Teachings

Ten years ago I posted the Degrees of Consciousness. Many reported that they found it enormously useful. I offer it again today, in the hope that you will find it of benefit at this time. (Even if it helped you years ago, be assured that you are not who you were then.) – Jan

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This moment is enough. Life is enough. The way things are this moment (whatever the particulars) is plenty. The Latin root of “satisfied” is satis (in English, “enough”); the root of “grateful” is gratus (which means “for free”).

But these words of mine are not a lesson in language. Stick me with, love, while I get to the point.

* * *

When a person is truly in the now — even when it’s something experienced as bad (so long as full acceptance attends awareness of what’s happening) — then there is a sinking into the real. Bizarrely, this radical being-with can actually feel good, even as the thing itself is not so welcome. Because to yield puts us in the moment, and anything that brings us fully here feels good. Oh, maybe not so much the specifics of the now. It’s allowing the truth of reality that is restful.

This radical being-with can actually feel good, even as the thing itself is not so welcome.

All-that-“shouldn’t”-be has no meaning. None of this can be fathomed with the ordinary mind. Visualize an animal picking over the fresh bones of another creature, sniffing for remnant flesh, hungry for sustenance. What I struggle to describe is like that: fundamental, elemental as that.

This is not an injunction to go out and try to become this way. It is saying: when liberation comes, this is how you will have turned out to be. A person cannot try to experience every moment as enough and expect to thereby become that way. But when the blessing comes, when the morning is awakened to that all torment has been lifted from you like a delicate cloth as you slept, what you are sure enough left with is the constant feeling of enough.

You have been relieved of wanting, of dissatisfaction. Of judgment. Actuality overwhelms the possible, the desirable, the how-it-once-was.

* * *

Also — something Franklin Merrell-Wolff has written about in his books about awakening — the real is at something from a distance from you now (whoever “you” may be, a hazy thing for sure). Merrell-Wolff calls it the high indifference. You see the oh-so-real clear through, but you are no longer defined by whatever human life is delivering into your hands just now. You are not of it. You’re unflinching in the face of it, curiously unmoved in the way you’ve been accustomed to.

You see the world go on. Outer things work as they work, the way they always have. Meanwhile, delight surges through your bones in each delicate movement of your body. If you are sick, it’s okay. If money is in short supply, it’s all right. It’s just the way it is.

You are constantly in the middle of a miracle. You cannot go anywhere or do anything or have anything done to you that leads you to feel you’re anyplace but in a miracle. When someone lifts a metaphoric “gun” at you, the bullet goes through you and comes out the other side. (Yes, when Mahatma Gandhi had an actual gun aimed in his direction, it killed his beloved body. But those who witnessed the violence reported that he seemed to be, in the final moments, at his accustomed ease.)

* * *

There are subatomic particles that regularly streak through apparently solid masses — people, walls, planets — and are never felt, never seem to disturb what they pass through. Life feels like those subatomic particles. It goes right through you, but you don’t register it. Not in the old way anyhow.

None of it changes you. You are just the same as you were.

It is about satis: enough. If enough is the rule of the day, of the moment, then all is well, constantly and profoundly well. Even when your heart is breaking because someone you dearly love has just died.

You cannot make yourself be this way, I don’t think. God knows people try; it doesn’t seem to work. But if you wake up one morning and feel lighter, if you have the feeling of something having changed when you slept, you will notice it is this way. When dissatisfaction picked itself up and left you, when it peeled itself off every inch of your sleeping body and slipped out the window, it left you light, buoyant, at peace.

When you get up, feel how light you are. How willing to dance. How at ease you have become! What a blessing life has turned out to be. Satis, satis, satis.

* * *

It was thanks to Franklin Merrell-Wolff that I came to understand, now many years ago, what had happened to me when I stopped suffering. If you have not read anything by him, pick up one of his books. His language is somewhat formal and “stilted,” for he was writing in the long-ago era when that was the mode. But oh, my love, is it worth the effort! His insight into the marvels of clear-eyed consciousness is stunning.

I wish you well, each moment you live.

If it matters to you, act like it matters. Express it. Do something! Maybe this has to do with someone beloved in your life. Perhaps it’s got to do with a situation in the larger world.

It is a very big world. We have our up-close concerns (family, friends, life decisions, our own health and well-being). But we all exist in a context. We cannot have our eyes on only our immediate situation.

