by A H Almaas
THE NEED FOR COMPASSION
We learn from this brief overview of the superego that the attitude we need to have toward ourselves in our inquiry is not one of harshness. We perceive the harshness of self-directed aggression the more we recognize the superego at work. In time, we come to understand that what’s needed is a gentleness and an empathy toward the way we are. If we’re feeling weak, we don’t tell ourselves things that make us feel bad about that, and we don’t judge ourselves. We’re understanding, we’re kind, we’re empathic. If we’re feeling deficient, that’s not a time to criticize ourselves or compare ourselves with somebody else. It’s a time to hold ourselves tenderly.
In time, instead of the superego’s harsh criticism, we experience more compassion and warmth, the attunement and empathy of a kind heart. Our inquiry begins to assume more gentleness in the way we perceive and recognize ourselves. We don’t just recognize where we are; we recognize where we are with kind, empathic attunement. And our responses become more and more suited to what we need. For example, if we’re feeling shame, we don’t need to hear from our superego, “Here it comes again . . . you never feel anything else . . . you’re always ashamed . . . what’s wrong with you?”
What if the inner attitude could shift from “I’m always feeling ashamed; I wish I felt different,” to “I’m feeling ashamed and it’s really painful”? There’s a slight shift, you see? Instead of harshness, there’s a gentleness and an implicit compassion that makes us more willing to see exactly where we are and to just be there.
When we are kind to ourselves, there is a warmth in the atmosphere, and we’re willing to reveal to ourselves what we truly feel. The compassion is really an empathic recognition of where we are in all its nuances, which brings forth just the right attitude that corresponds to our condition. So, in our example above, there is not only a recognition that it’s painful to feel shame, but also a tender warmth in that recognition. We feel much safer to recognize where we are and be there.
THE IMPORTANCE OF COURAGE
Remember that at the beginning of our practice, we need to defend ourselves against the superego, and to do that, we need to bring forth our aggression and our strength. As a matter of fact, in time, simply feeling our strength burns up the superego, without our doing anything to make it happen. However, we recognize that the importance of strength also lies in its function of complementing kindness. We cannot progress on the path with kindness alone, because sometimes what is happening is scary or destabilizing or disorienting. Perhaps where we are is terrifying because what’s happening is unknown, totally unfamiliar. Or there’s the possibility of pain or of feeling lost or falling apart if we keep going. Then kindness might not be of much help.
That’s when we need courage. We need a bold, courageous, adventurous heart to take us where we have never gone. Because that’s what the inner journey is—going where we haven’t gone before. If we only have a nice, kind heart, that might help us to not attack ourselves, but we won’t take the bold step of moving into the now, of being open and vulnerable to whatever beckons us into new territory.
When we go into new territory, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We might go crazy. We might die. We might fall into a black hole and never come out. So we think, “I’m always going to stay on this side of the event horizon. Who wants to go into a black hole? I might get absorbed. Or who knows where I might end up?”
Many of us now know that a black hole is the beginning of a wormhole. But it took a lot of research to discover that if you move into a black hole, it takes you to another place, another realm. So, we imagine that we’re going to disappear. And who wants to disappear? “I’d rather stay in the realm of the event horizon and have some experiences . . .”
It takes an adventurous spirit to say, “Well, let’s jump and see what happens.” But remember that the jumping is not a matter of doing anything. It’s more about the sense of courage, of boldness in that whatever arises, whatever happens, we will allow ourselves to be vulnerable to it.
So compassion is necessary, but it needs to be balanced with a strength in the form of an adventurous spirit, a spirit that wants to experience the unknown. We’re talking about a sense of vitality and strength that is not passively waiting for things to happen, but is dynamic and interested in what might arise at any moment. We’re talking about being ready to go—although we don’t go anywhere, really. We just keep being where we are in every moment.
KEEPING THE BALANCE
Inner practice is not boot camp. Boldness doesn’t mean pushing ourselves. It doesn’t demand that we jam ourselves into a particular place. The balanced combination of strength and kindness that we have been describing shows us that what we want to develop over time in our practice is a kind of bold vulnerability in which we’re kind and strong and courageous. Sometimes the kindness is more in the foreground. Sometimes the boldness is in the foreground. The boldness continues to be a courageous strength and adventurousness without becoming foolhardy, without becoming harsh. We’re not pushing ourselves, saying, “Okay, you wimp, why don’t you just move into this?” That’s not what I mean by being courageous.
So that’s when the kindness is important. Kindness has attunement, a recognition of exactly where we are. And if we have strength as well, we will naturally allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to be open to what’s arising and allow ourselves to be there and in the moment—whatever it is.
When we blend courage and compassion, assertiveness and gentleness, our essential strength and kindness support us in being where we are. These qualities open us to be with our primary experience and keep us from being distracted by or concerned with the secondary reactions of our internal aggression. With them, we are infused with a bold vulnerability that leads us more and more into the immediacy and intimacy of being real.
