it’s mistaken for reality itself.) This capacity has served us on a practical level, enabling our species to survive physical peril, to adapt to environmental conditions, create civilizations. 

The trouble is that we tend to extend the mind’s gifts — to misapply them — to the creation of a self, which appears (like so many thoughts) to have an objective reality. When that self experiences threat (rejection, challenge to identity, instability), it’s felt to be an existential threat, because we’ve come to equate the ego-mind (along with the body) with “who we really are.” A serious challenge to the seeming reality of the mind’s sense of self is felt with the same emotional intensity as if it were a tiger bearing down.

Meanwhile, the you experiencing danger isn’t even what you most deeply are. But because the self that’s subject to threat demands such vigilance, the Other is forgotten.

* * *

The only “you” that is real, actual, lived — that isn’t filtered through the mind — is the sensed encounter with momentary reality. That’s all. The now is all you will ever have of life. When the mind is still, there’s no space between “you” and the now. The moment is what you are, right then. And that is all. Yes, really. Everything else is a collection of memories held in the mind, as if in a suitcase, which is lugged into and out of every adventure.

We mistake ourselves for the contents of the suitcase. It’s the difference between a juicy, fragrant peach and a set of encyclopedias about a peach.

The you that you believe yourself to be has no independent reality. It’s produced and maintained by your processing mind, which is serving (almost constantly) at the pleasure of the ego, which has you convinced that it’s you.  

* * *

The you that the mind thinks up is incapable of experiencing the extraordinary peace and well-being of the no-you state. Even to call it a state is imperfect. None of the language here can ever be anything but a wooden approximation (language, a mental tool, being at a distance from reality).

It’s only to the mind-made self that there appears to be a locked door separating “you” from the spaciousness that is your fundamental nature. Trying to get the ego to experience transcendence is as worthwhile as searching for a key to a door that has no lock.

I just now did the math to see how many days I’ve been alive so far. At the moment I’m 73, which tallies roughly 27,000 days lived. Whew, that was fast! I mean, when I (you) consider how quickly a single day flies by, it seems like there should have been a million by now.

Yes, it’s true that some of our days do not pass quickly: the ones that are nightmares of one sort or another. Worry about a loved one, some awful crisis. Those days feel as though they’ll never end. But the great majority of our days, for most of us, whip past us without our ever noticing.

Now (you guessed it) here’s the question for us all: How many do I have left?

Today could be it, my love. It is at our peril that we ever lose track of that.

* * *

The seeker is one who senses there is more to life, more to reality, to self, than the solid, familiar ground where life takes place. There is the sense of something beyond, some potential. Other. The playing field where ordinary life is lived, where things like goals and history, identity and belief, define reality: all of that is felt by a seeker to be somehow subject to reconsideration. Maybe these things our feet stand on, that seem to give us a foundation — who we seem to be, ordinary life events, relationships — are not ever going to set us free. They will not deliver anything ultimate.

Maybe one fine day you’ll find yourself standing at the edge of a cliff, and you’ll come to know the end of gravity.

The seeker is at least considering the idea that what appears to be solid ground isn’t. Is limiting. Illusory. Maybe there is another direction to go in. Another dimension of sorts.

This must be why heaven, why God, is thought to be “up there” someplace, in the sky. Not tethered to the earth. Reality becomes multidimensional as soon as there’s more to it than forward, back, sideways.

* * *

Flirt with danger, flirt with death. Walk along the edge and don’t pay attention to where your feet are relative to the ground, relative to the air. It’s the edge of things: ground meeting air, ground meeting water. The lip of the sea, where ocean touches land, wets it. The edge there is gentler than it is with a cliff. The beach is an ambiguous place, water wetting the sand, then backing off, letting it dry. Then the wetting again, over and over.

You walk there, in that ambiguous zone, feet sometimes wet, sometimes dry. Dry sand, wet sand.

But the cliff! Either you’re on land or you’re in the air. The moment of transition doesn’t last, and will not come again. Once you’ve crossed over that line, once the edge is stepped beyond, there is only the falling. Only and ever the being bathed in air. You will not hit. You needn’t worry, there being no land down there. You have left the land for good.

* * *

Mostly, seekers walk around in circles, never really getting anywhere. Just the impression of progress, or at least, difference. Of course, the greater number of human beings never even think to wonder if there’s more to reality than the apparent, than what they’ve been handed for true, for important. They don’t look up, or within, not sufficient to deeply question, in a way that has the power to change the course of their lives.

A way that is free. Human and real, but free. Radically so.

* * *

After a long time of thinking the world was flat, people came to consider another possibility. The earth, it turned out, was round. But this didn’t doom us to walking in circles. It did not doom humanity to being limited to an earthly existence, feet held to the given condition.

The earth may be round, but it still has its edge. Consider the cliff.

Consider too the beach. The place where the land and the water each have an edge, and they touch.

Seekers mean to leave the dry land, the known terrain. Beneath the surface of the water, that other world, are worlds and dangers not known. Coming to the edge of land indicates a readiness to leave behind the comfort of the familiar. There are depths, powerful tides. Creatures (some of them enormous). A person could drown, be consumed.

