The Unfolding Now

by A H Almaas

  When we get identified, we don’t feel as though we have done it ourselves; we feel that something has happened to us. But in fact, identification is something we do. And it is possible to become aware of this subtle inner activity and what is behind it. When a strong identification occurs, it is almost like an addiction; you feel a need to be identified.

  But it is not just a need for this or that particular identification. What you believe you need is an identity. You are addicted to having an identity, and it is very difficult to be totally without the identifications that are continually creating that identity. And we are identified with so many things at the same time. One identification drops away and another one takes its place. We shed one after the other, but our need for self-identity remains.

  Identification can happen with anything. Some people are identified with their jobs. Most people are identified with being a man or with being a woman. We believe that if we drop the identification, the reality will drop off. But, in fact, whatever is truly real is not created or maintained by our identification with it.

  When we are being ourselves, implicit in that is the trust, the security, the certainty, the easy, natural, relaxed way of simply being there. The recognition of this is the illumination of who we are. Thus, if I know completely that this is who I am, I don’t need to engage in a mental operation to establish it or try to remember it. And if I really recognize that it is me, I don’t need to remind myself that it is me. Wherever I go, it is me. But if I am not confident that it is me, then I will struggle to remember who I am.

  Another way to say this is: if we don’t have that certainty, if we don’t trust who we are, then we reify ourselves so that we carry an identity around with us. And we go around asserting it to others. Some people are identified with being the Absolute, and if somebody tells them they are not the Absolute, they feel wounded. “Can’t you see that I am? Everybody should see that I am the Absolute!” That can happen to spiritually advanced adults. But this means that there is an identification. And even though the person might be actually experiencing themselves as the Absolute, the identification creates a gap, what I call the narcissistic gap. In that gap of needing to be seen as what we are, we are not being completely ourselves, we are not being where we are. We are not simply being.

  Every kind of identification is a mental operation that traps us into a particular form. Some of us identify with our nationality. Some of us are identified with our race. Other people are identified with their intelligence or with their beauty. We know that many of us are identified with being a child or with being an abused child. What is important to remember is that every form keeps us trapped, no matter how lofty it may seem. We are not free regardless of what we identify with. I can experience myself as God, but if I am identified with being God, I am lost, I am not free. Then I have to be God and everybody had better know it.

  DISIDENTIFICATION AS PART OF SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

  No matter what form identification takes, it always arises out of the particular relationship we have with the content of our experience. We make that specific content important in a way that disconnects us from the immediacy of being ourselves. That is why many spiritual traditions train their students to learn to recognize the identification and undo it. Or, more accurately, they teach them to recognize the identification and not go along with it.

  Many people think that disidentification is an activity: “I see my identification, and I do something to it—I disidentify. In the same way that I identify, I can disidentify.” But this is not the case. Identification is an activity, and true disidentification is the absence of that activity.

  Disidentification means:

  Recognizing the inner gluing of my identity or consciousness to a specific content

  Seeing this adherence to the content for what it is—an identification

  Not believing the identification or going along with it

  Not pushing it away

  Understanding it and letting it dissolve or reveal itself as True Nature

  If we try to push an identification away, we end up identifying with something else. True Nature doesn’t push anything away. When it sees identification, True Nature says, “Hmm, that’s a very interesting manifestation. I didn’t know I could do that! I can actually trap myself. And sometimes I even forget that I trap myself. I am good at trapping myself.”

  So it is important not to associate disidentifying with the inner activity of pushing away or disowning. Some people, for example, are concerned that if they don’t identify with their values, their values will disappear. Not identifying with your values doesn’t mean that they will go away. If they are real, they will be there; in fact they will be there more strongly. If they are not real, they will go away. But that only means that you are not completely certain about the reality of your values. And that’s why you need to identify with them. Identification says, “I am not willing to give the thing up! I am not willing to be free of that identification.” This is exactly why identification has such a grip on us: we don’t want to give up our identifications because it would feel like a loss of ground.

  IDENTIFICATION IS NOT YOUR NEMESIS

  Like anything else that arises in our experience, we do not need to make identification our enemy. Identification is not your nemesis; it is not something you have to fight. It is something to be aware of, to recognize. Because if you fight, if you make it your nemesis, then you are engaging in the same activity—you are just identifying with something else. If you’re angry, you can get trapped in thinking, “I am not that; I am my True Nature. I shouldn’t get angry in the first place. And I definitely shouldn’t be identified with my anger now that I am feeling it.”

  Or we reject other people. Let’s say you and your best friend are talking and you end up in an argument. You say to him, “I think you’re identified with your anger.” When you say that, you are most likely not saying, “I’m aware of your identification and offering you this information to help you liberate yourself.” What you are really telling him is, “You’d better not keep this up; I don’t like it. I want you to get away from me because I want to liberate myself from your anger.”

