Category: Teachings

We generally ask a question because we hope to get an answer. Sometimes, though, the deepest benefit of asking comes of turning the eyes from a would-be response and looking back at the question itself. Doing this can be life-altering, maybe even more significant than a prospective answer. 

How bewildering: why bother asking if an answer isn’t forthcoming?

There’s something radically altering about seeing from the outside a landscape you’re used to inhabiting.

Occasionally you may hear yourself say something inside your head, wondering about a certain thing. Sometimes tuning in to your thoughts can lead somewhere significant. This is what happened to Eckhart Tolle. Deeply depressed, he’d just then said he could no longer live with himself. Then, having noticed that thought, he grew curious: “Are there two of me — an I and a me?”

Could it be that there was a consciousness alive in him that was able to observe what went on in his head? The simple act of stepping back and looking at what he’d just said to himself gave rise to that wondering. It led, in short order, to his waking up. 

By his seeing the thought, everything changed — not just the depression. The relevatory moment is recounted in The Power of Now.

* * *

The transformative power of such an inquiry has to do with where the looking occurs from. It’s like stepping back and looking at the terrain one is used to looking from. You’re taking in the familiar landscape. It’s recognizable. But there’s something radically altering about seeing from the outside a landscape you’re used to inhabiting, as if it had been your entire reality. 

When we’re imprisoned in our heads, as Eckhart had been, their content is all we know. We are trapped inside the mind’s narrowly-defined world and cannot imagine there is anything “out there.” Typically we look unconsciously through a thought pattern, as if gazing through a lens. Until now we had not seen the lens itself.

The moment this occurs, a light has turned on. It’s a true game-changer.

We do not necessarily “decide” when to have a perspective change. It may occur as it did for Eckhart Tolle, courtesy of curiosity. It may come on its own, when the time is ripe. That’s what happened in my own case, the night something caused me to look at fear, not through its defining, imprisoning lens.

Note: I was not thinking about fear. Conscious awareness — plain seeing, unencumbered by ordinary thought — had just entered the picture.

* * *

From outside of it all, a thing you’ve been unconscious of may become startlingly visible. On the one hand, all you see is weirdly familiar — you do recognize the terrain — but on the other, you seem to be looking at what’s there from a new point of view, perhaps even from a great distance.

The result may be that a long-buried emotion or thought pattern is seen and allowed for the first time. This can be unnerving; there is a reason we hold down these things, averse to acknowledging or feeling something threatening or painful. Something may be at long last viscerally felt (grief, say, or guilt) that was denied space until then.

Perhaps it’s a belief we never realized we had (like the one I had that said An imperfect person like me could never become free). Maybe it’s an unacknowledged desire for a major life change, because to pursue it may be perceived as risky. We’re simply seeing what has been revealed, without judging it, not necessarily with an eye to changing anything. These moments are turning points.

All of us carry unconsciously held assumptions, desires, and beliefs. It’s part of being human. These forces are often what most deeply motivate us, yet typically we are unaware of them. There is a reason they tend to live in the subconscious: it is at significant risk to the ego that we invite them into the light of conscious awareness. Because once that happens, we cannot go back. There’s no pretending not to know what we have seen. Playing with a full deck, knowing and feeling what deeply animates us, is crucial to waking up in a stable way. If the revelation hasn’t occurred in the lead-up to awakening, it surely will in its aftermath.

* * *

When it dawned on me that the fear I’d long been subject to was an actual option, not (as I’d unconsciously believed) something I was inevitably at the mercy of, it changed my life. If anyone had suggested before that I was “choosing” terror, it would have infuriated me.

In that same vein, if someone had told me that being scared would have no bearing whatever on whether a dreaded thing actually happened — that I was entirely without control over the feared future — I’m not sure I would have been able to bear the truth of that.

What I ultimately saw, long after awakening occurred, was that I’d been imprisoned by the unconscious belief that fear might give me a measure of control over the unpredictable, uncontrollable future.

The bottom line was that I’d made the unconscious “choice” to feel perennially fearful. It beat the heck out of confronting the awful truth that I could neither predict nor alter whatever may lie ahead, nor avoid whatever pain it may entail.