What most seekers do is walk the edge of the sand, get their feet a little wet, but then skitter back, like sandpipers wary of going too far. Maybe one fine day you’ll find yourself standing at the edge of a cliff, and you’ll come to know the end of gravity.

* * *

I have had so much fun and love in my life, starting from childhood and continuing to this day. The delicious connection I have with my children, my savoring of the glorious outdoors, beloved animals (pets and wild), abundant music, heard and sung.

I wish the same for you, my dear — whatever your own version of pure delight and ease may be like.

Thank you so much (those of you for whom it is possible) for your financial support, whatever the size.

Miracle, miracle, this broken-open heart, this split-apart life. That such beauty — the picture of brevity, of childhood lost, of time and its diminishing — no longer delivers sadness. No longer pours pain into my open spaces, alcohol into a split in the skin.

Strange it can be this way, when all my life the measure of one was the measure of the other: joy and love had their undoing (or the threat of it), as if one could not be had without the other. I didn’t want a limbo life — a depressed life, one without risk, without potential — so I took it as a given that the harder I loved, the harder I’d have to hurt.

It was worth the cost.

But fear swam around the edges of everything I cherished — including my very life. Above all, that. Fear ate at it, like a cancer.

* * *

This seemed to be my nature, this whole thing, the united picture of it: my depth of feeling, of caring, wanting, appreciating — along with the undying dread of loss. That was “me.” I couldn’t imagine existing and not being all of that, not having the totality of it be my definition, the very “fuel” of my life.

“Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea.” – Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

I would read poetry about time, about childhood raptures — Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill” and Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” — and feel my very self there in the lines of words. Not just the story of it, but the poignancy it stirred, the pull between the thing once had and the thing now lost. The sadness of it, yet also the beauty! Terrible beauty. There seemed to be transcendence there, in the holding it all at once.

* * *

“This is what it is to be human,” I whispered to myself, a freshman in my dorm room, the heavy book of poems splayed open on my 17-year-old lap. Tears came easily. I was ready to take it on, to risk the pain I could see was inevitable, for the sake of love. Like loving my father, who was soon to die. Loving animals, whose lives would almost surely be shorter than my own. Loving a boy, even though the ones I really loved would surely break my heart. Loving school, though it would end when my father died, and I’d have to go out into the world, make my way there.

And later, much later, I would risk the radical love of giving birth to a child. What risk could top that one? Yet I would willingly face it down (twice), the ocean of it, the unending possibility of something going terribly wrong. My love bottomless, overwhelming.

I did it all, and I knew I was doing it. And though I didn’t deny the force of fear that always stood noisy sentinel beside all my dealings, I thought it had to be this way. I thought these treasures were worth the price of fear, the constant threat of loss, for the sake of a baby in my arms, a lover in my bed — for the sake of loving my own life, reveling in my aliveness.

How I loved it all!

* * *

It did seem to be a package deal: living life at full tilt, hurting hard, and always, ceaselessly, the fear. I’d have liked to make it otherwise, to do without the hurt, to be able to live and love fully, absent the underlying terror. But to me that was a nonsensical prospect. I’d have to die to lose fear — and then, I’d have lost it all, in one fell swoop: the baby with the bathwater. And I wanted to live! To live and live, to have the fullness of life. To stuff myself on it. If the price of that was fear as a container for love and savoring, for joy — well, I’d put up with it.

I cannot say what happened. To try to account for what changed inside, or why, is a useless thing. All I can say is, another possibility came to live in me. And when it set up its life in this very body, in the midstream of a life, it seemed — strangely — the most normal thing in the world. Again and again, in the uproar of its rearrangement of my inner world, I scratched my head and asked, “How come I never saw this as a possibility?”

* * *

Why don’t we? How come people don’t realize our options are greater than the one we seem to have been handed?

Here, love is unafraid, willing to allow whatever comes. I never felt this alive before — in all my passion, all my wanting and cherishing, my dread of loss. How can this be? How is it that love can be so big there is no room for fear, no place for it to set up housekeeping, no food to feast on?

* * *

I wish you well, my friend, as you continue your explorations. Perhaps you would benefit from the recording of my recent teaching gathering in Marlboro, Vermont. Many came together in a room. It was sweet — my first time in years. You will also find other audio offerings on that page. (If you were previously aware that some of the audio links were not working, be assured that they have now been restored.)

Thank you so much (those of you for whom it is possible) for your financial support, whatever the size.

Things that come along in life, at least the big things, are “supposed” to matter. (I don’t need to tell you what things. The list generates itself, if you give it a moment.) When nothing no longer carries meaning, in the long-accustomed way, what is it like to live that way?

What is it like when nothing any longer matters? When nothing “means” anything. Is a person depressed, in despair? Maybe it means they have no value system. If somebody you know (like the person in the mirror) says this is the case, and then says it’s profoundly restful to be that way . . . well, what to make of that?

Reactivity has drained away into the soil.

When a life development is allowed to be itself, how might that differ from the way a person is used to life’s realities landing? If you put the nothing-mattering thing alongside the familiar understanding of what it typically means, well, it’s a tad humorous.

