The Unfolding Now

by A H Almaas

  I hate the unstoppable activity that goes on inside me and I want to destroy it. I hate myself.

  I didn’t realize this before, but now that my hatred has shown itself, I see that it has been there all the time.

  THE CAUSES OF HATRED

  We can say that our problem is the ego, the self, but there is no ego or self except what manifests in our consciousness. To understand how hatred functions, it helps to know how it got there. Generally speaking, the causes of hatred originate on two levels. The first level, which I call the psychodynamic, relates to our personal history. From the time of our childhood, we have not been sufficiently loved. Maybe we have been hated, disregarded, humiliated, or treated as though we didn’t exist; maybe we’ve felt guilty or bad, or hated ourselves for things that were done to us or that we have done. The frustration that develops in us through interacting with our environment plus many of the things we learn from others generate a lot of hatred. The specifics vary depending on the circumstances of one’s life, but it almost never happens that someone escapes the effects of hatred.

  The second level is our lack of understanding, our ignorance about how consciousness works. We can recognize that there are obstacles to our freedom, barriers to our inner peace that make it seem impossible to just be ourselves without struggling all the time. But, as we have seen, because we don’t understand how things function, we end up believing that the way to deal with these impediments is to get rid of them—to remove or annihilate the obstacles, just as we tend to do in the physical world. This is the only way we think we can have peace and quiet and release from suffering. We don’t know that by doing this, we are perpetuating the same suffering, the same frustration. We are dividing ourselves and acting inside ourselves in a destructive way. Our actions dissociate us from ourselves and prevent our True Nature from revealing itself in its purity and richness. So we get stuck in a misinformed, misguided attempt at realization, at freedom, at achieving nirvana.

  We are ignorant of how reality works. And it takes a lot for us to learn it. But with time and practice, wisdom begins to arise just from our observing what is happening and from learning about our True Nature. We start to see that the inner activity we are engaging in to remove obstacles actually imitates a power in our True Nature that can eliminate obstacles. This power is needed because obstacles such as ignorance, identifications, barriers, and resistances definitely exist. But we need to learn that the way of the ego doesn’t work, because ultimately it is based on hatred, and hatred is divisive.

  These divisive strategies of the ego make us callous—they actually move us further from Being. But once we see that they are attempts to do something that the ego is not capable of, then we have the chance to recognize what Being can do. We are able to realize the power True Nature has that can reveal clearly what is occurring, that gives us the precise understanding of the impediment—what it does and why it is there. And if we recognize the impediment for what it is—with the complete immediacy of presence and the precise clarity of awareness—that awareness itself will appear as a quality that is pure stillness, that is pure peacefulness, that is the presence of peace. The presence of peace alone dissolves all agitation. Peace doesn’t have to do anything; its mere manifestation melts all strife, and impediments simply dissolve through the understanding that is inseparable from that stillness.

  That is why this teaching keeps emphasizing just being there, not doing anything, and simply being vulnerable to and present with immediacy of feeling. If we are being there with immediacy of feeling and not doing anything, at some point that not doing reveals its power. This power is not just that we refrain from taking action, but that we experience the presence of total stillness. This is the essence of nondoing, which is peace. Just the fact of stillness, the presence of peace, annihilates ignorance. But this annihilation is the action of appreciation and love in pure nondoing and stillness.

  Hatred wants to annihilate, but it annihilates by destroying, by making our awareness dull, by suppressing, by dividing. True Nature does not really annihilate, because something is not wiping out something else—there is no duality. The kind of annihilation that True Nature makes possible is more of a recognition, a precise understanding that Being reveals in us. We have no inner agitation in our attitude; we see and understand whatever impediment is arising, but we do not give it energy in the form of reaction, and thus it becomes still on its own and does not reappear. We experience this as a dissolving or a melting, but what is actually happening is that the energy fueling the obstacle disappears, the obstacle loses its dynamism, and it simply stops arising.

  What happens at this point is that we recognize that the stillness or quieting of the ego, of the self, is not separate from the stillness of our Being. And we discover that we are in the state that the ego wanted to achieve but could never reach because its method of pushing things away and trying to destroy them doesn’t work. What works is just simply being with a clear awareness of what is happening.

  We are ignorant of our Being and its power, but it still exists somewhere inside us, so on some level we do know what it is. Because we are ignorant of this power, we set about creating another power—hatred—which is a distortion and an imitation of the true power. The aim of hatred is to remove our suffering, to remove the impediment. And we believe that it will eliminate the obstacles between us and the riches of our Being. But as we have seen, when we try to do that by fighting, by rejecting, by trying to blow up the enemy, our efforts end up perpetuating the violence, the agitation, and the separation from Being.

  So how do you cease this destructive inner activity? First, you need to recognize your resistance and your rejection, and the hatred that is implicit in these attitudes. Because the hatred is the energy that drives the rejection, the rejection won’t stop as long as that energy is there; so you need to become aware of the hatred. Thus you need to relate to your hatred and self-hatred in the same way you relate to rejection, resistance, or defensiveness when they arise: You don’t reject the hatred; you recognize it for what it is. Rather than acting it out or having it dominate you, you become the awareness that holds it.

