“Well, what do you call it?”
“It depends on who is listening. What I see when I look at what I am looking out of is Nothing—no eyes, no face, no head—simply Nothing, or better yet, No-thing, a No-thing that is at the same time filled with the scene, so that I can say that I see Nothing/Everything, right here where I am and no one else is. This is so obvious, and so overlooked—yet it is so obviously what I am. And it’s aware. That’s the kicker, isn’t it? It’s aware—and what is that? How did that happen? It’s a mystery, the mystery of all mysteries, and it’s what I am, my true Self. I see that I am not the separate body/mind/individual I thought I was. Frankly, it blows my mind—that is, when contraction happens and I think I am my mind.”
“How do you stop the contraction?”
“That’s a strange question because it assumes there’s a ‘you’ who can do so. Not only that, but it assumes there’s a way or a method that can accomplish it. Looking back at what is looking, what is seen? I see nothing, filled with the scene, and along with it a sense of presence, of I-am-ness. All I can say is that what I see is a boundless openness of absolutely No-thing in which anything and everything appears. So I’ll say it’s the One—or whatever you want to call it—that calls the shots. A “you” has nothing to do with it. ‘Hows’ and ‘Whys’ have no place in this vision of Who You Really Are by Who You Really Are.”
Eddie thanks me, and we part, he to his cellhouse and I to mine in a different part of the prison. I wish that weren’t the case because I immediately feel a kinship with him, but it is what is, and I know that what is is perfect (or it wouldn’t be what is!).
On the way, I run into Michael who is adorned with multicolored tattoos head to toe, one of the few prisoners I’ve seen whose body more resembles a moving canvas of artistic expression rather than the usual displays of power and death. He is not a Buddhist, but he came to our group meeting one day to tell me that he read my book and tried the headless experiments and “got it” right away, and since then, it has changed his outlook. I am always pleased to see him. He is as lit up and enthusiastic as any man I have met. It’s good to know that the Beatific Vision of Douglas Harding is the same vision of so many others now, the vision of Who We All Really Are as One.
NO-MINDFULNESS
You practice mindfulness. You have read the books and dabbled in the scriptures; you joined a Buddhist Vipassana group and practice insight meditation. Now you go around trying to be “aware.”
There is something to be said for this mindfulness, of course. How much easier it should be to live in the present, with less guilt from the past and less worry for the future. You can, as they say, be present in the Now, and hence live more fully, moment by moment. After all, if you are not mindful, you are mindless—thus, how can you “wear out the shoe of samsara?”
Ah, but it isn’t easy, you discover. This living in the present seems unnatural at first. How can one possibly be aware all the time? But with practice, lots and lots of meditation, sitting and otherwise, you develop the ability to hold your awareness for longer and longer periods, sometimes for part of a day. “This is Buddhism,” you think. “This is the way.” Eventually you’ll be fully “awake”—for what else could “awake” mean but to be mindful all the time. And already you have become more peaceful, you function better, you appreciate more; you have even learned to take a step back, to watch yourself, to let things happen and thus douse the fires of your prideful will, to allow compassion in—certainly your life has become more meaningful. But is this all there is? Is this the Buddhist ideal? Is one, in fact, “awake” because one is one hundred percent in the present?
The answer arrives one day when you happen to read a passage in a book on Buddhist metaphysics about “time”—what it is, or rather, what it isn’t—and something inside you snaps. The past and future, you are told, are in your head, one as memory, and the other as imagination. But the present, because of the complicated biochemical processing of sense perceptions, which of course takes time, is already in the past by the time you experience it! You are—you realize all too clearly!—living in the past, albeit a recent one, which happens to be in your head! Or perhaps you are living in the future, which you can never know until it has become the past. Where, in any case, is this precious “present” you have for so long been practicing to be present in?
And so you wonder: If all that you see and hear and touch is in your head, then just what is it you are “aware” of? Where, or when, does “mindfulness” come in? What difference is there, in the Large View, between being mindful and being mindless? So what if you are daydreaming—is that any more or less true to your real nature than being mindful? After all, they are both in your head!
Now suddenly years of practice—your great investment in what you thought was the present—are called into question. You find yourself feeling hollow, fearful, and even angry. This everyday world, what you have been paying close attention to, is somehow not there as you thought it was. And then it dawns on you that if the world is not there as you thought, perhaps you are not there as you thought! How strange—here you are, a fictitious “you” being mindful of a fictitious world in a fictitious present, and all of it a product of “your” imagination! Now, not only does the question arise: What is there to be mindful of? But alas, who is there to be mindful of it?
What to do? The inquiry sits like a rock at the bottom of your teacup. If, as you have heard and as you now wish were not so forcefully clear, there is no “you,” and likewise no “other-than-you,” what in the lost world is all this fuss about mindfulness?
The solution strikes you as exceedingly humorous—the very idea that there could be something to fuss about, the idea that there could be anyone to do something about anything! In fact, there is no answer because the question is not really a question.