* * *

If peace and delight are alive and well within, regardless of what’s going on, it may just be that something innate to us exists independent of what’s going on (or not going on) out there. For quite some time after awakening landed on me, I would periodically scan the landscape to see whether anything could account for the bizarre change. Nothing there.

How could it be that this new way was dependent for its sustenance on nothing? At some point I stopped asking silly questions, or putting the thing to this periodic “test.” Whatever came long didn’t mold the interior to fit it, reflect it, adapt.

Nor did it mean I was walking around wearing blinders. I kept being aware of poverty and violence all about me (sometimes in my own life). It did not mean it was a great day when the house my family lived in was demolished. It was just that the mechanism of piss-and-moan, regret and frustration, had weirdly crumbled into bits, like the roof and the walls of where my children had grown up, where my own life had spent its several decades.

It was just that all of it was taken in as the truth of life at the moment. Eventually I discovered that it was the fierce energy of opposition that had been the true source of pain. Life was soft, soft, soft.

* * *

And speaking of soft . . . When a life development cried out for bodied sorrow, I bowed my head to that. I do not protect myself from grief. Some have the idea that awake people don’t feel. Spare me a life without heartbreak. Without rejoicing, celebration!

Every day is a great day, basically. Reactivity has drained away into the soil. The most alive thing in all of us, the most essentially real, is radical allowing. There is not a morning I wake up (regardless of what’s going on nowadays) that I don’t wake up in profound gratitude that I am still alive. And that suffering left me years ago and has not returned.

I wish this for you. Meanwhile, if it isn’t that way, when light shines on a way you’re distancing yourself from reality, just allow yourself to see. Don’t try to change it. Maybe sometimes seeing this, in the moment it occurs, will open your heart a tad (and your body), enabling you to feel it.

* * *

What we don’t feel doesn’t go away. It revisits us later (or haven’t you noticed?). To the extent that we allow the fullness of whatever is there, we feel ourselves being alive. This applies with equal force to the negative and the positive. After a while it all feels the same, in a way: it’s all a piece of lived life.

And that opens the door to where I began: nothing mattering. It’s simply what is just now. You bow your head to all of it, and so there is peace.

* * *

I want to direct your attention to some possible sources of support for your explorations. Beth Miller’s recent talk on Awareness Explorers is a gem. You may also find The Humanness of Being Awake to be of use. The Watch page of my website now has the video of an interview that was previously on the “Listen” page. Scroll down to Mitchell Rabin’s “A Better World.” (While you’re on the audio page . . . not long ago some of the links there were not working. They have now been restored.)

I continue to be deeply grateful for donations, no matter the size.

That I have lived on this earth. That I have stood out in the black night, in the sky that comes all the way down to the grass, the wet grass. That my face has lifted to the stars, the fireflies. I have heard the owl in the dark woods. I have smelled the green and sweet air, with my whole body I have smelled and heard and touched.

I have ridden a truly wonderful roller coaster. I have loved. I have had just the best time. It is that I have lived, really lived, and been lucky lucky, so lucky. I have not missed the thing we were born for.

We have not missed that many-splendored thing.

When I was a girl, one of the movies (and books) I loved ended with this line: “We have not missed, you and I. We have not missed that many-splendored thing.” Already I have not missed it. All the rest is gravy, all the rest of whatever I get. I am not greedy for more, but glad of it, yes, if there is to be more.

* * *

What a thing, to be physical. I have no idea if there is anything else, another sort of life, another way to be. I’ll know about that when the time comes (if it does). I can’t be bothered with it now, with wondering about it. I have this! this here. If I were thinking about that, about the possibility of life beyond this one, I would be missing what’s in front of my face, my now, what my hands are on, or could be, if I weren’t escaped into my mind.

I would be missing the sweet face of my dog Casey, who is alive. Give me this dog, my fingers deep in her black fur that smells of old dog. I will not subject her to water, the kind that makes contact with her luscious coat. She hates getting wet. If she comes in from a necessary trip out into the rain (for her toilet is out there where the water is falling), when this happens, I drape a towel around her dear body and buff her. This is so good (she would say) that it almost makes it worth the misery of the rain.

I live in paradise. When do I ever walk out the door onto the porch that I fail to notice this? When does the world out there not take me into its arms, sweep me up in its smells, the shape of its terrain, its tall and green trees? How could I miss it?

I sit on the couch there, and the old dog works her way up onto her place beside me. Sighs into my leg. We are happy here. We are together.

* * *

It is that I had this, with her; that I got to sing Beethoven’s 9th several times in my life, and the Faure Requiem. That I had more than one passionate love affair, and had my heart broken too, more than once.

I feel done with that now, with that kind of loving. I had enough. It was good. I’m full, and happy to be empty. It all came and went. Life did that. Life still does that. I’m still here.

* * *

You’re still here, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

We won’t be, though. In a hundred years it will be all new people. It all just keeps going.

Live, my friend. Not for the future, not “so that.” ‘Cause it’s the only now you’ve got.

This was written 13 years ago, when Casey was quite old but still alive. I came upon it the other day. I’m 13 years older than I was then. Casey is a box of ash. In my heart, she lives to this day.