by A H Almaas
You want to practice awareness as much as possible. What you need to remember about your practice is that at all times—whether sitting in meditation or having a meal or talking with a friend or listening to somebody giving a lecture—you can be present and aware. You can remember to be present to what is going on. Learning to be real must begin with recognizing what is real in our experience, and that always begins with being aware of where we are in the present moment.
EXPLORATION SESSION
Bringing Awareness to Where You Are
This exercise will help you to attend more fully to where you are. Begin with your experience right now. What is going on? Where are you in this moment? What is happening to you? What are you feeling, sensing, thinking, noticing around you?
You want to feel where you are. You want to see it, experience it, recognize it, understand it. You don’t want to go anywhere; you are not trying to accomplish anything. You just want to find out where you happen to be in this moment and to explore where you are consciously, fully and with awareness and presence.
After you’ve done this for a while, consider the experience you’ve just had. Your awareness can expand and deepen, or become limited and more constricted. What expanded your awareness? What limited it?
CHAPTER 3
Hands Off Your Experience
IN CHAPTER 2, WE DISCOVERED that the way we learn how to be real, how to be ourselves, is by knowing our True Nature. To be real and to be ourselves means being our True Nature. And to be just where we are is the closest thing in ordinary experience to being our True Nature.
It is useful to note here that the teaching about being where we are is not necessarily the most profound teaching, nor is it necessarily the teaching that will immediately bring us into the deepest condition or state of consciousness. But it is a teaching that is appropriate for any condition—for each of us, wherever we are.
All the instructions on being real actually come from True Nature. So, the challenge is to learn how to listen and find out what our True Nature is telling us about being real and how to practice.
TRUE NATURE SAYS, “HANDS OFF!”
Our minds usually want to make things complicated, but the basic instruction of True Nature is quite simple. It says: “Hands off!” That is the primary teaching. Don’t do anything. Completely cease anything you are trying to do to yourself. Hands off your own experience.
People naturally wonder what that means, because “hands off” sounds like passivity, that we should just let everything happen to us and not take any action in the world. But True Nature doesn’t mean hands off the activities of your life; it means hands off your experience. However you experience yourself, whatever arises in your awareness—that is to be left alone. That is not to say that when you are hungry, you shouldn’t eat. And it isn’t to suggest that if somebody is attacking you, you shouldn’t defend yourself.
I’ll give you a simple example. Let’s say you take a bite of a peach and discover that it is rotten. What is the teaching? Hands off! Hands off means that I take a bite, I experience the rotten taste, so I put the peach down, but I don’t put away my experience of the rotten taste. Many people misunderstand hands off, thinking it means that they should continue eating the peach. But that’s not what it means. The rotten taste is already in my mouth. I already have it as an inner sensation that is arising in my experience. If I try to put that sensation away, I am dividing myself; I am saying no to something in my experience. So when we say, “hands off,” we mean hands off whatever arises in our inner experience.
Hands off also applies when the peach tastes wonderful. When we taste how good it is, we sometimes want to hold on to that experience. Then hands off means that I eat the peach, and I enjoy it without trying to intensify the experience or make it last longer. It does not mean that you make yourself stop eating the peach so you can practice nonattachment. The trick to hands off is that you enjoy the delicious peach as it is—without trying to hold on to it, without putting away your feelings, and without having to put away the peach.
In the case of the rotten peach, you taste it and you put it away; with the delicious peach, you taste it and continue eating it—but in both instances, your mind is not doing anything to manipulate your inner experience.
That is what True Nature teaches us. It doesn’t do anything to itself. It just is. So what we need to learn is how to be just like that. That is what the practice is. True Nature doesn’t say, “Do this or do that.” Rather, it tells us not to do things that interfere: “No pushing, don’t manipulate, that’s not it.” Whenever we want to do something to ourselves, it tells us, “No, hands off—leave your experience alone.”
So, to practice is to learn how to leave yourself alone. Imagine you are with a person or a group of people that is always telling you what to do: “Do this . . . this is no good . . . you should change that . . . no, no, this is terrible; do it the other way.” How would you feel? You would want to be free of them, right? We naturally dislike coercion when it comes to our inner experience. Even if you don’t have people like that in your life, the problem is that those people are all inside of you. Their voices keep trying to push you in one direction or another.
And if we have been doing inner practice, one of the more prominent voices is always trying to make us better, more spiritual. We are trying to make ourselves enlightened. We are trying to squeeze ourselves into some kind of state. We are trying to corral ourselves into a particular condition. So, let’s say you sit down to meditate one morning. If you are sitting because you want to do something to yourself to get someplace, then you are interfering. If you just sit—that’s all—without doing anything, you are practicing. But that’s rarely the case. That’s because there are such things as spiritual schools and teachings and practices, so the moment we sit to meditate, we think we are going to do something to get someplace.