* * *

I remember realizing that what I’d called the “need” to do or to have a certain thing was not in fact necessary. I’d always believed I needed the respect of other people. I was bound and determined to ensure the well-being and happiness of my children when they were young.

To be sure, these things were deeply wanted. I was to discover ultimately that the perceived need for others’ admiration had everything to do with what went on in my head. I kept unconscious the supposition that if others thought well of me, that meant I was a good person. As for guaranteeing fulfillment and safety in my kids’ lives . . . well, if you have loved and cared for children, need I say more about the ultimate lack of control over such things?

Asking yourself what motivates something you habitually do — above all if it’s something you tell yourself you “must” do — can turn on a light. Is it done from mere habit? Maybe you’re unconsciously concerned how somebody might judge you if you stopped.

If it’s a spiritual practice such as meditating, it can be fruitful to look at the why of it. Do you sit for meditation because it nourishes you? Is the experience peace-inducing, illumining? Is it more like a task or a habit, a means to the perceived end of waking up? Is there a buried belief that there must be a “method” to deliver you to the land of awakeness?

Maybe, as happened with Eckhart Tolle, all that needs to happen is a moment in which your awareness sees yourself thinking something. Then a question pops up, and everything changes.

Ask yourself this: Why do I do the things I do? Hold still awhile. Just look.

* * *

One of the pronounced features of wakefulness (whether fleeting or stable) is the coming to rest in reality. One with whatever is real, you are entirely transparent to yourself. Nothing is “walled off” from awareness, as it likely was historically, including whatever might have been deeply buried.

At bottom, it’s all about being real with yourself. It might have been hard to imagine such a thing could be, back when you wanted to fix yourself.

Here’s a question worth asking: Could I die this very day? Here’s another: If I knew this day would be my last, would I spend it the way I’m spending it now? Is there another way you’d rather live? Are you keeping that buried?

Do you think you’ve got forever?

Just look. Step outside the landscape you’re accustomed to and look. You don’t have to do anything necessarily. But at least you’ll be playing with a full deck.

Being real with ourselves is pure gold. It just might shake us awake.

The storied container of a person’s recollected history is a kind of static object that exists in the head. Mental memory is distorted by interpretation and sculpted by a sense of identity, helping maintain the ongoing illusion of a self. There’s the temporal sense of ancient history relative to something having occurred more recently.

Awake or otherwise, whatever has shaped each of us into what we are animates us until we die.

By marked contrast, the experience of profound heart-opening — accompanied by the dissolution of temporal boundaries distinguishing the now from before — makes vivid the continuity of all of a person’s lived life. The stilling of the mischief-making mind enables the heart to take over.

Yet even in liberation, prior experience continues to animate the human heart. Pieces of the past that dwell in our hearts, rinsed of crippling meaning, continue to be a part of who we are. This bodied “memory” is markedly different from the mental rehashing of an earlier time. Nor does a present-moment revisiting of earlier experience necessarily constitute “living in the past.” It can more accurately be said that the past lives in us. It is, after all, the accumulated bounty of our experience that’s made each of us into what we are (whether or not it’s all retrievable via ordinary recollection).

Consciously entering a moment of one’s history in a bodied way (not in the head) — palpably sensing the reality of the past’s ongoingness, right now — is akin to the discovery of a new dimension. It’s as if one previously has known only two dimensionality, having features of just left and right, forward and behind. Now, abruptly, the present is endowed with three dimensions, where up-and-down has been added to the prior experience of flatness.

Here’s another way of looking at it. In what has been called the fourth dimension, all of time is said to co-exist. The explosion of cherishing lands us in the space where all our personal history is concurrent, with the past “contained” in the present. Whatever has been experienced, whatever continues to dwell in the heart (independent of a mental accounting), is still real. The re-collected experience is palpable in the body, in this moment. 

These are the words of T.S. Eliot:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future.

The poet is saying that in some sense, all of time co-exists. Each moment of a person’s lived life is the present, contained in immediacy. It continues to animate us now, the sweet and the sorrow of whatever has occurred. No matter whether it’s been grieved or celebrated, learned from or disregarded, consciously recollected or forgotten, or suppressed. 