  IDENTIFICATION AND INQUIRY

  What are the implications for our practice of inquiry? Now that we understand that any reification, any structure, that we are trapped in implies an identification, we can learn how to more easily recognize when we are getting caught in identifying. The more we are present, and the more we are aware of the present, the more we can settle down and allow the natural unfoldment of our experience. As our awareness becomes stronger, it will become easier to have a direct, immediate knowingness of our experience. Certainly our mind will label our experience; that is its natural tendency, and we don’t need to fight that either. But it can be more of an afterthought, and it does not have to interfere with the inquiry. What we inquire into is our immediate experience that the mind labels. That immediate experience is what unfolds, and that is where the inquiry stays.

  If, on the other hand, the focus is more on the discursive mind that is labeling, then actual inquiry is not occurring; it is more of a mental inquiry that will not help us learn to be where we are. We will stay dissociated instead of learning to be real.

  What we have been discerning in this chapter is one of the most pervasive and subtle forms of how we manipulate our experience and distance ourselves from the immediacy of where we are. Identification is an inevitable result of our mental capacity to objectify our experience combined with our lack of trust in simply being. Our ability to attend to this activity, to be curious about it, to learn how it works and to not go along with it, will directly increase our capacity to be the simplicity of our True Nature.

  EXPLORATION SESSION

  Recognizing Identification in Your Experience

  Take about fifteen minutes to make an open inquiry into whatever is happening to you, moment to moment. At any given time, you are likely to be identified with some element of what is g
oing on. As you inquire into your experience to see where you are, consider how identification may be shaping that experience.

  In order to recognize your identification, you need to see where you are coming from or who you take yourself to be in the midst of your experience. Being aware of reactions, attitudes, desires, preferences, and attachments provides clues that can help you recognize the way you are identified.

  If you become aware of an identification, notice how you feel when you recognize it. Do you judge it, reject it, feel relieved, get curious? If you are able to explore it, notice if it shifts, dissolves, or transforms over time. Being aware of the variations in your sense of constraint and freedom as you inquire can be another clue to the activity of identification.

  CHAPTER 13

  Lighting Up the Now

  IF WE EXPERIENCE OURSELVES in our true self-existing condition, we will see what we actually are: We are beings of light. Remember the example in chapter 11 of the spoon, which, when seen without any mental operation of reification, is perceived to be a form of light. We, too, are forms or beings of light when we experience ourselves with total immediacy.

  We are beings of light in the fluid state—completely frictionless, completely luminous, totally radiant and free. Now, everybody knows that because light has no mass and no weight, gravity does not affect it. So, in our True Nature, we have no heaviness, no thickness, no weight. We are substantial only in the sense that fluid light has a fullness, a sense of body to it. But that fullness, that substantiality, is completely light and smooth. That is the nature of awareness. And because it is light, it doesn’t help us see—it is what sees, it is what perceives. Thus light, awareness, consciousness, perception, sensitivity are all the same thing.

  However, even if we recognize the truth that we are beings of light, we tend to reify that perception and identify with it, concretizing ourselves and experiencing ourselves as heavy and opaque. Even as beings of light, we see ourselves as a physical body, with its parts and activities, having mass and operating under the influence of gravity. We think that we are entities in space and time, and that our existence began in the past and will end in the future.

  In our continuing exploration of True Nature and of the obstacles to being ourselves that we encounter, we want to focus now on another particular area that makes it difficult to be who we are: our incomplete understanding of the nature of time. In order to do this, we need to observe our experience from the perspective of being a being of light. What are the properties of light and time that can help us understand more about our essential nature?

  LIGHT AND THE PASSAGE OF TIME

  Science tells us that light moves at the maximum speed possible in the universe, which endows light with certain properties that differentiate it from everything else. One of the principles within Einstein’s theory of relativity is that the faster one travels, the slower time passes. Time slows down for somebody who is going at a very high speed—and the closer we get to the speed of light, the slower time becomes. That means that the closer we come to being light, the slower that time will pass for us.

  What are the implications of this for understanding what it means to be ourselves? If we apply it to our internal life, we can see that the more we are present and the more fully we are experiencing and being our essential presence, the more we will experience things slowing down. This seems to be a law of time—not that linear time is being altered, but more time becomes experientially “available” to us. Thus, the slowing down of our experience of time will place us more and more in the present. The more we are the presence, the more we are in the present. So, the slowness of time has a lot to do with being in the present.