That is the trap, the paradox, of spiritual practice. You are trying to learn not to do anything, but the very fact that you are sitting implies that you are striving to accomplish something, to reach some kind of spiritual state, or maybe attain an enlightened condition. The moment we go in with that attitude, we are already pushing in our consciousness, in our soul; we are trying to make things go in a certain direction. An operation has been set in motion to achieve a certain result.
So even though our spiritual teachings tell us that there is nothing to accomplish, that isn’t real for us, so we keep manipulating our experience. We can’t help but feel that we need to accomplish being ourselves in some way. Now there is nothing new about that self-manipulation; even before we learned anything about spiritual work, we were always trying to change our everyday experience. We judged it and devalued it and tweaked it and squeezed it. We pushed it and pulled it and held on to it. We have always tried to make ourselves feel something that is different from how we actually feel, because we have it in our minds that however things are in our experience is not the way they should be.
For instance, maybe when you were growing up, you were never able to accomplish small things such as being patient with your little sister or brother or always being good to please your mother. Now the stakes are higher, so you are really in a fix. Now you are not just trying to be good or patient, you are going for enlightenment! Now your job is to figure out how you can manage to get enlightened, so you focus on doing spiritual practices—chanting and meditating and inquiry and whirling or whatever it is you do—and you never leave yourself alone.
But what practice does our True Nature recommend?
We can be guided here by noticing the way that True Nature relates to whatever is happening to us. Let’s say you are feeling pain or fear or happiness. Or maybe you are feeling divided or guilty or scared or full of longing. What does your True Nature do? It doesn’t do anything. It is simply aware of whatever you are feeling; it is interested, empathic, attuned to what is happening. It wants to experience the feeling fully, be there for it with kindness, gentleness. True
Nature doesn’t try to push. It doesn’t try to do anything, and it doesn’t do anything—it just is. And in its is-ness, the necessary qualities emerge. If compassion is needed, compassion emerges. If love is needed, love emerges. If strength is needed, strength emerges. True Nature doesn’t lift a finger.
TRUE NATURE IS AWARE AND ATTUNED
True Nature does nothing, but it is naturally aware because it is pure awareness. If we just let things be—if we don’t control them or try to direct them—we are naturally, simply aware. And in this awareness, we are present to whatever is happening. True Nature is so loving, so kind—infinite in its kindness and compassion and intelligence—that it relates to each condition exactly according to what that condition needs. And it doesn’t give you an instruction that you cannot relate to. It doesn’t try to tell you to practice something you cannot practice. In our work, we discover that True Nature responds to our limitations—our stuckness, our lack of development, our reactivity—appropriately and with attunement and kindness.
So that is what our practice is. We are learning how True Nature would approach our situation in the moment—how it would hold it, how it would relate to it. And we especially want to know this when we are reactive or scared or feeling stuck. That’s when it’s especially hard to know how to just be in a natural condition. You might hear people say, “Just be in your True Nature; remember what it is to be yourself and just be that.” For some people, that might work, but most people can’t do that at any time, much less when things are difficult.
We never need to take the position that we have to pull or push ourselves into the complete purity or nonduality of our True Nature. That would be like trying to push a camel through the eye of a needle, as some spiritual traditions express it. True Nature is compassionate and appropriate, so the first thing it does is to help the camel walk. It doesn’t try to push the camel anywhere, much less through the needle’s eye.
TRUE NATURE HAS NO PREFERENCES
The way True Nature approaches all questions is by being open with full awareness and understanding of the particular reality that a person is operating in. For example, if a person embraces reality as nondual, as having no separating boundaries, True Nature is very open to that and will respond accordingly. Whatever beliefs, assumptions, and limitations a person has, True Nature is open to see those without trying to change them. If an experience is limited, True Nature sees it in its limitation and doesn’t try to make it be different. True Nature really has no preferences.
So, one thing we can learn from True Nature is to have no preference, no choice; we don’t need to choose what to experience. Our experience always simply happens. If we try to choose and say, “This is good, this is bad, this situation should include this and not that,” we are already separating ourselves from True Nature; we are already not practicing.
True Nature shows us that to be where we are means having an awareness that embraces whatever is—whatever our perceptions are, at whatever level, in whatever condition or state we are in. That awareness embraces our experience completely, with immediate feeling, with as much understanding as possible. The awareness contacts the experience, holds it, embraces it—just by being there, by being with it, in it, around it.
And when I say “being with it,” I don’t mean that the awareness is necessarily being with something separate from itself. For example, if I say that I am being with my hand now, does this mean that there have to be two things—me and my hand? I can be with my hand and yet my hand is mine, it is part of me. It is the same with your thoughts. You can be with your thoughts and see that they are separate from you, or you can be with them and see that they are not separate from you. Either way is valid; what’s important is that you see whatever it is you are experiencing.