And with that realization comes a shift of consciousness, a somersault, the miraculous metanoia you have read about. Now mindfulness is suddenly “no-mindfulness”—mindfulness in its true sense—not a “you” in the “present” but simply an all-embracing Presence.
It is a Presence that you (but not as a “you”) are creating, moment by precious moment. What you once called “time” you now see for what it is—a concept—so the past, the future, and even the biochemical process itself, are revealed as conceptual interpretations of what is basically a “timeless Presence (presented serially), Here and Now intemporally. Creating the world constitutes the Here and Now—the process itself is the so-called “present.”
Aware of this, you are also aware of Subjectivity, for to “create the world” and to “perceive the world” must necessarily be the same; they cannot be separate. There is, you realize, no such thing as subject seeing objects, because seer and seen are one and the same. This is the realization, the (sort of) awareness that is “mindfulness,” the no-mindfulness (for there is no one to be mindful of no-separate thing) that is true mindfulness.
Mindfulness, after all, is Mindfulness being mindful of Mindfulness. Need you say more?
LETTER TO A FRIEND
Awhile back I came across an article in Discover magazine entitled “Astronomy at the Speed of Light” (by Bob Berman, December, 2005, p.24) that caught my attention, in particular this one sentence:
“A photon does not pass through time at all: Travelling at the speed of light, it experiences being everywhere in the universe all at once.”
And not long after, I read much the same in The Little Book of Life and Death, in which the late English philosopher Douglas Harding quotes John Gribbon from Gribbon’s book In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat:
“At the speed of light time stands still; to a photon the Big Bang and the present are the same time. Therefore the universe is connected by a web of electro-magnetic radiation which ‘sees’ everything at once.”
During the last thirty years or so there have been several popular books published for the lay public on the subject of the new physics and cosmology. But of those that I’ve read, not one
proffered the suggestion that light is the Observer, Consciousness, Who We Really Are—this, despite numerous pronouncements on how we are required to radically rethink our views of reality, or despite millennia of references to Light by the great spiritual traditions. But how else can one interpret the conclusions of relativity and quantum mechanics? For the facts point to the observer. Einstein’s mass/energy equation tells us that our universe and our world of everyday objects—this paper and this ink, for instance—are, in fact, energy. And energy, as quantum mechanics points out, whether chosen to be “seen” as a wave or a particle, is no more than a measure of its position when observed; beyond this, it cannot be said to exist. Objects “collapse” into apparent “reality” only when observed.
Moreover, relativity theory demonstrates that space and time and mass are relative to the motion of the observer, and in this way depend upon the observer. The speed of light, however, is constant (as is Einstein’s space/time invariant, a mathematical combination of space and time demonstrating that changes in space relate to changes in time), regardless of whether the observer is moving toward an object or away from it. But does this not call into question the premise of “observer” and “observed” (not to mention the assumption of multiple universes), or at least provide a clue to the possibility that the distinction may be illusory? Would it not be simpler to explain the paradoxes of relativity theory if there were only one Observer with multiple space/time “views?” Or no observer, apart from that which is observed? Only observing?
For what is light but what One is, and what is the space/time invariant but a measure of how One appears as the universe? What I Am is spacelessly and timelessly the center of the universe because all of space/time is what I manifest as. Space and time have no reality other than this. What the new physics therefore suggests is that only the observer “exists,” and given this, it becomes clear as to where space and time and all of matter originate. There are no fixed and intrinsically existing properties called “space” and “time.” There are only events of observation, the Observer observing Himself, and in the process, weaving His measurements into an appearance of reality. Quantum imaginers, What We Are “collapses” repetitively, instant by instant from the stillness of probability into our manifestation as time, assigning these instants, these “quanta,” to what we call “light”—that mystery we cannot otherwise define because it is what we are. Is this not perhaps the way, science’s way, to define “enlightenment?”
ON DYING
Melvin, my octogenarian friend with his share of dementia, has now reached the stage where the distinction between TV reality and so-called “real” reality has significantly blurred. Recently a friend caught Melvin waving to a game show model who had waved goodbye to the audience at the end of the show. And I too have seen him, wide-eyed and on the edge of his bunk, mouthing inaudible words to a cross-eyed bird in a Saturday morning cartoon. I love this old guy, and I hope that when I’m his age I’ll at least enjoy life as much as he seems to, never complaining, never blaming or belittling others, never rejecting whatever shows up. Only once have I ever heard him utter a negative word, and that was in regard to an apparent relationship he’d had with the Prince of Darkness. “Before I came to prison,” he told me, “oh, the devil was in me!”
These days more than ever I think about dying. Or living longer. Quickly followed, thank goodness, by how absurd those notions are, for what is there but this body, this brief apparition, that could do either? Here, right where I am, I see nothing but awareness. No “thing” at all, and it is only things—objects appearing in awareness—that can live or die, each and all of them arising and passing expressions of this aware no-thing that I am. And yet, despite the fact that awareness both witnesses and is what it witnesses (and knows that that is what it is!), it also seems to forget, and in the forgetting continues to play this marvelous game of oneness pretending to be twoness. Could there be an adventure more wildly improbable yet so completely satisfying? So endlessly new, yet always the same?
