The Unfolding Now

by A H Almaas

  The way you experience the interaction—and, in fact, almost any interaction—is a reenactment of an internalized experience of someone from your past. You are projecting the dynamics of an earlier relationship onto the present one and perceiving the present interaction through that veil. What is happening is not freely, spontaneously arising; you are forming it, you are making it be a certain way. And one indication of this is the fact that somebody else wouldn’t experience that person in the same way.

  You won’t see yourself as trying to be a certain way. You will think, “I’m just being who I am,” but it is not truly a spontaneously and freely arising experience. It is determined by your historical knowledge, your learned knowledge—all the beliefs and ideas about who you are and what other people are like and what reality is. It is influenced by your ordinary accumulated knowledge.

  So, looking at this situation of interference with all its subtle activity, we can see that:

  Our experience doesn’t freely arise. We interfere with the spontaneity of our experience by perceiving it through our accumulated beliefs and understandings.

  Specifically, our experiences are molded and formed by a subliminal mental process—the incessant activity of remembering, thinking, and reacting according to information from the past.

  In any interaction with another individual, we impose on our experience an image of who we are, an image of the other person, and a particular feeling tone on the relationship itself. The result is an experience of reality created, at least in part, by past conditioning.

  We don’t see our activity as an interference because we are not explicitly rejecting a particular experience. But what we are actually rejecting is the spontaneity of our arising experiences. This is exactly the difficulty we have in being where we are: we try to direct our experience. But here we are not just trying to direct our experience, we are actually directing it. We are shaping it by looking at it through the past. Our experience is partly formed by it emerging through the filter of past knowledge.

  This is a subtler inner activity to observe because it is an almost continuous, subliminal, or unconscious mental process with many parts: remembering, imagining, imposing a particular image or form, filtering, projecting, and a host of other subliminal mental and emotional operations.

  We can see from this that we are continually creating our experience instead of letting it be itself, instead of letting it emerge freely on its own. Thus all ego experience is inherently an interference with our present experience. Here is another example:

  Let’s say you are feeling, “I am furious at my partner; that is where I really am.” It seems to be the truth, and it probably is. But being furious at this person may also imply that you have imposed on the situation a relationship from someone else in your past. You dragged that out of your memory, carried it on your shoulders, and have attached it to the moment. You forced it on the moment, and you keep forcing it on, keep trying to make it stay, so that it conforms to the past that you are still carrying.

  So you have your story: “I’m furious because this person did this hurtful thing to me.” Most of the time, however, when we explore the situation, we find that we are not seeing the matter correctly. And even if some of what we perceive is true, inevitably we are also projecting onto the experience things that aren’t really happening; we are in at least partial delusion.

  This is another way of saying that we are doing something to our experience. But it is a kind of doing that we don’t usually see as doing. We say, “I can’t help thinking that I am really furious at this guy,” but the thinking itself is an interference with the moment. It is a reacting and a remembering. We are activating a particular program that we think of as reality.

  It is our reality, on one level, but if we let ourselves really be there with that reality, if we are present and feeling that reality fully, it can take us further into the truth, and the experience will begin to reveal its True Nature. We will start to see that our thoughts about a person we are angry at involves a mental operation, a projection, a transference, and an imaging of ourselves. In other words, in order for that experience of our being furious to happen, we must believe that we are a certain person and our partner is a certain person. If we let go of those beliefs, the reality will begin to shift. We may not believe we can let go of those beliefs, which might be true. But the important awareness is that our reality is at least partly based on a mental belief carried over from the past. So we become able to see the mental quality of our experience, which exposes its empty quality—its lack of presence—because the reality we are experiencing lacks full immediacy.

  That is why awareness with presence is emphasized as our practice—being aware of and present with where we are. If we are only aware, but not truly present, we might miss the fact that our experience can be palpable, full of consciousness—that we can have an immediate contact and in-touchness with whatever is happening.

  Let’s review, then, how we move toward a transparent understanding of our experience and toward being who and what we really are.

  As we experience an event or interaction, we are generally reacting to what we experience happening (secondary manifestation). This involves judgment, resistance, denial, manipulation, and so forth.

  When we can stop this interference, we become more aware of what is actually arising (the primary manifestation) and begin to understand it. We see that it is not a full, immediate experience of the now. We recognize that we have layers and layers of veils over our experience that make it not completely palpable, not completely alive, not immediate.

  We think we are being where we are, but we are actually engaged in an inner activity that is at first not obvious. We are unconsciously disconnected, dissociated from our Being, or we might have some sense of disconnection but feel that we have no volition in the matter.

  If we just stay present with our experience and do not fight it, it begins to reveal itself, and we start to see how our mind is meddling with our experience in the moment.