  Learn to hold your hatred, be with it, feel it as much as possible from the inside and from the outside. Seek to know hatred, to feel the energy of it, to feel the power of it, and recognize all the associations that come up in relation to it. See into the history that created it and understand that, too. Continue in your inquiry until you are finally able to feel that hatred completely, in its full energy and power. If you do not obstruct it through judgment or rejection, the hatred will—just like anything else that arises in your experience—naturally reveal its own nature. It will dissolve, leaving what is true.

  And that truth turns out to be essential power—it is the power of truth and peace and stillness. This is the immense and silent power to be—to be undisturbed and unruffled by the ignorance and reactivity of the familiar self. It is simply the power to be who you are, without domination or control, the power of True Nature that brings a love and a freedom in simply being yourself.

  EXPLORATION SESSION

  Identifying Self-Hatred

  The purpose of this exercise is to open up your curiosity and willingness to see the hatred that may be operating unconsciously in your inner practice. To do this, you want to explore the ways you attempt to change, modify, improve, or enlighten yourself. Consider the whole range of internal activities you engage in, such as comparing yourself to standards, analyzing your behavior, managing your emotional reactions, stopping your inner process, and limiting your awareness.

  Reflect on the underlying best intentions that you may have, as well as your convictions about what it takes for you to change or grow. Notice the degree to which you are either willing to be open to yourself as you actually are or trying to make yourself fit your ideals of how you should be. Pay attention to any inner sense of ruthlessness or viciousness or coldness in the process of inquiring. Also note any discomfort, fear, or
shame that may arise as you explore.

  The more you are willing to see the manipulations, judgments, attacks, and rejections—whatever manifestations of aggression are part of your inner process—the more you can recognize the energy that is the driving force that powers them. Be aware that hatred may manifest as rejection, disregard, violence, obsessiveness, agitation, withdrawal, coldness, or lack of feeling, as well as the direct annihilating intensity of pure hatred.

  When you can recognize an element of your own self-hatred, notice how it makes you feel to be aware of it. Can you understand it enough not to judge yourself for its presence? If there is some space to be with the hatred, see what happens if you simply stay with the experience while being present with yourself.

  CHAPTER 10

  Ignorance and Direct Knowing

  IN THE FIRST PART OF THIS BOOK, we explored how the obstacles to self-realization arise in our practice of just being where we are. We focused on the ways in which aggression, attachment, defensiveness, resistance, rejection, self-hatred, and other types of inner activity make it difficult for us to be whatever we are, wherever we find ourselves.

  What may not be clear yet is that none of these activities can be understood fully until we recognize their relation to ignorance. For example, when hatred arises, there are psychodynamic or historical learned reasons for it, but they are not the only causes. Hatred also arises simply because we are ignorant. That is, we don’t know how our mind functions, how our consciousness functions.

  This brings us to the necessity of examining the primary root of the ego, of all ego life, which is ignorance. Just as we need to be aware of the specific manifestations that make it difficult for us to be real, to be ourselves, we need to see the contribution of our ignorance to this situation. When we discover how ignorance underlies all these inner activities and related attitudes, we realize that it is the fundamental impediment to being where we are.

  Without ignorance, it would be difficult to continue these activities. That’s because as ignorance dissolves, insight and self-knowledge arise. We need to be clear about how our ignorance operates so that as it transforms, we can understand how it becomes insight, clarity, knowledge, and the recognition of the truth of a situation. Enlightenment means waking up to reality, recognizing it as it really is and being there with it as it is. That is why enlightenment is usually understood as self-knowledge, self-realization, illumination, clarity.

  In prior chapters, we have worked with the fact that we have all kinds of beliefs, ideas, positions, identifications, and structures that we take ourselves to be. And we have seen that these are not who and what we are. We’ve also worked on our unconsciousness and its issues and how what arises in our experience is associated with these unconscious parts of ourselves, making it difficult to know the truth of our experience. So, although you may not have realized it, much of the inquiry we have already done has actually been inquiry into ignorance as it manifests in these different ways. Let’s look more deeply, then, into the situation of ignorance.

  LEARNED IGNORANCE

  There are two kinds of ignorance that we need to recognize and understand so that we are no longer controlled and defined by them. Once we see them for what they are, they stop being obstacles.

  The first kind is called learned ignorance. It can also be referred to as developed ignorance or accumulated ignorance. Sometimes the term conceptual ignorance is used, which means that as our mind develops and we acquire the capacity to conceptualize, we develop a certain kind of ignorance that is specifically human. Generally speaking, animals and other beings don’t have that type of ignorance, because it is something that you have to learn in order for it to develop.