Nor can the mind hope to understand how this can be; any attempt to do so is inevitably reductive. This is not about ordinary memory; it has nothing whatever to do with the interpreting mind. Yet something in the alive human body — the same something able to register momentary aliveness — registers the truth of it.

To know the profound blessing of being aware of what has shaped your human life — while no longer being at its mercy, or defined by it — is one of the miracles of wakefulness. Awake or otherwise, whatever has shaped each of us into what we are animates us until we die.

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]

A human being blessedly is endowed with a dual capacity: to experience our oh-so-mortal physicality and simultaneously to attune, in the stillness of the now, to the timeless reality of which we partake. To be incarnate is to inhabit a body, even as we can detect — very nearly feel, in a palpable way — a larger truth enfolding and saturating our temporal existence. This means that in addition to attuning us to the sensory world, the body is the “vehicle” through which we know the timeless now. 

Here is what spiritual awakening is about: living a fully human life — brimful of love, death, and (yes!) profound sorrow — all the while being neither defined nor imprisoned by any of it. To partake consciously of our twin endowments is the greatest good fortune imaginable. 

Many a well-meaning seeker, aching for freedom from suffering, will turn spirituality into a means to an end.

Our capacities may seem incompatible and irreconcilable, but they are not. Both are thrillingly real. Only to the ordinary mind (or in reductive religious or spiritual orientations to “reality”) do vastness and mortality appear contradictory. Attempting mentally to reconcile the two is a waste of effort, of precious life.

* * *

The term incarnation classically is used to refer to Jesus Christ. The historical figure was a man. He also is said to have been the son of God. Nor is it delusional — or blasphemous! — for you or me to sense that we too partake of the mystery that gave rise to Christianity. I cannot imagine the historical Christ having wished for us anything sweeter than palpably to know the intersection of time and timelessness. Nor is it relevant whether we consider ourselves Christians. None of what Christ was about has remotely to do with a system of belief, which cannot hope to be anything but reductive.

Any religious system, its structures likely infused with ideas and dogma, is a pale and sad diminishment of the underlying reality it points to. Yet most organized religions, most of which involve the existence of a deity, appear to have arisen from a deep intuiting of the larger truth of existence, in many cases thousands of years ago. 

A good deal of contemporary spirituality unfortunately is subject to the same phenomenon. A spiritual framework may well shed light on the larger truth of things. Yet many a well-meaning seeker, aching for freedom from suffering, will turn spirituality into a means to an end, rather than simply taking refuge in its wisdom as each moment of life arrives. Perennially keeping the eyes fixed on a desired future looks over the head of what is, just now. The desire to awaken thereby (most poignantly) actually interferes with the prospect of coming to know radical peace — to see that “it” is already here, however seldom it may be experienced. 

Evidence of this phenomenon is the nondual allergy to the use of the word “I,” along with the tortured practice of referring to oneself in the third person (“the character”). What’s wrong with having a name, with being a somebody? As if using the correct lingo had anything whatever to do with attuning to reality! It is a colossal squandering of life energy, altogether missing the point, without benefit for one longing to become free of mental constructs and identity. Isn’t it clear that the strained effort to say-it-right is the activity of the very mind that’s in the way of radical truth? However well intended, it’s all misguided and useless. 

Yet the underlying wisdom of nonduality — rather like what underlies much religious doctrine — is surely profound. It points to the possibility of being an “I” without its generating torment. When a person is relieved of crippling attachment to the self, cleansed of the familiar identification and belief, inhabiting a human skin can turn out to be delicious. Because none of mortal experience is any longer mistaken for what we are.

Isn’t that the point, after all? To get to be a person and yet not to be lost in the head? To be liberated from lifelong identification with what life has endowed us with, good or bad? What more could a person wish for?

* * *

In the months following my awakening, one of the more stunning moments of dawning had to do with my finally deeply “getting” Jesus Christ. I was in my car and suddenly had to pull over, lest I plow into another vehicle. I needed stillness just then, to enable the shocking realization to register fully. I could never forget it: I saw — actually felt, inside my skin — the truth of that man’s existence. I felt how his presence palpably shimmered — shimmers still, to this day — with an aching tenderness. It’s the wish that each of us could know what he came to realize in himself: that we all are both human and divine. That there’s no contradiction whatever. Blasphemy? Only to a mind imprisoned by dogma. 