EXPLORATION SESSION
Deepening the Inquiry
Now that you have some understanding of the primary and secondary components of experience, as well as the capacities that are needed to stay present with and explore your experience and some of the obstacles that may arise, let’s do another exploration of your experience. Take fifteen minutes to do this inquiry. Without focusing on any capacities or obstacles, just be present in each moment, aware of what’s happening and attuned to where you are in that process. Let whatever wants to arise manifest itself naturally, and follow it.
Notice when you are in touch with your primary experience and when you are more focused on a reaction or attitude toward the experience. Can you sense the difference? What happens when you are being with the primary experience?
You may be able to observe changes in your experience that reflect a deepening and expanding of where you are. After you have done this, consider your inquiry to see how the qualities of kindness and courage manifested. How and where did kindness show up? Did it have the quality of timidity? Where did courage or boldness manifest? Did it have an edge of harshness?
CHAPTER 7
Following Truth to Meaning and Harmony
I HAVE BEEN ENCOURAGING YOU to become more aware of what you are experiencing and to understand what you are experiencing in order to know where you are. And I have indicated that knowing where you are will lead you to knowing and being the deeper nature of what you are. But it is useful to keep in mind that what you are is not separate from the deepest nature of reality itself. This true reality is a nondual oneness of pure Being.
However, many people find that when they are in touch with the transcendent nature of reality—the oneness of all things and beings—then who and where they are in the moment feels irrelevant or disappears into the oneness. Others have the experience that the True Nature of reality cares nothing for the more ordinary aspects of their life. And many spiritual paths take the point of view that our familiar personality, or ego, is only a barrier to what is true and real, and thus it needs to be transcended.
If we take the latter position, how do we make sense of this notion that know
ing and understanding where we are in any given moment has a particular, revelatory relationship to our True Nature, which is also the True Nature of reality? In this chapter, we will explore this question of large and small truth—primordial and partial truth—and how the thread of understanding links the individuality of one’s life with the nondual oneness of reality.
THE UNFOLDING JOURNEY TO TRUE NATURE
Let us start with the recognition that reality itself doesn’t actually have levels. Reality—everything that exists—is all True Nature. It is all one thing. But because we go through stages in the unfoldment of discovering the truth—which is the truth of True Nature—it seems to us that reality has layers. Reality is sufficiently intelligent and vast to know that human beings recognize reality with different degrees of completeness. It knows that each degree of recognition has its own possibility of truth because it is still reality; it’s just not reality in its completeness.
That doesn’t mean that we can have truth only if we see it completely. At every level of truth, comprehension and meaningfulness exists. With every glimpse of even partial truth, what we are seeing is being touched by the primordial reality, by the primordial harmony, and by the primordial truth itself. This provides us with a sense of a path or an unfoldment, a flow of experience that makes being where we are, and inquiring into that, a meaningful practice.
So what does that tell us about how to approach our work? As we have seen, our practice of learning to be where we are is a matter of inquiring to find out what is happening, what the truth of a situation is. To ask, “Where am I?” means, “What is the truth of my experience?” And to ask, “What is the truth of my experience?” means, “I want to understand it in a way that is meaningful to my heart, that nourishes my heart and my soul; I don’t just want an explanation.” An explanation that is not felt can be exact without being meaningful, in which case, it doesn’t nourish us.
As we work with our experience—inquiring and delving into it, being present with it—the presence and the awareness that pervades our experience reveals itself to be that underlying truth, or True Nature, that we have been seeking. And as our understanding unfolds, the harmony of the various elements of our experience is a felt harmony of connectedness. That experience is closer to the inherent, original, primordial harmony that reveals—and actually is—the oneness of all things.
We could describe the path toward realization in this way: Our desire to understand where we are and who we are takes us on an initial journey of learning to have more and more insight about our ordinary experience. Gradually, we come to recognize the relationship of ordinary experience to deeper levels of reality—how it reflects True Nature. Eventually, we are able to see how our individual experience is nothing but True Nature, and we move toward the realization of pure Being—the oneness that is nondual reality.
This recognition of the nondual ground of experience is the realization that there is basically only presence. Presence is what exists, what is, and everything that exists is a form that presence takes. Reality is one unified field of luminosity that differentiates itself into the various perceptions that we have. Thus, True Nature and Being are really the same thing as truth, or reality. All those terms mean the same thing: presence that is in a condition of conscious full realization. In this condition, experience is not filtered through the mind; things are experienced exactly as they are. We see their nature and recognize that it is True Nature—which turns out to be the nature of everything, all the way down to the tiniest particle.
This means that nothing exists but True Nature. It pervades everything so intimately, so completely, that it doesn’t leave any one spot unoccupied by it.
GOT MEANING?