* * *

Yes, there is the here-and-now, this very moment. Registering the smell of something in the room, on the breeze. Focusing on what needs getting done this day. Sometimes the present moment is felt as a radical immediacy, a timeless stillness, where the larger world has ceased to be. This can be true even if you live in a war zone. There are oft-told accounts of that very thing, a bizarre and impossible-seeming moment of peaceful ease in the midst of an unmitigated nightmare. In the concentration camps in Nazi Germany, for instance. In kindred times and situations where it would be unbearable to “occupy” that surrounding circumstance, because it was (is, right this moment) truly perilous. In Sudan, say.

If you are fortunate enough to live in a part of the world that isn’t in an ongoing war or famine or flood — if you are lucky (as I am) to live in a country that is allegedly “free,” including free to vote — then express your gratitude for that blessing by taking the action of voting.

It really is, after all, one world.

* * *

Citizens of the United States are paying a good deal of attention to the upcoming election. We in the U.S. are (more or less) free to express divergent views, to protest. Some of us have protested the violence that continues unabated in the Middle East — even, as I write this, verging on all-out regional war. The world as a whole is in peril. As if the climate disaster weren’t already sufficiently imperiling.

It really is, after all, one world. That said, some parts of the planet are less subject to violence and poverty and war than others are. Some people have more freedom than others to take action, to express ourselves. I, for instance, have enough food and water. I’d like to say I’m not in constant danger of having a gun aimed at me, but alas, in the United States no one is free of that danger, not even the beloved children in school.

With all the mess of the country I dwell in, I count myself fortunate indeed to be in what calls itself a democracy. I have the ability to vote. And so I do. It matters to me. If I have this freedom — as so many do not — and do not exercise it, I am a fool.

I am not getting political here (though I realize it may look like it). Nor would I ever judge anyone for declining to express their values at the ballot box. The man I dearly loved for many years never voted in his life, so far as I know. It was up to him. That is one of the things freedom means, eh? I myself didn’t vote for years after I was old enough to. In that era — Viet Nam, Nixon — it seemed it was pointless to vote.

* * *

Never assume it’s somebody else’s job to take care of something that matters to you. It’s your job. It’s mine! However “lucky” or unlucky you are, wherever on the dear earth you dwell, do what you can to relieve suffering. To make it a better place for us all to carry on — as one planet. Take the steps you can to show you love your immediate world, but also the earth as a whole. Educate yourself, as I am trying like hell to do. Feed yourself, if you’re fortunate enough to have food. Provide for your little ones, for your elders, your neighbors, if you are able.

And if you live in a democracy, for God’s sake vote. Whatever your politics. If you don’t open your mouth and say what matters to you, then you don’t get to complain if things don’t turn out the way you wish they had.

Then, when the results come, accept what’s happened. You did what you could. There’s nothing for us all to do but to move on, from there. To be in that new now, whether or not it’s the one you would have chosen.

Be kind, regardless of other people’s beliefs. We are shaped by the world we grew up in, by our particular experience. In some sense we cannot help being who and what we are.

Nothing matters more than love. Period.

This little construction of lichen I’m just now gazing upon, exotically designed, whimsically colored, its spongy tendrils of greenish gray dotted at their tips with crimson, like something out of a Star Wars movie — something a child might produce with big bright crayons — it is the way it is because it works well, just the way it is, to keep itself alive. None of it is made for our pleasure. No entertaining God assembled anything with our delight in mind.

Yet it bemuses the human being, who pronounces the lichen “whimsy,” whose eyes see what it names exotic. Meanwhile, the plant simply is what it is, as the human is. It’s the same with this hillside I call beautiful — all the varieties of green, the birds in their busy communication it pleases us humans to call “song,” as if its function were aesthetic, or arose from joy.

* * *

Are the birds happy? Does it occur to them to enjoy life, or to feel morose when things don’t go well? Do they lament when it rains? That woodpecker who came, soaked, to my suet feeder: was it relieved when the sun finally came and did its drying work? The sympathizing human with her face at the window, making compassionate note of every saturated feather, the way bunches were clumped together like after a shampoo and towel-dry — did it ever occur to her that the woodpecker wouldn’t think to mind the rain?

Just do what you are doing. Don’t mind it. Don’t label it.