[From a forthcoming book by Jan Frazier]

We keep getting older. From the moment we’re born, each day we’re older than we were the day before. This is vivid if you’re around a baby or a little child. If you’ve lived awhile, you can observe the changes in yourself in the mirror, in photos.

Aging — even when we’re young — is our friend. To those of us, I mean, who are trying to become more conscious. Perhaps more at peace. Aging accompanies us everywhere we go. And so (like much of ordinary life) growing steadily older can be a helpful teacher. It can enable us to open our eyes more fully on the truth of things.

This very moment is all we’ve got.

The truth of things: What do I mean by that? I’m saying we don’t have forever. For anything. This is not intended to heap on more discomfort and anxiety; many have plenty of that already. What I’m saying is meant to land us in reality.

That word reality tends to be surrounded by unwelcome associations and feelings. Isn’t that telling? The last thing many a person wants is to be reminded of reality. And yet what gets called spiritual liberation is about coming at last to rest in what is real. Imagine: that relaxing into the truth of things, without recoiling, is utterly peace-inducing.

* * *

Many enter the spiritual life imagining that being awake is a condition of otherworldliness — an escape from pain. The wish to feel better may be why they got interested in spirituality in the first place. We’re so used to thinking that “reality” is the enemy, the cause of enduring human pain. The culprit never was reality: it was — it is — what the thinker does with life that generates the torment. What waking up delivers is an end to the particular pain inflicted by the mind.

We know life will come to an end at some point, however infrequently we let ourselves look that truth in the face. We notice, for instance, that particular periods of our lives have unwound and become a part of the recollected past. If you’ve lived long enough, you’ve observed this.

Back to reality. We don’t have forever to get real with ourselves. To get in touch with what really matters to us. To make changes, where those are possible, in how we live. When the moment comes when death is staring us down (not “if,” dear heart, but when), then it will all be blindingly clear. However belatedly. If only, a person laments.

“If only” what? If only I had slowed down long enough to be truthful with myself about what really matters to me. To see how I was doing things I didn’t really want to do . . . because I “had” to. If only I’d told that person how much I love them. That I was sorry.

If only I’d paid more attention to my sweet dog. To the people and things that are dear to me. If only I had slowed down every now and again to let myself feel all of this.

* * *

Brevity is our best friend, if we will allow it to be. For decades I told myself “I don’t have time. I’ll get to it tomorrow.” But tomorrow never came. I mean, we don’t LIVE tomorrow. 

We live now. All the living we’ve ever done happened in some now. This very moment is all we’ve got. Ever. Let the aging face in the mirror remind you of the things you deeply value. Don’t make yourself sorry. You’re alive! Live as though you’re alive, as though being real with yourself, and with others, is a profound blessing.

And who knows? Maybe it will wake you up.

A new year has begun. “Happy New Year,” we wish one another. But what if we greeted each new morning (our own or someone else’s) with “Happy New Day”? What if we saw each day through new eyes, a succession of fresh moments? Imagine approaching life as the gradual unfolding it is, each moment brimming with possibility.

Why do we welcome the new year? We want to move on from the painful or disappointing past. We like to hope things will get better in the coming times. Some of us make resolutions; some lament that the promises made the year before never quite came to fruition.

Is there something that might be learned from this repeating cycle of hope and regret?

For heaven’s sake linger. Do not protect your heart. The cost is dear indeed.

Perhaps the annual tradition can be a kindly reminder that all we ever truly have is this lived moment. It’s in the now that we sense our aliveness. And yes, it is also in the living moment that we can entertain fresh possibility: the prospect of turning a corner that has long wanted turning. Who knows what holding still and quiet might put us in touch with? Being really here, in the present, is a wide-open door to discovery. To the realization that this thing really matters to me, whatever it may be. Maybe in a lingering moment of stillness, there can come the deep recognition that I could actually do this. We see that a thing long wanted deserves to stop being put off.