  Usually this ignorance develops as knowledge. That is to say, much of our knowledge about ourselves and about the world is actually learned ignorance. It is ignorant because it is simply wrong; it does not reflect how reality is. We have all kinds of beliefs and ideas about reality that are not true. We have positions and philosophies and ideologies about ourselves, about how things work, and about what makes things happen, and many of these are inaccurate. Of course, it is difficult to see this as ignorance, because it is what we know, it is what we take to be our knowledge.

  Even our experimentally verified scientific knowledge is part of this learned ignorance. Although it is useful and in some sense correct, it is not a true picture of how things are. But generally speaking, our problems are not related to the accuracy of scientific knowledge; they concern our personal knowledge about who we are and what we are, what reality is, what relationships are, how things happen, how the mind works, and so on.

  For example, a lot of people believe that hatred, power, and aggression will bring us peace and freedom—but it doesn’t work that way. That kind of ignorance is very difficult to dispel. But the fact is, any kind of ignorance is difficult to dispel. When you believe something is true, many people can tell you that it’s incorrect, but you don’t believe them. You keep behaving as if it were true, because you really believe it is true.

  So our learned ignorance underlies much of our inner activity and our external actions. A common example is comparative judgment. We think we know what is good, what is bad. We imagine that this is what should happen or that is what should have happened. These suppositions are based on the ignorance that we call knowledge. Not only do we believe we know what should happen, we also think, “I know how to bring it about. I just need to visualize some kind of angel or deity” or “I need to get involved politically, meditate more, breathe more consciously, deepen my inquiry, feed the hungry, go back to school . . .” It goes on and on.

  So, to summarize the characteristics of learned ignorance, we can say that:

  It is our accumulated knowledge about reality. It is what we take to be true, and so it forms the basis for our inner and outer activity.

  It is also called conceptual ignorance. We conceptualize things in our mind, and these things become knowledge, and that knowledge becomes the learned ignorance.

  Even though much of it is scientifically accurate, it is not how reality is. This doesn’t mean it contradicts reality, but rather it is an approximation of it.

  When it comes to our knowledge about ourselves and our consciousness, how the soul and awareness work, what we take to be real is simply not true. Often, it’s the opposite of the truth.

  As you have seen, much of the inner work consists of seeing through all our identifications, our structures, our beliefs, our positions, and our self-images that we have taken to be real. For example, we believe that we are this individual with this history who is interacting with other individuals with their histories. We believe we’re physical bodies that move through time and space, and we take that to be knowledge because it can be scientifically verified. But through the work of inner realization, we recognize at some point that this is a learned knowledge, which is really a learned ignorance, an accumulated ignorance.

  We come to recognize that what we take to be true is false, is not the whole truth, or holds a meaning different from what we think it is.

  INNATE IGNORANCE

  The other level of ignorance is more fundamental, more subtle, and more difficult to deal with. It is called innate ignorance. But we cannot even recognize it as ignorance until we work through much of our learned ignorance. Unless we become much more illuminated about our beliefs, ideas, positions, and patterns, our innate ignorance will be hard to identify. But at some point, it becomes clear that no matter how much of our learned ignorance we work through, the realization arising from that process does not bring us to the clarity, openness, and immediacy that we have experienced when we are more directly in touch with reality. This is when we begin to recognize what is called innate ignorance, which is also referred to as primordial ignorance. This is the ignorance that we share with all animals. It is not learned; we come into the world with it.

  Learned ignorance is directly connected with development of the mind and the ego—with
all the structures and representations, images, patterns, beliefs, and ideas about oneself and reality. But the development of that learned ignorance is based on a more fundamental ignorance—the ignorance of our True Nature.

  We come into the world not knowing our True Nature. We don’t know who we are. That doesn’t mean that we don’t experience True Nature. It doesn’t mean we don’t feel it. It doesn’t mean that we don’t perceive it. It means we don’t understand it. We don’t know what it is. We don’t know its meaning, its significance. We don’t know that it is what we are.

  Animals are their True Nature, but they don’t know it. Very young babies are almost purely their True Nature, but they don’t know it either. When we are infants, we might feel it, sense it, taste it, but we don’t know that it is what we are. To know the significance of it, to be able to discriminate it in an insightful way—to recognize, “That is me! That is the nature of the world. And that is the truth”—we first need to develop learned ignorance.

  So to clarify the relationship between learned ignorance, innate ignorance, and our True Nature, we can say:

  Learned ignorance is based on innate ignorance; without that innate ignorance, we cannot develop learned ignorance.

  We have to develop learned ignorance before we can recognize our innate or fundamental ignorance.

  The reason we form an idea of who we are—which becomes part of our learned ignorance—is because we don’t know our True Nature; we are innately ignorant.

  If we knew from the beginning who and what we are, we would not need to develop a sense of self in order to know who we are. But we don’t know who we are, so we do develop a sense of self and we believe it and we take it to be true because of our innate ignorance.

  As we work through the learned ignorance, we begin to experience our True Nature. To understand our True Nature fully, we have to go through our innate ignorance. To go through our innate ignorance requires that we fully understand True Nature.