Category: Teachings

A few years ago I got it into my head to return to the western Massachusetts town I’d long lived in when first I moved north from Florida in 1980. To revisit places and people precious to me. To remind myself (and to savor anew) of all that had happened in my years there. It was one of the best gifts I ever gave myself. And how very timely it was to end up being.

We do not have forever to do — to revisit — things and people that have mattered, that have shaped us into who we are now.

Nor is this something to be entertained only by your elderly self. Maybe you’re quite young. But there’s always some cherished past, if you slow down enough to reflect on it. Places you associate with a certain era in your life. Maybe it was painful stuff, or perhaps where some reckoning occurred, or where you finally felt something you’d never allowed yourself to feel before (excruciating love, anger, regret, longing).

This is all about granting your beloved self the space to feel, to reckon with, what you have experienced in your life that has deeply mattered. No, it’s not “living in the past.” It’s about giving major things their due, maybe for the first time. Yes, it’s tricky business to differentiate between going back in time in order to savor and deeply feel, on the one hand, and on the other getting stuck there. Learn to discern the difference. (Maybe you already know what I mean.)

* * *

When I decided to go for it, to take several days to bring it all into being, it was some years after a dear friend of mine had died. So one place I went was to her home. I lingered there, recalling all the sweet times Mary and I had had there, the meandering walks up her road. I drove to see the place where I’d worked for a few years, trying mightily to prevent nuclear war. I was the assistant to the national head of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. It all meant so much to me, the pressure so extreme, that one day I found myself crumbling in the face of it all, unable to function. I had to leave my job for a time.

The building where it all happened was at the top of the same hill holding a lovely cabin. I’d gone to stay there over the course of many years when I needed a place of respite, or a chance to do some writing. There had also been significant reckonings in the cabin, turning points in my life. I went inside, sat, lingered. Oh it was glorious, every inch of it (even if it reminded me of some anguished times there).

And I wanted to see the house where I’d first lived when I moved north. I’d had a delightful landlady who became a dear friend, introducing me to all-things-New England. But the major incentive to go back there was that it had been the setting for a love that turned my life inside-out (and would, for decades afterward). I also drove to the graveyard where my landlady has long rested. I wanted to be with her, but I also wished to feel again the rapture I’d experienced ages before, when I’d come to an exhilarating clarity about a change my life was taking.

I drove to say hello to the beloved veterinarian I’d had years before. He lit up when he saw me, took me into his arms. We spoke of my beloved dogs and cats and rats that he’d taken such good care of. I also went to visit the long-ago National Coordinator of the Freeze Campaign. We hadn’t seen one another in so many years we couldn’t count them. He and I had shared experiences, all those years before, that no one but us could have understood: the intensity of our nonstop effort to prevent a nuclear holocaust (more than once we saw the sun rise, having been at it all night). He confided in me something he’d never told another soul. When I first arrived and he saw me there, he wrapped me in his arms and wept. It had never been this way with us, all those years ago. What a joy it was.

One oh-so-moving thing that occurred was that he’d long supposed I’d judged him for something. But I had not! You should have seen the relief spread over his face.

He was to die not long after. (See above about the timeliness of my visit.) How grateful I was — and am — that I went when I did. We do not have forever for such things.

* * *

But the place I wanted to see again that meant the most of all these things was the spot on a road where I’d come to know I wanted more than all other things to become a mother. How it had caught me utterly off guard, at the age of 28, when something in me had long supposed I might not enter the world of motherhood. I’d been driving around when first I moved north, becoming acquainted with my new world, when I happened upon a mama cow who had just that moment given birth. I was stunned. Pulled over, got out, and stood to watch as she ran her enormous raspy tongue over the newborn’s sticky body. Dangling from the mama’s backside was the remnant of the sac that had held her baby, amniotic fluid running down the backs of her legs. The wee being kept falling over as its mother licked it clean. I could barely breathe, the sight was so dear.

It was inevitable that I would one day give birth, and so I did — not once, but twice. The two best things I ever did. So of course, on that yummy day of going back to see those places that I’d never forgotten, I would park my car by that field, and remember. (And anyhow, I am a Holstein: that was my mother’s maiden name. 🙂)

One more thing comes to me, and maybe this will remind you of something kindred in your own experience. There was an apology I’d meant to make to someone on whom I’d inflicted a great deal of pain many years prior. The precipitating event had been unavoidable (regarding my decision for us to part ways). I never regretted what I had done. Still, in recognition of the suffering he’d experienced in its aftermath, I wanted to let him know how sorry I was. When I finally — decades later — came around to telling him, it meant all the world to him. If I’d had any idea, of course, I’d have told him ages before. Our relationship nowadays is quite wonderful.

So you just never know. And (have I mentioned this lately?) you don’t have forever.

Are there things whispering to you? If it matters, do it, my friend. You’ll be glad you did. Think of it as a way of honoring your beloved self.

---

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.