Why do you suppose twelve-step recovery programs insist that confronting addiction means one day at a time? Every scrap of life (whether you’re an addict or not) is just that: it’s what’s happening now. Not tomorrow; not next year.

Right now: this very day.

* * *

In the last couple of days I have been taking down my Christmas tree, sweeping the fragrant pine needles from the floor, lingering to smell them as they collect in my dust pan. I’ve been putting away beloved ornaments, like the foil-covered cardboard star fashioned in my youth. That star has crowned my grown-up Christmas trees for decades.

The holiday season is my favorite time of year. I love going out to get a Christmas tree, driving it home, putting it up, hanging the ornaments. I delight in thinking up presents for loved ones. Maybe above everything else, I revel in the music of the season, joyfully singing along with recordings, joining in with the annual community Messiah sing.

I’m well aware that for some of us, the season is a time of acute stress and dashed expectations. But for me, at least in recent years, it’s pure joy. I linger over each ornament dangled from a tree limb, revisiting its history, delighting in the memory of all it summons. 

There is the leather ornament made by my father when he was dying of cancer. Yes, it stirs the memory of his painful death, of his last Christmas, when I was eighteen. All the more reason to cherish the ornament: for it reminds me of when he was here, a living presence in my young life. This is all “contained” in the round leather disc that graces my tree each year.

Because I so enjoy the holiday season, it is inevitable that when the time comes to say goodbye to it till next year (should next year come, for I cannot be certain of that), I will be sad to let it all go.

And here is where we come to the business of not-having-time-to-hurry.

* * *

Anything cherished that is brief (for all things are fleeting) deserves to not be hurried past. Oh, but what does it mean to linger over a thing being let go? It means allowing myself — your self — to dwell there as long as the savoring heart desires. So for me just now, putting away the things of Christmas, I take my time. I give each thing its due. I let my heart dwell awhile in the joy of it all, not wishing to protect myself even a little from the sorrow of the ending.

You may say — oh, this is silly, all of this attention to putting away seasonal ornaments. Oh dear heart, this is not about what might appear to be trivial. For sometimes what we are saying goodbye to is a loved one in hospice care, or a job we’ve enjoyed for years and are now letting go. Perhaps a dear friend is moving away. Whatever it is, we owe it to ourselves to not protect our hearts from the ache of loss. For love — which is all this is about — inevitably entails change, some of it painful.

What if I hadn’t allowed myself to feel the deep cherishing for my father, when he was still here to love? I knew his diagnosis was terminal. Something in my youthful self also knew I didn’t have forever to love him. That after was going to be much longer than the years I had gotten to spend time with him. Nor did any of this quiet knowing protect me from protracted and terrible grief, once the box cradling his body had been lowered into the earth.

* * *

We perennially protect ourselves from sorrow, supposing that “if I hurry on to what’s next, I can avoid the hurt.” If, say, you’ve been disappointed (yet again) by the holidays, or by the relationship you thought might be “the one,” the tendency may well be to get on with the next thing, or to try to forget the past, pretending it didn’t really matter.

All our lives we labor to avoid pain, above all the pain the heart is subject to. But to protect ourselves this way is to live a muted life. For cherishing carries a risk: we might lose the person, the job, the time of year. Our own lives. Over time the heart shrinks, with less capacity to love in an unbounded way.

Yes, each thing is brief. I can’t know if I’ll have another Christmas. The awareness of that truth could lead to my hurriedly putting away ornaments, to discarding fragrant needles without pausing to drink in their scent one last time. We turn our backs all our lives on the painful prospect of loss, of brevity. No, I tell myself (as I urge you, dear heart) to sit down on the floor and lift the dust pan to my nose and smell the residue of the beloved tree. It’s a crime to let the prospect of a breaking heart cause you to hurry on to what’s next.

You don’t have time for that. Let yourself know this, at long last. What a gift to yourself! And it didn’t cost a nickel or need wrapping. For heaven’s sake linger. Do not protect your heart. The cost is dear indeed.

I wish you a blessed new day, a moment at a time. So much love to you.

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