Category: Teachings

Yes, that’s a black hornet nest on my head. (Fortunately, the prior residents had vacated by the time I put it on.) I do like having fun. Well, it was hard to resist: when I happened upon the impressive piece of construction one day in the woods, once I’d ascertained its unoccupied status, I couldn’t help but notice it was just the right size for my head. So I put it on and walked home.

But this (are you surprised?) is not about black hornets.

* * *

Over the many years since I woke up, I’ve had to relearn plenty of lessons. Each time the same one would revisit, it would seem to hit me harder over the head than the time prior. Trying to get my attention, the way life in its unceasing kindness means to do. I wrote of this a bit in Love Incarnate. Bit by bit, I got to where the first time a message came swimming into my heart — for that was its landing place, not (as in days of pre-waking lore) my mostly-useless mind — I let it altogether in, bowed my head, and assented. Okay, message received, I said (sometimes out loud).

All of this was in marked contrast to how it had been my whole life prior, in which there was lesson after lesson after lesson. But my pride, my fear, my reluctance to look a radical truth in the face — all of these forces “made” me avert my eyes from what would have benefited me mightily to PAY ATTENTION to on the first go-’round (or at least the tenth). My failure to learn led to a major breakdown and endless terrible mistakes in judgment.

Does any of this ring a bell, my love?

* * *

Many stinging insects are not gifted the way black hornets are: that is, the later are entirely capable of coming in for a given attack multiple times. (Some stinging insects die after the initial venom-insertion.) Also, the hornet’s venom is impressively painful — as I was to learn one day some years ago. I had inadvertently encroached upon a particular one’s territory. It “warned” me once (inserting its hellbent stinger into my forearm), then backed up and came in for round two. Message received. I had to elevate that arm for a couple of days, keeping an ice pack on it pretty constantly, because every time I let my hand drop to the side, the increased blood flow to the wounded forearm cranked up the pain to considerable.

Which is rather the way we humans sometimes need to learn the same lesson on more than one occasion. Or haven’t you noticed?

The more self-aware you are, the more quickly you will learn — thereby being spared of yet another (this time more painful) attack. What typically happens, before awakening has occurred, is that when life delivers a message that might be perceived as threatening, we avoid taking in the truth it means to deliver. Because we don’t enjoy pain! Here is where the mischief-making, emotion-saturated life (and its companion “hornet,” the mind) comes in handy. It registers DANGER-DANGER-DANGER when an uncomfortable truth is hovering around the vicinity. Leading to one of the most terrible things the “excellent” mind is capable of: avoidance.

* * *

In my case, that had most memorably to do with the time I was looking away from the truth that the relationship I was headed into would be a colossal error. I was given three chances to get it. I’ll spare you the details, except to say that with each subsequent “hit-her-in-the-head-with-it” message, I was aware I was looking away from some uncomfortable truth — something that appeared to threaten what I then saw as my well-being.

Is it any wonder my devastating breakdown followed not long after? But it would take me years (decades, in fact) to understand what had gone on here.

So what’s the moral of the story, dear friend? It’s this: have the guts to know when you’re looking away. Here’s where taking your dear self seriously is an actual blessing. Slow down in a quiet moment and see if some kind of fear is running the show. Don’t think about it. Feel! Allow yourself to get vulnerable. Oh yes, it’s “risky” like crazy to be real with yourself. Darwin understood well that like all animals, we flee from perceived risk.

But there are cases in which our “excellent” human minds do us in, talking us into running full-tilt from whipping around to face a truth that would not kill us but might, in fact, save us. In the biggest of all possible ways.

* * *

I can’t tell you how many people have shared with me that the idea of awakening actually frightens them. I get it. You never know how radically it’s going to change things — not just you at the essence, but your relationships with others, maybe. If you notice yourself feeling a tad scared, just notice it. It’s normal. Anyhow, the you that’s a little worried isn’t the you you’ll be in the aftermath. See if you can laugh a little, okay?

Be brave. Do the gutsy thing. No matter how scary. Beats the hell out of yet another jab from the black hornet.

* * *

Many thanks for your kind donations, those who are able to manage one, whatever the size. I am deeply grateful.

Please be kind to all you encounter, “strangers” included. Above all, be that way with your dear self. There just isn’t time for it to be otherwise.

What you do, who you are, how others see you, what you achieve or fail at, what you imagine to be ahead. None of it is what matters about your (fleeting) human life. What matters is (1) that you notice you’re doing it all, and (2) what happens once you’ve noticed.

Normally what a self-aware person does is back up (in a manner of speaking), scrutinize it all, and make a determination to “do better.” But guess what? The person who does all of that is as sound asleep as they were before they became more self-aware.

I can almost hear you sigh here. Hang in there with me, love.

* * *

The miracle occurs when something in you backs up from all of that — including retreating from the one doing the watching. You’re standing at a kind of a benign distance from it all. Just looking, in an utterly neutral way. Not wishing for anything to change.

Right about now you wonder Okay, so who’s doing the looking? It’s natural to be curious about that. Let it go (or the next thing you know, your pesky mind has kicked back into its familiar high gear). When the part of you that can simply be aware is musing outside the whole familiar mess, merely registering what the regular you is doing, notice what the “larger you” is feeling like.

Peaceful, maybe?

You may find it helpful about now to pick up a pen or a pencil and make a drawing of what I’m trying so hard, in clunky words, to describe.

* * *

Yes, there IS a farther-back from it all where the truest you exists. Can you feel how restful it is? Can you imagine dwelling there all your days?

You cannot put something down if it’s actually part of you. The farther-back awareness that you most profoundly are is not troubled by the wish to change. It doesn’t take seriously any of the regular-person stuff (including the part of you that considers itself a seeker).

You can’t decide to set a thing down — like the desire to change. It falls off when the time is ripe for your eyes to open. To grow lighter. It can be irritating that these things happen on their own schedule (but the usefulness of irritation is that it draws your attention to the you that hardly matters).

* * *

Life is profoundly wise in this matter. The order and the timing of lessons, as we move along in our adventures, is driven by something that knows a whole lot better than we do what will serve us, and when. The thing to do is simply pay attention while each moment, each “period,” is under way. Just don’t try to take hold of the steering wheel. Remember that our school is going on constantly, whether or not we’re paying attention at the time.

It took me forever to understand this. Be patient, my friend. And no, you do not have forever. How about this very day? At the very least, invite your dear self to entertain the possibility that there could be fresh, lovely ways of orienting to your day-to-day.

Really. I would not lie to you.

* * *

You probably received a message from me awhile ago saying I’m moving toward more simplicity wherever I can in. As part of that, I’m no longer selling books from my home. All of them are available on Bookshop and elsewhere. See the Purchase page on my website.

Thank you so much for your kind donations, no matter the size. Each time I receive notification that one has arrived, I give my heartfelt thanks to the person. My cat must think me crazy by now, because I’m saying Thank you, love to somebody who isn’t even here.

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.