The Unfolding Now

by A H Almaas

  As children, we were open and delicate and gentle, which meant that we lacked hardness, we lacked defenses, and we lacked a shield around us. But when we felt exposed and afraid, we learned to build those shields to protect ourselves, to defend ourselves from the environment around us. So now, as adults, we continue to put up walls and shields to stop the environment from affecting us. In order to protect ourselves from outside dangers, we stop ourselves from feeling vulnerable by closing down our own feelings, our own sensations, our own imagination.

  I am not saying that physical self-protection is unimportant or unnecessary. But hardening ourselves internally is not truly helpful in accomplishing this. It is an illusory protection because it does not affect the outside danger at all; it only diminishes our internal awareness and aliveness. It was only helpful when we had no way as children to protect ourselves externally, and we used our internal defenses to diminish the impact of overwhelming feelings when the external cause could not be stopped.

  That is why it is not easy to learn to really be ourselves. It is simple, but it is complicated by the fact that to be ourselves means being open. To be where we are without doing anything about it means that we don’t do anything to protect ourselves, we don’t put up walls, we don’t hide ourselves. It means that we are really out there. When I say “out there,” I don’t mean out there in the middle of the highway. “Out there” might be in your own bedroom, by yourself, without any defenses. Maybe you think somebody is going to jump out at you from the TV! So being out there by yourself might make you feel naked and you get scared.

  We end up being paranoid in some sense and afraid of our own experience. So, if we are scared of our experience and even of the possibilities that might arise in our experience, how are we going to learn to be real, to be ourselves? How are we going to learn to see exactly where we are and be there—abide where we are—when that might include experiencing danger or perhaps a condition that we think will invite danger? “If I let myself be where I am, what will happen to me? I will be jumped on.” That’s why we automatically defend ourselves. You don’t have to be walking around in an unsafe neighborhood to be afraid for your own safety. You could be in your own room and still not feel safe. What I am saying is that you are defending yourself there, too.

  Defenses have become so institutionalized, so much a part of our character and personality, that at some point we don’t recognize that they are there. They have become part of our internal structure. But in our attempts to protect ourselves from real or imagined danger, our awareness becomes diminished. That is because being completely aware would mean being aware of all the things that scare us or might hurt us or that we are ashamed of. So we defend against them and stop being aware. Much of the time, we are defending ourselves against reality; and it is not against reality as much as it is against our own experience. The implication for our practice is that we can recognize and understand this and be aware that we will encounter these things as we continue to practice being where we are.

  DEFENSIVENESS AND VULNERABILITY

  Let’s review a few key points about defensiveness and then see what we can understand about the process of its transformation. This process includes encountering the vulnerability that inevitably comes up as we become aware of how we defend ourselves:

  As we practice—which entails inquiring into what is going on, recognizing our experience, being where we are, abiding in it, and learning to be ourselves—we encounter a stance of defensiveness that we become more and more conscious of.

  That defensiveness is a barrier against our unconscious, but also against much of our potential, because it is a defense against experience, a defense against the expansion of awareness, a defense against being present, a defense against being real.

  When a defense is pushed against or challenged, it changes from a passive wall to an active resistance against what is arising, a resistance against recognizing what we think is—or could become—dangerous or threatening.

  The defensiveness is a hardening and a thickening of our consciousness, creating walls within us.

  If we recognize those walls and are able to understand them, they begin to transform and start to come down.

  As those defenses gradually dissolve, as those walls come down, we will have the feeling of no protection for a while. Without the walls, when we still do not feel the security of being ourselves, we will experience that as defenselessness. And that defenselessness will feel like a kind of vulnerability, a trembling emotional condition of the heart that makes us feel quite delicate.

  That delicacy, that trembling, means that we are open but we still believe that there is danger. So we are still tentative, a little cautious, a little reactive. That is because as we are approaching the delicacy of being ourselves, the delicacy of intimacy; we are approaching it by letting go of the walls, and we are still not used to being in that openness.

  Our defensiveness at some point becomes a wall against vulnerability. So to learn to be real, to learn to be ourselves, we need to come to terms with our vulnerability.

  VULNERABILITY: THE DOOR TO TRUE NATURE

  What does it mean to come to terms with our vulnerability? It means recognizing it and seeing it for what it is. It means identifying all the beliefs we have in our unconscious about real and imagined dangers and the way we have been trying to deal with them. It means seeing how our defensiveness doesn’t work, how it only cuts us off from ourselves and from our resources.

  It also means being able, at some point, to appreciate the vulnerability we feel, because vulnerability means openness. If my consciousness is vulnerable, that means I am also vulnerable to the manifestations of my True Nature. If I defend myself, I am not open to my True Nature and its manifestation. I am not only protecting myself from other people, I begin to protect myself from True Nature itself, with all its qualities.

