Yes, you are afraid. You want desperately to be somebody—anybody—but now you know better. Now you can’t go back. You can’t go back because you realize there is not anywhere or anywhen to go back to. There is only Here and Now and This, and you don’t know how to deal with all Three or all One or all None because they aren’t a place, a time or a thing. You are afraid not because of what you have lost but because of what you are losing moment by moment. You are even afraid of being stuck in your fear—thoughts swirling madly like a horrifying carnival ride you can’t get off. There is, you think, no way out.
But out to where? . . .
To Here! You know the answer, of course, and you also know that all you have to do is let go—but it seems so final, so “forever.” Your head feels a little strange; you seem to be viewing the world from a little farther behind your eyes than usual, and you have the odd but certain conviction that everything you see is only you—which you really don’t know what to do about. It dawns on you that, in fact, there is nothing you can do about it, never could and never will, because you, you realize, have nothing to do with it, for you too are a character in your dream. Then who is dreaming?
You are! My God, you are alone, and the greatest joke of all is that you have dreamed up a “you,” someone who thought to be in charge, responsible for your every move and a few moves of “others” as well. But there is no “you,” there are no “others,” there is only the dreaming (no dreamer and nothing dreamed), so what to do?
Now you do laugh, and while you are laughing you watch yourself laugh—it is all so hilarious, this “doing.” What could you or anyone else possibly do? And this “seeing”—what possibly could one see that is not the seer?
A wave of gratitude washes over you. The fear is gone, and even if it were to return you feel you would be grateful for it too. Now there really are things to do, an unlimited supply of “doing,’ all without a “you,” all presenting themselves with a smile. It is as before but so completely different. Alone? You? The idea is as absurd as there being a “you” to be alone! How could you have been so blind, so ignorant? You could dance, you feel so light. Dance with “reality,” the only reality there is, the reality you have created. Dance with yourself! Oh endless laughter and waves and waves of—what? Bliss? Joy?—gushing from within. So this is the realization! This is it? This is all it is? No mystery, no hidden meanings, no secret of secrets, just the profound apprehension that the seer is the seen, and the seen is the seer!
So it is, you think. And with that, you realize that now it is just a thought—somehow, the “experience” has passed, as all experiences do, and you are left with a memory, an abstraction, a concept called “awakening.” How quickly is it gone!
And yet, you know it is still there, it is just that somehow, without you being aware of it, a “you” has returned to cover it. So you must remember yourself. Perhaps, with practice, you will get good at remembering. Perhaps someday you will “remember” permanently.
But then, you tell yourself, how could a “you” forget there is no “you?”
DON’T MIND ME!
I have no mind, not here. It’s “out there” frolicking in the world, as the world. Here, I see only clear space with no qualities, simply no-thing and no “mind” (whatever a “mind” could be). The scene appears, thoughts pass through, but always the thoughts are attached to the scene, part and parcel of the things that comprise the scene; never are they “mine,” contained in an imaginary head here above my torso where, if I tell the truth—the truth being the way I truly experience it right now in this moment—I see no head, no such place for thoughts to hang out and cause problems. Thoughts are attached to and belong to the things of this world, are the things of this world. This includes all thoughts—mental images, memories, dreams, beliefs—anything that can be said or named. “I” is one such thought, attached to this flesh body that others call “J.C.” When I say “my mind” (and believe it), a fundamental mistake is made, that of being a separate and self-existing individual with certain thoughts that occur here and only here in this head and nowhere else at this particular time and place. In this scenario, the statement “my mind” refers to a storage house of thoughts, beliefs, memories, expectations, imaginations, etc., that lurk inside this head waiting to be called upon or to call upon “me,” to control or be controlled by “me,” to upset the cart or set it aright.
But how easy and relaxing it is to let thoughts simply be thoughts, to know they aren’t “mine” but instead are attached to things, to all the objects and images arising and passing, appearing moment by moment, floating by.
Here, I am free of them, I can watch them, allow them, enjoy them. Here, I need not follow them, attach to them, own them. Here, I can be surprised or amazed or grateful beyond measure for them (for without thoughts, there would be no “world”). Here, I can love them, see them as perfect and perfectly faultless. Here, they are What I Am, appearing as That. They are the drama of my life, all the ups and downs and rights and lefts rolled into one, a performance I never would have (nor could have) missed.
I see an object called a “tree.” As a child I learned from others that it is named a tree, so now it is a tree. The thought “tree” and all the secondary qualities related to that thought are attached to the object, experienced here and now as a “tree.” It is not “my” thought, apart from the object. I am not separately responsible for the thought, I am not right or wrong because I personally thought it. My head is not packed with thoughts that should or should not be there. And why? I have no room for such nonsense because I have no head! In its place I find the world, a world of things, with thoughts and feelings attached to them, all arising and passing by, the continuous movement of Stillness Itself, Pure Subjectivity, Awake Emptiness functioning as things-passing-by.