Birds aren’t “smart” enough to be crazy. Only humans have the brains to mind, to see the rain as off-putting, to perceive the hillside on a sunny morning as beautiful, whereas if rain is falling to pronounce the weather bad. Does the bird, huddling in the branches, wish the water would relent? It wouldn’t occur to an animal to wish, to be frustrated. To see the day as beautiful, or too full of things to do. Yet in some ways the woodpecker works harder than we do, and minds not a drop of it. The bird does what it’s doing and nothing else. It’s not planning ahead to what’s next. Nor is it visualizing what it would rather be doing. A nonhuman animal has no name for the sheer surge of aliveness, the purity of utterly focused attention, that fuels every moment of its life.

Only we need names. Words become stand-ins for reality. You may protest that we are not winged creatures. And isn’t our kind of language handy? Oh, it is handy. Fun even. Everything in its place though. We insert words between ourselves and the real. We look through language, through concepts. Words are interpretive lenses, and we become so accustomed to that kind of looking that we no longer can see, unimpeded. We invent tomorrow and yesterday, and today is lost. Let alone this now!

We find so many things to mind, to wish otherwise, that we never feel the plain aliveness fueling our animal selves. It’s the same vitality felt by the wet-headed woodpecker, working at the suet it pleased me to call “mine.” My suet, my woodpecker. My idea of how unfortunate it was the bird had gotten soaked, and how glad it would surely be when the sun toweled it dry. Talk about projecting.

* * *

This is what we do. We don’t know what it feels like to yield, to just be-with. To be awake, present. To feel our plain, unelaborated aliveness. We too work all day, as other animals do. Nor is this writing an injunction to go out into nature. It might appear that way, but no. Plenty of us are far from woods or the ocean. It’s an invitation to do what we do (work, talk, vacuum, drive, pay bills, help a kid with homework, wait in line at the store) — to do each thing as though it is okay to be doing that, and ONLY that, just then. As though there is no need to go ahead in the mind to the next item, or to the one prior.

If you could open a book of recipes alphabetically arranged, and open it to the letter P, and come to the makings for the delectable thing called peace, this is what you would find for ingredients. Just do what you are doing. Don’t mind it. Don’t label it. Do it with your pure attention. If your mind needs to be there too, let it do its good work.

If you’re balancing your checkbook, or explaining the order of things to your colleague, or marshaling a set of arguments for your child (who cannot see why doing homework matters), then press that wonderful noggin into service. Let it rip. When it’s done its job, allow it to grow quiet. If your mind isn’t needed for what is here and now — if you can wait in line without thinking about how to stand still and breathe (just do it!), without needing to pay attention to the shirt on the person in front of you — then your mind can be empty and airy and comfortable. This is the makings of a peaceful life, or at least a peaceful moment . . . which is all there is, anyhow. Ever.

Does the woodpecker think Boy, this suet sure is tasty? Does it remember the suet that was there last week and do a comparison of which was better? The bird is not grateful. Nor is this writing about gratitude. It’s about what-is. The suet the creature is putting its beak to just now is the suet that is. The other suet, from a week ago, has long since dropped from the woodpecker’s vent feathers to a branch below. That ancient meal has meanwhile fueled the muscle of the glorious wings, the swallowing of a subsequent berry. Each thing has had its effect, its outcome.

* * *

A person might think the mind is its own world, having its own terrible momentum, that there is nothing to be done about the life inside the cranium. It seems to carry on independent of any desire for peace that might show up around the edges, wistful, like a courting lover with no expectation of ever really coming there to hang its hat, put its feet up, and stay awhile. Some might suppose (as I once did) there can be no change in the tyranny that reigns inside the wordy head, so brimful of its own history, its dreams and grudges, its idea of what a life is supposed to look like, how the world ought to be.

You might believe this is just the way it is, that the mind has a life of its own, nothing to be done about it. That quiet well-being has to do with us and everybody around us being happy enough, fed and housed enough, safe enough — that peace is about the wars all being over, and somebody sane and good running the government, or at the very least our workplace. The idea that inner well-being is to be had when things on the exterior are roughly in order.

But life isn’t like that, or haven’t you noticed? Things on the outside will keep on being what they are, right up until the day the brain shuts down, and even after that, though we won’t be noticing.

Can you imagine that peace could be had, somehow, even while the mind carries on muttering to itself, running the way it has, morning-noon-and-night?