  As we see how our beliefs and ideas are involved, we begin to see the mental quality of our experience, its emptiness and its lack of reality.

  We superimpose on the moment what we believe we are. In other words, whenever something happens, we react in a certain way based on a certain projection from the past that makes us be a certain kind of person at the moment.

  As greater clarity, greater understanding, and greater awareness of presence arise, we begin to recognize that when we think we are being where we are, we are not being ourselves yet. We begin to see that what we are engaged in is a reaction, a projection of our mind onto the moment.

  We begin to see more specifically the inner activities of primary-manifestation meddling, which we have been accustomed to believing are the real content of the moment. We become aware of our self-images, our identities, our ego structures, the programming from our personal history, and our projections. All of these are interferences.

  As we come to understand what is happening—by recognizing that the content of the experience is a projection and a position we are taking in the moment—the light of awareness transforms our experience into the actual reality of that moment. At the same time, it will transform us into what we really are, not what we believe ourselves to be.

  EXPOSING THE LACK OF IMMEDIACY

  As we work through these issues, it becomes clear that our ignorance perpetuates itself because we don’t know who we are. So how do we understand and work with this kind of inner activity that keeps us from really being ourselves?

  This activity is very difficult to perceive because, as we said, it is subliminal and mostly unconscious. One traditional method we use is to sit in meditation, which means to not engage intentionally with any inner activity. Eventually, the mind will quiet down, the agitation will settle, and that settling, that quietness, will begin to bring more immediacy to our experience. Actually, it will first begin to reveal the lack of immediacy, and then it will bring about more
immediacy. That is because in meditation, we are not dissociating from our present moment through the mental processes of thinking, reacting, and inner agitation.

  In terms of the primary practice of being where you are and inquiring into your experience, you will find that it is best to work with the immediacy of your experience, bringing to it a quality of awareness and consciousness that can look into the truth of it. You engage with your experience, inquire into it: What is it? What is its nature? What is making it be the particular way it is in each moment?

  We see our thoughts, our feelings, and the content of our images and projections and through contrast and scientific comparative judgment, we can perceive the connections between these elements and what we have experienced in the past. You might see, for example, “Oh, how I’m feeling right now is similar to how I reacted to my mother when she used to tell me that I’m stupid.”

  In making this kind of connection, we recognize something common to all our experiences—that they are not truly of the moment; they are colored by our past. We can see the veil, the wrapping that our consciousness has put around itself, which has become an interference. We recognize that the dynamism of our Being is not completely free; the total openness that invites experience to arise freshly, just as it is, is missing. We sense that our experience is occurring through old, musty filters that create a dullness and a darkness.

  We often talk about being here in our ordinary experience. And of course, we are being here in some sense. But what does it mean to be here in the first stage of self-discovery, when there is no direct sense of essential presence? All it means is that I am feeling what I am feeling and I am not overtly trying to change it. But I am not being there yet! How can I be there if it is just an idea of me who is there? All I can do is to be aware of what is happening, to feel it, to recognize it and not fight it.

  However, if I truly learn not to fight it, my experience begins to reveal that I am not being here, I am not really present. It is true that I am not fighting it, I am aware of it, I am not trying to get away. So I might not be off somewhere else with my attention, but I am not really here either. I haven’t really landed in the truth of what is here, the truth of the now. I’m just hovering over the experience. I am someplace in my mind, in a mental reality.

  REIFYING OUR EXPERIENCE

  We see that when we examine the mental content of our experience, we begin to notice that our experience is composed of images, reactions, and projections that are all knowledge in our mind. A simpler but more profound way to say this is that our experience is composed mostly of reifications. A reification refers to something that we have experienced or thought about that has become an object in our mind, a mental construct.

  For instance, the body image that we rely on to experience ourselves is a reification of the body. When you see somebody that you know walking by, you see them as a particular physical time/space entity, identified by a certain label called a name. This is a reification—an encapsulated idea of what a person is. But a person is not a time/space entity. He or she is a manifestation, a form that reality assumes that we first experience at a specific point in time. Our mind remembers that impression, abstracts it out of the oneness of Being from which it is inseparable, and makes it into an object, putting a wrapping around it and labeling it.

  Let’s say that you are having a meal and you lift your spoon. What is this spoon? The spoon that you are experiencing is not the real spoon. What you are experiencing is the reification of the spoon—that is, something that your mind is imposing on the situation. You are mentally creating an object that we call a spoon and projecting it onto the form that reality is taking in the now. If you could see this form without the reification, without that mental operation, you would recognize it as presence assuming that particular shape and color at that location.