  There is most likely an etymological connection between the words “present” and “presence,” because the two are very much connected in sense and meaning. In our practice of inquiry, when we talk about being where we are, we mean being in the moment. Our experience is always in the present, even though our mind might be flitting about in the past and future. The actual manifestation—what is arising in our experience—is always arising right now. This is also true of light. For light there is only now; there is nothing else. This fact is another consequence of the reality described by Einstein’s relativity equations.

  What is behind the principle that the faster you go, the more slowly you experience time? It begins with understanding that the speed of any object in the universe can be seen as a function of traveling in both space and time. We never travel in space without time passing. Physics has determined that the faster you go in space, the slower you go in time. As we travel at normal speeds, that is not apparent to us. But as objects accelerate and approach the speed of light, it becomes apparent that speed in time slows down the more speed in space increases—the maximum point being the speed of light.

  In our universe, nothing can exceed the speed of light in space. And the slower you travel relative to the speed of light, the faster time passes. So for human beings, time passes very quickly relative to light because we move very slowly in space in comparison to light. Thus the combination of speed in space and in time always equals the speed of light.

  LIGHT AND THE ETERNAL NOW

  The human experience is of moving about in space and steadily, constantly aging—of having time pass. What is the experience of light? Time does not pass for light—light does not go through time. It travels at the maximum speed in space—the speed of light. So what is its speed in time? Zero. That is, since its speed in space is the speed of light, and the speed of light is the maximum speed, its speed in time is zero.

  Einstein was talking about physical light, but when we are experiencing the inner light, the actual luminosity of our True Nature, we begin to appreciate Einstein’s idea and have an actual experience that is analogous to it, instead of just a theoretical understanding of the idea. We begin to know what it means when we say that for light, time does not pass; that for light it is always the eternal now, and there is nothing but now.

  What does that mean? If you see light from a star, and some of it is coming from as far back in time as the Big Bang, you will think that the part of light that you are seeing is very old—say, three billion light years old. Logically, you think, “This light came from that star and it took it that long to get here, so it must be at least that old.” The light itself, however, will not experience that any time has passed for it. If you were to experience the light, or if you were “riding” the light, you would know that it is the same age as it was at the time of the Big Bang. It is one hundred percent new light, ever fresh; it never gets old.

  So for humans, who are operating outside of light, time passes, and things get old. For the light, there is no such thing. Light travels through space at a certain speed, but it has no experience of getting old. It is always new, always fresh, and so it is always itself; it doesn’t change. It is always, always, its very nature.

  You might not have thought about that, but scientifically, it is known that light is ageless. We don’t experience that because we are not traveling with light; we are looking at it from outside. This is just like looking at our True Nature from the outside, from the perspective of the physical body: We keep experiencing the passage of time, and therefore we assume that time must pass for our True Nature, too. But if we are in the stance of our True Nature, things can change around us, and our body still changes, but the experience is that there is no passage of time. And that is because the experience of that body of light is agelessness, endlessness—always now, now, now, never changing, that ever-fresh now, this very moment always.

  So what we call present time is actually the intersection between what we call time and that timeless presence. The only place we touch True Nature is in the present moment, not in the past or the future. In the present moment is where True Nature intersects time, because it is the now.

  NOW WITHOUT FUTURE

  True Nature is the now-ness of time, but the now-ness of time is not just the present time, the pa
rticular moment you are in. When you experience the actual now-ness, it is not an instant in time; it does not have a beginning or an end. If you notice an event happening, you can say that it has a beginning and it has an end, but all of it is actually experienced in the now. So the now itself doesn’t start with the beginning of the event and it doesn’t end with the end of the event. It is always now.

  You can see, then, why it is difficult to think logically from the perspective of light. The universe appears differently for light. As we have seen, light doesn’t age, and time doesn’t pass for it. So there is no such thing as boredom, because there is no history, and there is no such thing as future.

  What does that mean for us as human beings having experiences? If there is no history, no future, then nothing affects me. How can I be affected if it is only the now that is real, that is present? And if I recognize that there is only the now, what is the point of trying to change my experience?

  Any attempt to alter your experience, to improve it means that you believe that there is a future and you are living for that future. You are saying no to the now out of hope for some better future. But for light, that better future never comes. Whenever we want to advance to a better future, we disconnect, we cut off from the path of light. Light experiences only the now, the very moment. It recognizes that what is now is what is, that what reality is is the now-ness of this moment.

  Even if you just look at this logically, what else is there but now? The rest of it is really just stories in our mind. If you believe the stories of your mind, you believe in past and future as possibilities.

  LIVING IN THE NOW

  So this is where we can see how our orientation, our attitude, about time can become an obstacle, an obscuration, to being our True Nature. If we have the attitude of future orientation, we miss the moment. We are dissociated from the presence of the moment, and we can’t be in the moment.