* * *

The only peace that’s to be had — the deep contentment of the woodpecker with the wet head, not glad when the sun comes out — the only one that’s a keeper, that cannot be rattled by what-all goes on, has to do with something in us, something we’ve already got, and it does not live in the mind. The mind is a noisy thing. It’s been taught to be that way, and it can be untaught.

We have more to say in the matter of mental racket than we half dream. Not by going at it via a full frontal assault. But by a little sneak around to the back side where the plug is, where the energy supply is that keeps it all going. Slip it out of the socket. Just by paying attention to what’s happening right now inside you. Don’t mind it. Don’t proclaim it bad. The plug slips out all by itself, simply by your observing the havoc of the mind.

Awareness is clean and clear: it simply sees. It has no agenda, no goal — to fix, complain, celebrate. Awareness is like light itself. It illumines what is before it. And most of the time what is within its field of seeing — if only we will tune into this — is the havoc being wreaked by the assessing mind.

Oh my friend, do tune into this capacity that is your innate equipment. You can see yourself thinking. Discover this, if you have not yet. Realize that if you were to wake up, spiritually speaking, it is there you would dwell ever after, in utter peace — however hard outer life might be, however much of a disaster the present moment may be.

I wish you well. This month’s podcast episode will address this same topic.

Jiddu Krishnamurti would sit very still before vast crowds in India and all over the world. People traveled great distances to be with the man, to take in what he had to offer. He referred to himself in the third person: the speaker, he would say. All of them sat together in the scorching heat of what his listeners tried so hard to understand.

What he embodied. What he lived.

Even when he was quite old and in decline, he would sit with them. Riches poured from his frail lips, from that ferocious, tender heart. Those before him drank in his words, longing to draw them into their own dear selves, so that they might be like the speaker.

He lamented all his life that he never seemed to get through. They kept supposing it all to be too complicated.

* * *

I never sat with him.

I understood what he was aching to get across to people. Though it was after the fact. It was some time after the thing had already happened to me that I came upon him. I sat with K’s words. When I watched talks of him (long dead by then) or read words in his books, it helped me to get what had happened inside myself. Oh, I said again and again. He was like this too.

What a blessing he was to me. Long after his death, I wrote a poem to thank him. It’s included in Love Incarnate. The lines are spoken to Krishnamurti, but really, the poem is “addressed” to those who have eyes to see, hearts to drink in the radical truth of their dear selves.

* * *

If only the thousands who came to sit with him, over the decades, could have seen how simple it was. How in the intimacy of one’s own heart it could all be known, shiny and silvery in the light of their innate pure awareness. What they (what I, the first five decades of my life) could not see. How it all was obscured by the dust and mess of what human beings kick up, the mold and residue of our ordinary confused lives. What miracle might have unfolded, if only a person could soften to herself, to himself.

What is the destination of those who seek? Always we arrive at the present moment.

If only we could let go of trying to wake up. Let go of angst, of time and its frenetic little dance. Unbutton the hot, heavy, suffocating clothing of all prior experience. And so come to encounter directly the truth animating all existence, our own blessed selves.

* * *

What is the destination of those who seek? Always we arrive at the present moment. Flawed and imperfect though it may be. No matter where a person has been before, what we think has been learned there, what wisdom accumulated: we dig and dig to get at the truth.

See how useless it is.

Here you are. Open your eyes, your mouth, your arms, your heart. The only real thing is this, here, now, just as it is. You are it. You are the moment, the atmosphere in which the only real is. Oh, not the you you’re used to thinking is reality. That is insubstantial, flimsy as gauze, readily burned as parchment. The light shines through it.

Let the light get hotter and hotter till the edges begin to singe, crisp, dissolve. Feel your blood grow warm with your own dissolution. Forget whatever might have been useful to you in the past. It is not useful here. If it taught you, you are taught. You do not need to remember it: it has done its work. There is no need to keep going over and over it in your mind.

Krishnamurti didn’t waste time. He didn’t know how. Every pore of him was alert, always. How he loved the world! His natural mode was stillness, even when he was in motion. He loved to take long, brisk walks. Each moment fresh and new.

Do not hide from the present. When you do that, you rush toward death. Why hurry? Hook your finger in the finger extended to you. It is your own. It wants to dance. For God’s sake, dance. Soon enough the curtain drops.