Yes and no. That “something” is not a “thing.” I use the term Awareness, or Empty Awareness, because when I look back at what I am looking out of, or in other words, when I am aware of Awareness, I see nothing objective, no thing at all, simply an emptiness, or void, that has the quality—if you can call it a quality—of being aware, awake, alive, present. So it’s not an absolute nothing, which is the opposite of something. It’s a nothing the likes of which can’t be described, except to say it is both void and aware, and moreover, aware it’s aware.
Self-aware?
Yes, as long as you capitalize the “S.” As long as you don’t refer to it as an individual “self” separate from all other selves, which is a thought, a mistaken identity.
You said it can’t be described, and yet you’ve described it as both void and aware.
Which maybe I shouldn’t have. I can’t describe it because it’s not an object, and only objects can be described. I can’t describe something that’s not there and yet mysteriously is, but not as a “something.” It can’t be described because, you see, it’s what is describing!
It’s subject, not object.
Yes, but not “subject” as the opposite of “object.” This can be confusing at first, which is why it is better to actually look and not use words, and when we look at where we thought we had a face and see no face—when we actually place our attention there—we may see a void that is more than just a void, it is an awake void, if you will. In other words, we see nothing there, but also see that it is aware, conscious, alive, present. So it is not simply nothing, it is a very special nothing right at the core of our being. Many have called this nothing by various names such as Pure Awareness, the Buddha-mind, God, Brahman, the Great Spirit, etc., but for this explanation let’s use “No-thing,” thereby distinguishing it from our usual concept of nothing as the opposite of something. Next, having established that, we look out upon the scene where we usually look. We can now make the distinction of “No-thing” being “here,” and the scene, or “Everything,” being “out there,” and as I said, this is only for the purpose of bringing our attention away from where it is usually focused, which has been on the world “out there.”
At that’s it?
Not quite. The final step is Subject seeing only Subject, both Void and Form as one, No-thing and Everything as identical, which is Pure Subjectivity, the eternal Now.
When I look back at where I don’t see my face, I can see that the no-thing here is aware, but I can’t see that chair over there as the same as this aware void. What are you saying, that the chair is here?
Yes, but here as what you are! Combining aware No-thing here and the available scene there, we see that the scene is inside aware No-thing here. We are Space, or Capacity, for the scene, such that we cannot separate the one from the other. The scene appears within this No-thing that we are. Look. Forget what you’ve been told about where that chair is. Look at both Empty Awareness and the chair appearing within it. Try to separate the two and you can’t. This is because they are not two! This is true of any object, any scene, the world, everything. No-thing and Everything appear together, always here, always now.
I kind of see that, but my mind is kicking up a storm. It just seems so impossible!
Yes, the mind can’t accept the obvious because it ultimately means that the mind is no longer in charge. Really, it’s better not to try to figure this out. Eventually it is seen. Actually, it doesn’t matter whether it is seen or not because, no matter what, this is the way you are—there is no separation ever, never was, never will be. There is simply Pure Subjectivity. When we are very young children, a fundamental but perhaps necessary lie is passed down to us by our parents, siblings, and society, and that lie is the “original sin,” the separation of “me” as an individual “here,” versus a world of separate objects “out there.” When we are ready, when we dare to drop that belief and take a look and believe what we see, not what we have been told by so-called “others,” the true vision of Who We Really Are opens.
So I say, have the courage to look back. See the Aware Void at the core of your being. Keep noticing it whenever you can. See that it is No-thing and is wide awake and is what you are, right where you are. The rest will eventually come.
Okay, but I want to know how that chair is here and is, as you say, what I am. That seems so absurd that it makes me doubt everything you’re telling me.