  The wonderful thing is that vulnerability becomes the door to intimacy, to being ourselves, to being real, to being where we are. But for that to happen, we have to be willing to be vulnerable to what is. Being vulnerable means that our soul is open for things to arise in it. It is not defended.

  If it has walls, it is preventing things from arising; it is not allowing the dynamism of our Being to transform our condition. This means that it will only transform in ways that don’t feel threatening—in other words, ways that are familiar to us. But being vulnerable allows our soul to transform into something new and unfamiliar, and that at first is scary—which means we will feel undefended.

  As human beings, we have always been vulnerable. Our natural state is to be undefended. In fact, the defensiveness of human beings, the sense of security that ego constructs by building defensive walls to hide or camouflage itself, is arrogant and even delusional. Because when it comes to real danger, we are vulnerable all the time; we can be damaged easily. For example, we are quite vulnerable physically. A little virus that you can’t even see can get you, and the next day you are on your back and you can’t even move.

  But our vulnerability is also the quality of our humanness. It is a heart quality of openness, of gentleness, that is needed for us to recognize where we are and to abide there. We cannot truly recognize where we are without that gentleness, that humanness, that humility. But that means we will find ourselves in a vulnerable condition. Vulnerability in the face of danger feels frightening, but in the absence of danger, vulnerability can simply mean feeling naturally, undefendedly yourself.

  So we have a dilemma. We are scared, we want to protect ourselves, but at the same time we want to be real. How are we going to solve this paradox? How do we protect ourselves against danger and still be real? We come back to the peach . . . You do things to take care of yourself. You get professional health care as you need it, you brush your teeth, you take reasonable precautions if you are walking through an unsafe neighborhood, you don’t hang out with gangs, and so on. You use your intelligence to do what is necessary—you defend yourself physically if that is c
alled for—but inside you remain vulnerable, open, supple, gentle. And you begin to appreciate vulnerability as a human quality that gives us the openness to reality, to perception, to our True Nature in all of its manifestations.

  We cannot be ourselves if we don’t experience that vulnerability, because vulnerability is just the beginning of experiencing the gentleness and the exquisiteness of being genuine. In time, we learn that we can feel completely undefended without it feeling scary, without feeling that we need to defend ourselves, without the need for those inner walls.

  DEFENSIVENESS AS EGO BOUNDARY

  The issue of defenses is a deep one because putting up walls implies that there is somebody who is putting up those walls around himself or herself. The walls we construct ultimately become our defining boundaries. They define who we are inside, and then we put walls around that self to protect it from danger. So we cannot be completely free of defensiveness as long as we are holding on to the definition of our boundaries—what we believe defines us as a human being. At some point, we recognize that our defended condition is tied in with our boundedness, and that this sense of boundedness doesn’t respect our True Nature—because True Nature has no size and no shape; it is without boundaries.

  Looking at the relationship between ego boundaries and our definition of self as we have just done is a way to recognize how deep our defenses go. Resistance operates in a similar way to putting up defenses. Thus, having no resistance and having no defenses both mean ego death at some point—the dissolution of the boundaries that define us as individuals. And we create many other kinds of defenses and walls and hard places to protect ourselves from experiencing certain parts of ourselves and our history. We defend against certain situations, against feeling the implications of those situations and what we perceive about them. So when we perceive something but we don’t want to let ourselves experience what it makes us feel, where does that put us? Immediately we feel we need to defend, to create an inner boundary that allows us to see things without having to feel how they affect us.

  Psychologists have made long lists of the kinds of defenses people engage in. Projection, identification, and repression, for example, are different ways to defend ourselves against perceiving reality and being totally in the moment, against feeling ourselves completely. They are ways to distance ourselves from the intimacy and the immediacy of just being ourselves. The purpose might be to protect our vulnerability, our genuineness, our reality, our sense of self; but in each case, we dissociate ourselves from the preciousness we want to protect. We might have felt it necessary as children, but it usually no longer is. However, self-protection has become habitual, institutionalized in our character.

  Only by opening ourselves to what is present in our experience—especially our tendency to defend ourselves—can we challenge our fear of being real. The more we see our defensiveness and understand it, the more we invite in the tender, intimate vulnerability of our souls that is hidden behind the walls. It is this vulnerability that allows our true humanness to reveal itself in the simplicity of being ourselves.

  EXPLORATION SESSION

  Exploring Vulnerability in the Present

  This exercise will help clarify the relationship between vulnerability and being open to your experience in the moment. Vulnerability is a state of consciousness in which we feel open, delicate, sensitive, alive, undefended, and intimate with ourselves. But it also tends to be associated with fear and danger. Vulnerability is not a state we generally live our life from.

  As you pay attention to yourself in the moment, notice whether you experience yourself as being open or not. If not, what is stopping you from feeling open—to your thoughts, to your feelings, to your sensations, to how you are impacted by your experience? If you are more open to the specifics of your inner experience, does that bring a sense of vulnerability? If so, what is feeling vulnerable like for you? Is it okay? Is it tolerable?