A neighbor here is slowly killing himself. He’s a devout Christian, he claims he’s not depressed, and he’s convinced that only by dying will he find himself in a better place. Of course, to him, suicide is an unforgivable sin, but he’s figured out a way around that by trying to eat himself into a heart attack or cancer. He’s morbidly obese. He gobbles almost nothing but cake and cookies and whatever packaged junk food he can afford from our weekly canteen, conveniently forgetting that gluttony is also a sin, and could, in his worldview, send him to the place he least wants to go.
Which reminds me of a joke. Hugh Hefner and Madonna die and meet Saint Peter at heaven’s gate. Saint Peter tells Hugh Hefner that, because he corrupted so many young men’s minds with pictures of nude women in his magazines, in order for him to get into heaven he will have to walk through a tunnel, and if he has one impure thought, a trap door will open and he’ll fall through to hell. So Hugh Hefner walks into the tunnel, with Saint Peter 10 feet behind. Halfway through, Saint Peter yells out, “Naked breasts!”—and immediately a trap door opens and Hugh Hefner falls through to hell.
Back at the gate, Saint Peter tells Madonna that she too must walk through the tunnel, and because she corrupted so many young men’s minds with her sensuous moves, if she has one impure thought, a trap door will open and she’ll fall through into hell. So Madonna starts into the tunnel with Saint Peter 10 feet behind. Halfway into the tunnel a trap door suddenly opens, and Saint Peter falls through.
Sadly, from my neighbor’s point of view of a separate “self” confronting a separate world, this is no joke. To him and to so many others, life is a never-ending struggle of failing to live up to one’s distorted beliefs and then having to suffer the consequences of a presumed afterlife based on either how great or how little one failed (or, as in Buddhism, suffering an endless succession of presumed reincarnations).
Added to that is the fact that, when you finally do “see the light”(!), you find out that you never left it, that it was this assumed “you” that all along was the joke, a “you” that was never in the central spot to begin with, a “you” who never had the power to get it wrong, a “you” that could never do anything at all, apart from the All of No-thing/Everything.
And how much easier this so-called “living” should be when the false ideas of life and death are seen through, or, as Wei Wu Wei once said, when you finally board the train and leave your baggage behind. And so it is. So it all is when this timeless and boundless and empty Aware Capacity for everything arising and passing is seen, actually seen, and therefore indisputably known to be the true Self.
Two weeks ago Melvin collapsed on the sidewalk in front of the medical clinic, and by the time they got him inside, he was flatlined. Somehow they revived him and got him to a hospital where he underwent bypass surgery, and now he’s back, looking pale and more stooped than ever as he trudges to the chowhall, towing an oxygen tank on wheels. Today he told me that everyone keeps asking how he’s doing (to which he always answers what he really believes, which is “Fine!”), so I related to him what I’m fond of saying when someone asks me that question: that I’m like the guy who fell off the roof of a ten story building and was heard to say as he passed each floor, “So far, so good!”—to which Melvin chuckled, so I added, “I’m at the second floor, Melvin.”
“Yeah,” Melvin said. He had a funny look on his face, as if he were confused about something, like maybe he was wondering whether or not he was confused. Then he slowly looked down, moistened his lips, and half-whispered something that truly amazed me.
“I think I already hit the bottom floor,” he said. “But it wasn’t there.”
WILL THE REAL J.C. PLEASE STAND UP!
Sri Swami Baba Muktananda said, “The highest purpose we have in this life is to recognize our own Awareness of Being as the universal Self which has become everyone. The primary process in life is not of becoming but recognizing what already is.”
I could say that
Baba Muktananda is right. And I could say that Baba Muktananda is wrong.
But who am I to comment on the perfectly right or wrong words of Baba Muktananda? I’m nobody. In fact, I’m NOBODY. The very same NOBODY/NO-THING that has no thoughts, no beliefs, and certainly no such thing as “purpose” for anybody or anything. And yet, all bodies, things, and purpose arise TO, WITHIN, and AS what I am. What else is there to recognize? And who is there apart from It to recognize It? What else could there be?
So who am I?
Is it not just THIS—Pure Awareness of Being, appearing as anything?—and can we leave it at that?
IMPROMPTU AWAKENING
This is the realization: You are dreaming, and the entire universe is your dream. Everyone else is a character in your dream. You have made them up. You have conjured every last person and thing in the cosmos because, after all, you are dreaming it. You are alone. You have always been alone and always will be alone, because there cannot be anyone else.
There is more to the realization: The world is a hoax, a sham, a cruel hallucination. The monumental superstructures of religion, science, culture—it is all a trick of the mind. Everything you held dear—your family, your home, your job, your friends, your town, your nation, the earth, “life”—is all a show, an incredibly intricate and complicated drama you have somehow created. It is the Great Joke. You could almost laugh, if it weren’t blowing your mind.
Coming to Nothing and Finding Everything Page 4