  I don’t mean that there is nothing real about the spoon. Obviously something is in your hand that you are using to get the food to your mouth. But if you see the spoon without any mental operation, it will be more like the appearance of a spoon, a hologram of a spoon. Actually, without reifications you will see that it is light. It is a form of light with shadows and colors, stripped of its familiar mental-image identity as a spoon. And it is the mental imaging of the spoon that makes it opaque and solid to the eye. Without those reifications or mental images, everything around you would become one vast field of light shaping itself into holograms. But usually, because of our reifications, we don’t see the light itself; we only see the color and shape the light takes, which we then label as this or that object. This mental object is an opacity that cuts us off from contact with the field of light.

  Extending the example of the spoon to the rest of our experience, we can see how our learned knowledge becomes an obstacle to being ourselves. Our entire experience is composed of reifications—abstracted concepts and impressions that have become mentally created objects. We keep imposing our belief in those entities on our experience. This is how we interfere with the moment, making it appear as though these entities were real, when it is really our mind that has made them into entities.

  This process of reifying our experience is ongoing and constant, and we are continually imposing old reifications from the past. We do not see the now; rather we experience a reified moment, which means that we are superimposing previously created reifications—images, representations, and mental constructs of what we think is the self, other people, and various objects, on the now.

  Because we are tightly wrapping the moment with these constructs, the dynamism of Being is not free to manifest itself in us. Our Being, then, is always constrained and directed to manifest through one kind of wrapping or another that is specifically ours. This reifying of experience, of awareness, of the present moment, prevents us from being ourselves. We don’t feel that we are really there. It’s as though we haven’t landed. We feel that way because there is a dissociation—a distance between our true beingness and what we are experiencing—that is created by the mind interposing layer after layer of these wrappings.

  We have learned in earlier chapters that our practice is to see the truth about what is happening in our experience in each moment, to recognize what it is and understand it. Now that you have some understanding of how reification operates, you can appreciate how important it is to feel our way through that process, to approach it experientially. Because if we only work with it mentally, we are still operating within our reifications and will remain trapped by them. That is why it is not possible for the thinking mind alone to dissolve reification, despite the claims of some postmodern philosophers.

  In contrast, observing our experience with awareness and with presence challenges the reifications by revealing them as reifications. It is our belief in them that keeps them in place. We hold on to them, we preserve them by believing that they are real. But once we recognize them as mental constructs, they become transparent, and that makes it possible for us to stop going along with them.

  It is important to remember here that whatever constructs we identify are not to be treated as the enemy and rejected. Just as in any other part of our practice, we are called to understand our mental operations and recognize our lack of immediacy and the reifications that create it. This occurs simply by being present and aware of what is happening and inquiring into it. Even when we recognize how we are limiting our immediacy, we don’t have to fall into the trap of judgment.

  As we recognize these things for what they are, the obstacles, the layers, begin to dissolve, and we begin to experience ourselves as more landed, more present. As they dissolve, they reveal the True Nature of the moment, and we feel a greater immediacy in our experience.

  Eventually, we recognize that immediacy really means presence. That is, when our experience becomes truly immediate—without the interposition of any mental construct—then we are here, really in the now, fully in our experience. To be in our experience in this way is what we call presence and that is what we mean when we
talk about truly being ourselves. We realize that “being here” means, “I am actually the presence that I am. I am here at this very moment, and my experience is not a mental construction dredged up from my past. I am just what I am in my factness, and I am experiencing this moment completely, directly, without anything intervening. I am the very awareness, the very consciousness, that is present, that exists, in this very moment, and I am experiencing myself as that very existence.”

  Further, when we are no longer defined and restricted by the constructs that our mind has imposed on the moment—when we finally can experience ourselves with immediacy and let ourselves be—we recognize what it means not to act internally, on ourselves or our experience. Because “not taking any inner action” and “being ourselves” turn out to be exactly the same thing—the simplicity of just being here.

  And then the realization arises: “Not only am I free to just be, free to not act; I am the aware medium, the conscious medium itself.” That fact, and the recognition of that fact, is what makes it possible for us to be truly where we are—which turns out to be what we are.

  We also come to understand what immediacy is. That is, we experience things directly. But we also recognize that we are experiencing ourselves in that immediacy. We do not just experience the content of the experience; we are experiencing our awareness as well.

  So if I am experiencing my sadness in some moment, and I am able to do that with immediacy, totally, I then recognize that I am this presence, this fullness, this awareness, this luminosity, that is pervaded at some location within it by the affect of sadness. I am that self-existing awareness that is aware of that sadness.

  And we recognize that this self-existing awareness is now the primary arising in our experience. It is an actual true manifestation of reality in this moment. Everything else—including all of our feelings—is secondary and is always changing.