Category: Teachings

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.

At our essence, we human beings are the same as one another. Nor are we apart from the world we dwell in. (This is not something the ordinary mind can understand, so resist the temptation to try.)

Someone recently asked why it meant so much to me to be in Ojai, California, where I traveled not long ago. Ojai is where Krishnamurti lived much of his life. It’s where he woke up, where he took countless delicious walks in the natural world, and where he would finally come to the end of his long life. He gave many talks in Ojai, trying earnestly, all his very long life, to help others experience what it was like to not suffer.

* * *

Ever since my awakening in 2003, I had longed to go to where he had been. For in the aftermath of that radical change, Krishnamurti’s writing had been such a blessing: his writing helped me fathom what had happened. For decades I dreamed of traveling to Ojai. At long last, some time ago, it seemed I needed to let go of that desire.

That is how it feels to me, when I take my walks in the woods.

Then it came to be, to my delighted surprise, that circumstances conspired to get me there after all. And so I was able to see — to taste, to feel — the places where K was flooded in such extraordinary joy.

It was above all when he was in the presence of the natural world that this occurred: the hills, his fellow creatures, the ocean. The air, the earth his shoes moved over. All of it.

He was it. And that is how it feels to me, when I take my walks in the woods. This is why I relate to him, and to how life felt to the man.

* * *

K did not write often of what it felt like to be himself, plainly that. His writing generally was intended to be of use to people. A precious few of his books portray the embodied human experience of his day-to-day, the unity of his in-motion body through the trees, with the clouds and earth, birdsong, the unceasing movement of sky, the scent of the non-human creatures among whom he moved. Two I especially cherish are Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal and Krishnamurti’s Notebook. These are not “teacherly” volumes. They allow the reader into the man’s experience, to taste the continuity of him and what he moved through: the utter non-separation.

As I do now, he struggled to find words to express the unboundedness of himself and the glorious natural world in which he moved.

* * *

Some years ago, I realized I wanted to live alone. Because without another person occupying the house, it wouldn’t be necessary for me to need to “remember,” at intervals, that I was in some sense separate from the other. You can’t have a conversation unless there are two of you there, the going back-and-forth in an exchange. There is a perceiver and a perceived, one speaking and the other listening, taking it in.

I shared the house, in those days, with the man who was the love of my life. Choose to live apart from him? But if there was anything I cherished even more than that man, it was the extraordinary palpable experience of utter non-separation. So we began to live apart, though we stayed dear to one another all his remaining years.

There had come to be a strong preference to live in the experience of unity, to forgo the need to “pretend” to a distance I didn’t feel. I had landed in daily solitude. I struggle to describe all of this in Love Incarnate: Twenty Years After Awakening.

* * *

When I’m reading one of Krishnamurti’s luscious descriptions of those walks he went on in Ojai, it’s as if I am walking with him. So to blessedly walk the land he walked, all those years ago — to smell the air he breathed, see the miraculous colors of the still-abundant hummingbirds, wander the hills surrounding the buildings he was in — was the sweetest of dreams come true.

You are the whole world, my friend. You are all your senses drink in, with such lusciousness. For God’s sake (for your own dear sake!) slow down and notice it all.

Revel in it. You don’t have forever to do so.

Which is to say, brace yourself. You don’t get to be “free” without having the self basically destroyed. The precious, familiar self, I mean. The one that’s defined fun in particular terms, and torment, and freedom. All of it with a match suddenly put to its kindling.

Well, think of that blazing orb 93 million miles away. How it does light us and all our dealings. It keeps us comfortably warm without overdoing it. But we’d better not get too close. Yes, it might illumine what’s going on inside, what keeps us limited. But then the heat gets turned up. Pretty soon we’re burned to an unrecognizable crisp.

The rejoicing reaches to the most distant star.

Yes, do move toward it. By all means, when you feel the sun has taken you into its transforming arms, let yourself go — the self you’ve always thought you were. Bit by bit you find a way. I managed, when the time was right. But oh my, do you then discover! And yes, the rejoicing reaches to the most distant star. You keep not being able to believe how different you are.

* * *

And while you hold this in mind, whatever you suppose it might be like, whatever you think it’s been like for somebody else (me, for instance), laugh at yourself. Because you have no idea until you get there. And if you’re anything like me, when you get there, you may not even know where it is you’ve landed.

All the while an enormous kindness attends it all.

We can’t get there until we’re ready. We can’t rush it. Yes, you may say, I’ve been ready for decades. Or so you thought. But you can trust that when the time is right, it’ll happen. You can rest in it, and it will carry you, like a baby in its tender arms.

It turns out we were wrong about every scrap of it: well, that’s sure what happened in my case. As in the case of many others I’ve spoken with about what it was like in the aftermath.

* * *

Is this one of those “be careful what you wish for” things? No, not really. It’s just to say don’t be surprised if precious little of your old self appears to still be operative. Which is why when waking up first happens, it can take some time to register what’s happened. To adjust.

But we do, over time. Inch by micro-inch. And the change never ceases. At least, in my first 22 years of this wild ride, stability has been mostly short-lived.

But what a life. Oh yes indeed, it’s really something. It’s worth everything. So long as you don’t exert yourself in the aching longing. Just relax.

No, really.

So much love to you, my friend.