  If you find vulnerability arising as you explore, notice how the sense of vulnerability manifests in your body, your thoughts, your emotions, your voice, as you explore each aspect of your experience. This may include qualities such as gentleness, delicacy, fragility, fear, trembling, receptivity, sensitivity.

  You can develop this contemplation further by exploring any situations that make you feel vulnerable. As you do this, consider how vulnerability and fear are related in your experience. Do they always go together? Remember that vulnerability can mean freedom and openness as well.

  CHAPTER 6

  Cultivating a Bold Vulnerability

  BY NOW, YOU PROBABLY HAVE experienced various types of obstacles and impediments arising as you continue your inner practice of finding where you are and abiding there. You may be coming to the understanding that the obstacles to being where you are turn out to be the same as the obstacles to being yourself and that those are the same as the obstacles to reality and to realization.

  Understanding how these obstacles arise within your experience is a major factor in our practice. But there are additional factors that, once understood, can also make our practice simpler and easier.

  As we have seen, most of the time we don’t know exactly what’s happening with us. We know scattered bits and pieces, but it is difficult to see how they fit into one coherent manifestation. And we notice that even when we pay attention and are aware of our experience, we don’t automatically know where we are.

  Knowing where we are requires some clarity. It takes some inquiry. To further our understanding, a specific discrimination can be made to support our practice of finding where we are and letting ourselves be. That is, we can learn how to differentiate our experience into two parts: the primary component and the secondary components.

  The primary component is the central event—the main thing that is actually arising in our personal experience at any given moment. And that can be anything. It can be a feeling or emotion, such as a state of joy or love or dread. It can be a sense of deficiency or feeling like an empty shell. It can be some kind of activity or perhaps an imagining. So the primary component is what is actually emerging in the field of our consciousness, in the field of our soul.

  The secondary components are the reactions and responses to the primary component, to the central event. There is generally one primary component, but there may be many secondary ones. We experience the main event as it arises, and we also experience commentaries, reactions, and attitudes to that primary event.

  Those responses can be all kinds of things—for example, self-congratulation or pride about what we are feeling or embarrassment and guilt about feeling this way instead of some other way. It could be excitement about our condition or avoidance of it, or a thought process that interferes with or shuts down what’s happening. So we have what is arising as the central event plus our reaction or attitude toward it. Maybe we don’t like it, or we want more, or we judge it or want to change it, or it makes us feel sad, or perhaps we feel that our experience makes us better than someone else.

  The fact that many thoughts, feelings, activities, and impulses arise in us in response to the central event makes it difficult to see where we are. To know where we are, we need to find out what is centrally arising. What’s the primary component? Much of the time we are trapped in the secondary components, and we cannot separate those from the primary event. Is what I’m experiencing the primary event, or am I experiencing my fear or judgment of it or my thought process around it? Can I separate these responses from the event itself?

  The relationship of primary and secondary components in our experience can be likened to the phenomenon called a black hole. A black hole is an area in space that appears black or empty because in that location, a nuclear event of such mass and intensity is occurring that nothing can escape the gravitational pull of the event—no matter of any kind, and not even light. Each black hole has what is called an event horizon, which exists at a certain distance from the center of the hole. Anything that reaches the event horizon disappears fro
m view. Scientists are discovering that the event horizon is a very busy place. All kinds of things happen there because of the black hole. As a metaphor for our inner process, the event horizon is where the secondary components are. The actual event that is happening—the primary component of our experience—is beyond, inside the black hole, at the center.

  In our human experience, we tend to be afraid to go beyond the event horizon, because we imagine that we’re going to be pulled into some sort of inner black hole. Consider your experience and you will see that the focus of your attention is generally on judgments of the primary event—fears about what it means, upset or disturbance over what we think caused it, or efforts to change it. To simply be in touch with the primary component of our experience seems inconceivable. If that central event is an emotion, we may feel it will go on forever or that we will be overwhelmed by it. If it is an energetic experience, we may feel that we will be lost without our story or ideas about it. If it is a difficulty, we may feel that we will be stuck with it forever if we don’t focus on resolving it. In our fear of the “black hole” of our experience, we distract ourselves with associations and reactions, rather than just being with the primary experience.

  But to be where we are, we need to see what the main event is. Being where we are in the present means not only seeing where the event is but being where it is. If we remain at the event horizon with only the secondary manifestations, we’re not being where we truly are; we are engaged in the secondary processes that are a reaction or response, that are tangential to where we are.

  CHANGING COMPONENTS IN THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

  The nature of where we are and the nature of the secondary components are determined by where we are in our spiritual journey. Our experience will have different manifestations depending on the stage we are at in the unfolding of our soul.