To get used to this, to make it permanent, takes practice, and I find that looking in at the empty aware space that I am while simultaneously looking out at the scene, or what Douglas Harding called “two-way looking,” is the most effective way. It is immediate and unmediated. It is mindfulness in action, and while at first it may seem unnatural, ultimately one relaxes into the peace and extraordinary sense of freedom of the moment, and to the immediacy of what is meant by “Here,” the only place one has ever been, which, ultimately, is no place at all.
With the index finger of one hand, point back at where you see no face, no head, no-thing above your chest, and with the index finger of the other hand, point out at whatever scene presents itself in your view. Whether you are indoors or outdoors makes no difference. Notice that the thoughts attach to the objects of the scene, and that they and the objects are presented together as one and the same, right here, right now. There is no distance between the objects in the scene and the thoughts or feelings about the objects. There is no distance (and no difference) between the objects in the scene and the aware space in which they appear. The aware space, the scene, and the thoughts and feelings are One, and nowhere in that equation is there a “you” to own any or all! It just is, and you can no longer take responsibility for the thoughts and feelings that are part and parcel of that scene because when you “see” that what you are looking at and what you are looking out of are the same, you realize that even “you” are a thought, an idea, a belief attached to a body-thing. The “mind” you thought you had is simply a collection of thoughts attached to an image you learned as a child, the image of a “you,” itself a thought. That image was learned from others—parents, siblings, teachers, friends—according to what they saw from where they were, at a distance from you. It is not what you saw at your center, from where you were, and not what you see at your center today. It was an innocent mis-take of your identity, one you couldn’t help but make as a child, especially at such a young age and especially when the “other” happened to be your mother or father. It was also a necessary mistake for socialization, and certainly required in order to survive as a member of the human community, but now it is time to come
home to Who you really are, home to exactly what you see―or don’t see―at the core of your being. Look back, turn your attention 180 degrees from where you habitually look, turn from exclusively viewing the scene “out there” to inclusively viewing the aware space filled with the world, all right here, where you are.
Where is your mind? Do you have a mind? Can you see it? Or when you look, do you find nothing of the sort, or of any sort? Telling the truth based on your senses and not your thoughts, in place of a so called “mind,” might you not find simply awake emptiness filled with objects passing through, objects that constitute what we are calling the “scene,” along with the thoughts and feelings that are attached to those objects?
Or perhaps for you it is as it was for me, the passing scene being not always so passing. That all-too familiar object called “my body” kept presenting itself, along with the firmly attached thought that this indeed was “me,” chock full with all manner of secondary thoughts and feelings such as regrets, guilt, fear, worry, not to mention an excess of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” that imprisoned me for most of my life.
Until finally I looked, and when I looked, I stopped believing the lies, not all at once but eventually once and for all. Two-way looking is the answer, I say, and going by what you see, not what you think, and certainly not what “everyone else” says—this is end of confrontation and separation, and the beginning of wisdom.
GRACE
The tough guys here used to call themselves “convicts” and the rest of us “inmates.” Some still do, and no doubt as a way to flex in front of the mirror of their insecurities. But a decade ago the staff throughout the state began officially calling us “offenders,” to most of us an offensive name if ever there was one. And now, rather than “cons” or “ex-cons,” we are forever “offenders” or “ex-offenders,” terms that, because of their novelty if nothing else, alienate us even further from the mainstream of the public psyche. I once wrote a piece for a prison magazine defining “offender” as a wheel cover for an Irish car (pronounced O’fender), or alternatively as an “off-ender,” one who has been pushed off the cliff of life. Needless to say, it was censored by the staff before the magazine went to print.
I suppose the majority of us take for granted the ad-speak and gov-speak we hear daily, but for prisoners it’s hard to take seriously the word “Corrections.” We are housed in a “Correctional Facility” by the “Department of Corrections,” and few of us can figure out what it is that is corrected and how the State could take credit for it. “Penitentiary” might be a better word, but not, of course, as the Quakers intended it back in the days before our nation became a nation, when a penitentiary was a place to do penance. “What’s wrong,” we prisoners ask, “with the word ‘prison’?” Who but the spin doctors would fault the honesty of calling it what it is, and wouldn’t a fearful and clamoring public endorse the prospect of sending criminals to “prisons” or even “dungeons” for their crimes? Where are the Howard Cosells when we need them?
There are programs here that we offenders can take, such as Mental Health and GED and Drug & Alcohol, and one or two Therapy Communities we might qualify for, as well. With the right attitude a man can learn something, and his behavior may or may not change. But years ago a priest friend told me that any meaningful change in one’s life could only arrive through the intervention of God. I had doubts then, but these days I know he was right.