This recognition that only True Nature exists is expressed in different ways by various spiritual cultures and traditions. A Vedantist would say, “I am That,” because what is real is referred to as “That.” A Buddhist would call it the suchness of reality. A Taoist says, “The real Tao is beyond words and names.” A Christian mystic will say, “God is the unknowable transcendent unity of all.” All of these different approaches basically attempt to refer to reality in a way that takes it away from the mind and the idea that mind can define it. It is what it is. It is the truth independent of mind, more specifically, of discursive mind.
As we move toward the West, to the Sufi tradition, we find that the word Sufis use for True Nature translates into something close to the word “meaning.” They also call it “truth,” but when Sufis are referring to the essential presence, the essential nature—that which underlies everything—it is meaning that they want to emphasize.
This is one reason why I think of Sufism as a Western tradition. Many people associate Sufism with the East because they know Sufis from India. But Sufism came out of the Middle East, which, along with Greece, is the birthplace of Western thought. Thus, the origins of Sufi thought are rooted in Greek and Middle Eastern soils.
What makes Sufism more of a Western than an Eastern tradition is the fact that it relates True Nature to the mind and calls it “meaning.” But what Sufis are pointing to is not what we usually call meaning. Their word for “meaning”—ma’na—signifies that which is substantial, important, what matters. It is the meaning to the soul, the meaning to the heart, not to the mind as we conceive of mind today. That is because in general the Sufis say that the organ of true knowing is the heart. So this sense that True Nature is true knowing or meaning is in contrast to the traditions of the East, in which the emphasis is beyond knowing.
I am focusing on the word “meaning” because I think it will help us better understand what it means to be where we are. In the condition of realization, the meaning we are experiencing is not the conceptual meaning; it is the very presence of reality. When we experience it, it is the meaning of existence. It is meaningful to the soul and to the heart. Or we could say: The soul and the heart feel that existence is meaningful. Existence got meaning. What’s the meaning it got? True Nature.
DISCOVERING A SEAMLESS HARMONY
Thus, in this condition of nondual realization, one perceives a transparency and a luminosity of oneness and at the same time a seamless harmony in the manifestations of that oneness. Whatever the situation, what we would normally distinguish as bad or good is experienced as a seamless and graceful harmony that is simple but beautiful, aesthetically inspiring and uplifting. What’s more, the harmony between everything is also meaningful; it is part of the meaning. So, the meaning is the presence itself; it is the totality of reality in its harmony.
We begin the inner work of exploring our experience from a point that is far from that recognition of harmony. Before we take on the work of inquiry, life seems empty and meaningless, and we feel dissatisfied and discontented. We look for significance, for meaning, for an inherent value to our life that we don’t recognize yet. As we come to understand what is happening in our experience, we see some truth and some meaning, but it is not yet the final meaning. It does, however, have a flavor of truth in that the understanding itself brings a harmony that reflects the inherent harmony of the universe and of truth itself.
Even in the initial stages of our work, as we get insight into what is happening in our experience, the truth that we see is meaningful in some way. At this first stage, that meaningfulness reveals a harmony, an interconnection between the various elements in our experience that we didn’t see before. So meaning, which is based on making connections, is felt as a growing harmony based on the truth in our experience. And that truth reflects the True Nature that is the essence of the harmony, that makes harmony possible.
So, for example, I might have been dealing with the issue of being weak and thinking, “I haven’t got any strength. I can’t say no; I can’t be myself.” At the first level, I might come to understand that this lack of strength to stand up for myself is related to not feeling my own identity as truly separate from others in my life. Understanding how this is part of my personal history brings a certain harmon
y to my experience based on recognizing a personal truth.
At a later point in the inner journey, it becomes more obvious that this harmony or understanding is connected to essential presence. At this next stage, the strength essence arises and I feel strong, able to be a separate person who feels free to say no. It all fits together, because the arising of the essential quality itself answers all the questions about separation, self-assertion, and autonomy, and also reveals the inherent harmony.
In other words, at the second stage, I am feeling the sense of strength because I can see that these manifestations of clarity, expansion, energy, and capacity are related to feeling separate, and I didn’t know that before. Now, as I understand my issue of separation—with my husband, or my wife, or my children, or my mother—the presence arises and I feel the true separation in which I am separate from my mind in the sense that I do not need any ideas or beliefs to be myself. Everything I have been experiencing is now meaningful. It all makes sense, all of it fits, and I am seeing the truth. The truth I am aware of now is the meaning, and the center of that meaning is the essential presence itself.
At the third and most conscious stage of the journey, I recognize that meaning as being implicit in everything. The meaning is essential presence, which is revealed as the nature of everything—the nondual reality of True Nature. So the meaning and the harmony are actually inseparable at this point in the journey.
So, to summarize:
In the first stage, the harmony becomes apparent as the understanding of your experience reveals the meaning of that experience. You feel more like yourself, more real, as you understand the situation and see the truth.
In the second stage you begin to recognize what makes you real and where the truth comes from. When you recognize the essential presence itself, you see that the source of realness, truth, meaning, and harmony is all True Nature because it is absolute authenticity—it is undefiled, incorruptible realness.