TRUE NATURE MEANS NONDOING AND SURRENDER
To be where we are really is a form of surrender to whatever is happening. And that surrender is an awareness that embraces whatever our experience is. If I am feeling something and I see that I don’t like it, then I embrace that I am feeling something and I embrace the fact that I don’t like it. I don’t take the position that I shouldn’t have a negative response to what I am feeling.
This implies a certain trust and confidence in our nature. Usually we don’t have that trust, so we want to take things into our own hands and twist them and turn them the way we want them to be. True Nature shows us that we have another option, which is to align with it in allowing our experience to be what it is.
So you can see from everything that has been said thus far that True Nature really doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t push and it doesn’t hold on to anything. It simply relaxes, effortlessly, and is present with full awareness, embracing the immediacy of feeling and sensing our experience. That is the sense in which surrender is meant. It’s not that we are going to do something: “Okay, now I am going to surrender.” What are you going to do to surrender? I have never seen anybody surrendering. Nobody ever surrenders. Surrender means basically nondoing. It means not doing anything to what is arising in our experience. It means leaving ourselves and our experience alone.
When we have been pushing and pulling and resisting and controlling and then at some point we stop doing that, the transition can sometimes seem like surrender. When we have been holding ourselves together or remaining involved in an active, rigid mental process, and we recognize that and stop doing it, we call it surrender. But stopping doing something is not doing something. So, surrender is not an activity. And it is definitely not control.
To be where we are means that we leave our experience alone. We don’t interfere with it, we don’t say no to it, we don’t try to grasp it. We don’t say anything about it at all—no comment! Instead, we behold it, embrace it, be with it. And this absence of control, this effortless lack of manipulation, this hands off, can continue moment to moment, but the awareness of not doing anything will elude us if we are not carefully attending to what is happening. For instance, you may say, “I had an experience and I really surrendered. I was just there; I wasn’t doing anything,” and then the next moment say, “I think it was a wonderful experience. I wish I could have it again.” As soon as you think that way, you are already trying to squeeze your soul, tying it with a rope so that that experience doesn’t get away from you.
Without careful attention, we will begin to manipulate without even knowing it. By the time we wake up to the situation, we have already tied ourselves up in knots. But even then, if we are aware, we can catch ourselves trying to hold on or trying to push away or trying to control. As soon as we feel the impulse to go after something, to orient ourselves one way or another, we recognize that and simply do not engage it. We cease and desist.
True Nature is always steadfast in its nonmanipulation, its noninterference. And it doesn’t cheat. It always refrains from interfering. We learn that as well in our practice. We learn how not to interfere and to be steadfast in our noninterference. And because True Nature just is, it will simply unfold—manifesting and revealing whatever needs to be revealed to us.
TRUE NATURE EVEN RESPONDS TO OUR MEDDLING
True Nature is a pure research scientist. What does a pure scientist do? He or she explores to find out the truth of a situation. Pure scientists know that as they explore something, they should not interfere with it, should not add to or subtract from it, should not manipulate it one way or another. They just want to know what they are studying as it is, in its bare, naked condition. They don’t desire anything from it; they just want to behold it and discover the truth of what it is.
As we have seen, our meddling mind never acts in the way that a pure scientist does. But True Nature, in its infinite kindness, will respond impeccably according to our meddling. It will bring out whatever wisdom or quality or insight is needed in relation to whatever meddling we are doing. That is why True Nature has many qualities—because we engage in many kinds of meddling!
In our ordinary condition of never leaving ourselves alone, our
manipulation happens on all levels, from gross to subtle. We can be trying to push ourselves through the eye of a needle by molding our experience in some highly manipulative way, or we can be engaging in a subtle form of holding on simply by remembering a condition that we enjoyed in the past and trying to shift our consciousness in that direction.
As we continue our study, we will learn more about the various ways that we interfere with our experience. But however we interfere, it is always true that because we don’t have the infinite wisdom, intelligence, and awareness that True Nature has, we don’t know what should happen next in our inner experience. Doing anything to make our moment-to-moment experience different from what it is means we believe we are God; we believe we know how things should be.
So you might think, “Now I am going to meditate so I can experience pure peace.” But who said that pure peace should be the next thing you experience?
“And later I will get into primordial awareness.” Who said that is what is supposed to happen to you?
Do you see the arrogance in this kind of thinking? Who is saying these things anyway? This is why in our work, we say, “I don’t know what should come next in my experience; it is not in my hands.” This is the humility needed for True Nature to move our experience to whatever condition it wants to bring about, which is usually the condition we specifically, personally, need at that moment. It might be primordial awareness, it might be peace—but it might be jealousy, or hunger, or even death. We don’t know.