When I first arrived here I was afraid, confused, lonely, anxious and ashamed. I think everyone enters prison this way, although most suppress it or cover it with bravado. Why else would a man or woman join a gang?
However, considering my former life of crime, the surprise to me was that these feelings prompted me to go straight. It’s true that many men who come to prison seek God, in one form and in one religion or another, and I was no different, except that I bypassed the major religions and went straight for the heart of them all, the message that emerged in India and China long before the birth of Christ and was more recently popularized as the “Perennial Philosophy” by the English philosopher Aldous Huxley (in a book by that title), a philosophy which today is more often referred to as “Non-duality.” I guess I can say that in the process (and many years into my sentence) I became a Buddhist for convenience, mainly because it seemed to offer a story closest to the truth, a description of the empty awareness that lies buried deep within the layers of religious custom. But I wanted more than ceremony, more even than the recommended practice. Meditation calmed my “monkey mind,” relaxed my body and relieved stress, and later even brought me to the entrance of the “gateless gate.”
But still I wanted to know, I wanted to pass through, I yearned for conclusive answers to the questions Who am I?, What is life?, What is this universe?
The answer came when I read one short article and did one simple (and I mean simple!) “experiment,” as Douglas Harding called it. I pointed at where I thought I had a face, then told the truth. And the truth at that moment was that I saw no face, no anything. For all of my life, at least all of it that I remembered, I believed I had a face, but in actuality, when I put the belief aside that I had learned as a child from others and actually looked for myself, looked right here where I was, and looked using only the awareness and attention of the present moment, I saw nothing, simply a space so vast and so empty it contained everything, the entire scene before me. And I saw Awareness here. Not an awareness, an object, one that an “I” could claim (for what is an “I” but a thought, and all thoughts are objects) but only Awareness, and amazingly, Awareness aware of Itself, and simultaneously aware of Itself as Being or Presence, the indisputable answer to the question, Who am I? And at that instant, I knew why the gate had no gate, never did, never will.
So when I say that God has had a hand in what I think and feel and act, it is always more than that. I am what He thinks and feels, and from this wide-open Center these hands and feet do His bidding, performing moment by moment this radical transformation that dissolves my identity and merges it with His.
And while others may see me as an offender in a correctional facility, I don’t see that here and now where God and I share this Being, this solitary and all-inclusive Presence. Everything changed when I saw the world inside Me, including this correctional facility, these thoughts and feelings and this upside-down body dressed in State clothes (should you see exactly what you see, not what you are conditioned to see, you may find that you too are upside-down!). And to this day, how marvelously freeing it is to see This and know that I am Nothing-at-All, that I am always Here where only God dwells, God who is both capacity for and the source of everything, even this prison—especially this prison.
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD
“You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”
―comedian Steven Wright
It’s a funny joke told in his deadpan manner, but he’s right, isn’t he?
Oh but you can have everything!
Yeah, sure. So where would I put it?
Right where you are! Right in the Awake Void that accepts all and rejects nothing, where everything arises and passes as yours and no one else’s, where you are the Sole Owner of every appearance that you alone simultaneously create and experience within.
But even if you could have everything, you wouldn’t have time for it all, so what would be the point?
Oh but you would have time. And you do!
Like when?
Right now. And now, and now, and now. And since now is the only time there ever is, how could you not have time for it? Even if you think you don’t have time, you’re having time for the thought that you don’t have time, and that thought happens to be “everything” at that moment. You see? The fact is, you cannot not have time for everything. There’s no way out of this. This is not optional. What it ultimately comes down to is the fact that You as Who You Really Are, which is Empty Aware Capacity, are like an unblemished mirror that at every now-moment accepts everything and reje
cts nothing and has no choice but to do just that. And the “everything” that appears is not only the objects of the scene but the thoughts and feelings attached to those objects. This is Who You Are, and this is what you do. Or rather, appear to do.
What do you mean, “Appear to do?”
Because Who You Are doesn’t really do anything. It’s simply a case of being. In this instance, doing implies a spurious “you” to do it, and there is no such “you.” That too is a thought attached to the appearance of the flesh body, a thought propped up by the assumption of having an individual “mind,” which is another thought. The combination, often called “body-mind,” is merely a tangled knot of thoughts which we could call a “me-belief.” It is unsupported by the facts. There is no such thing. One look in the right direction will prove it.
So the “you” is part of the scene, part of the world, what you’re referring to as “everything.”
Exactly!
Then who am I?
If you mean who you think you are, you aren’t!
Well, I’m not nothing. I’ve got to be something!
Coming to Nothing and Finding Everything Page 5