Well, you could start by asking science. Where does science tell you that you see anything? Here, where you are, right? Do you experience that chair over there, or do you experience it right where you are, at the terminus of the visual process that science claims is where anything is seen. Look into that, then look at that very terminus you are looking out of. Don’t let distance hoodwink you into believing the chair—or anything perceived—is “over there.” It is where you see it, which is where you are. …But again, this will come. And when it does it will be obvious that the Awareness you can actually see at your core is also capacity for the world. In fact, a better name for it might be Aware Capacity. This is What You Are—Aware Capacity for the world!
Some of what you’re saying makes sense. You know, I get these little “Aha!” moments, like all of a sudden I get it! And then the next second I’m more confused than ever. But whatever happened to what we started with—having everything and where we’d put it? That’s what began all this.
You are Aware Capacity for the world, for everything. How much more could you have it! The world and everything in it is inside you. If you look back at where you think (!) you have a head and see only awake emptiness, you may see that this emptiness is also filled with the scene, that at this very moment, where you are, you are Capacity for anything and everything. That pencil on the desk, that chair, that building, those mountains and the distant horizon and every thought and feeling and memory and expectation and image you have, are inside the Aware Capacity that you are.
So they are not “over there” as you have been taught. They are Here where you are. You are Room for them. You “have” them all. You couldn’t be more intimate with them. In fact, they are What You Are, and only appearing as “other.” There is no separation, no distance, nothing apart from the complete Subjectivity that you are.
There’s nowhere to go after that. That’s the end, isn’t it?
For now.
And the game continues.
Yes, that too. You could call that the “practice,” playing the game and playing it well and knowing that every now-moment is What You Are. It’s the movement of the universe, and you are the universe. It’s love in apparent action. Many have said it’s sacred. It’s also lovely beyond compare, don’t you agree?
I’m trying.
PART THREE
THE MAN IN THE OTHER BATHROOM
Since everything is but an apparition
Perfect in being what it is
Having nothing to do with good or bad,
Acceptance or rejection,
You might as well burst out laughing!”
--Longchenpa, from
The Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena
RELEASE
To my astonishment, I was released from prison this year on a technicality after serving 35 years on the wrong law governing my sentence. It happened quickly, and directly from the courtroom (and county jail) at 8:30 on a wintry evening dressed in nothing more than jail clothes: T-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers. Fortunately, my attorney, the same attorney who had worked tirelessly on my case for 6 years for no fee, showed up in her car to drive me to a friend’s house, an ex-con I knew who had done more time than I had, the two of us often together in the same prison facility.
I can say today and will always say that, other than my LSD trips in the early 1960s, the ride from the jail in my attorney’s car was the most surreal experience I have known. The car, unlike prison vans and buses, sat low to the ground and seemed to be speeding beyond all limits despite registering 35 on the speedometer. I
found myself bracing as if it were a rocket, landing nose first, a spaceship that had arrived on an alien planet where nothing was familiar, not the buildings, not the signs, not the oddly dressed creatures on the sidewalks. At a stop light, a man wearing black with a flashing red light pinned to the back of his jacket flew across in front of us on a skateboard, and moments later the white lines of a freeway penetrated my stare while more spaceships hovered around us, humming above the roadway.
I slept that night in a real bed with a soft pillow. I slept better than I had in longer than I could remember, and when I awoke in the morning my friend led me to the kitchen and sat me in front of a cup of real coffee and real eggs (over easy) with three slices of something I hadn’t tasted in a very long time—bacon! We chatted briefly, and he pointed at the window and the expansive view of the back yard and beyond. There were deer, at least a dozen of them, the youngsters cavorting on the frozen hill behind the yard. The trees and bushes were bare, but it could have been the lushest rainforest this side of the Amazon and it wouldn’t have impressed as much as that cold and woody back yard of that 1950s style house set in a neighborhood of the same, an overgrown creek running wild just past the fence.
I called a friend I hadn’t seen in a decade since he’d left prison. I thought he dropped the phone when he realized I was free. He drove 30 minutes from his house, picked me up and drove me to a nearby park. We strolled on a path down an incline to a brook where there were ducks paddling close to the bank, carving circles in the icy water. I watched them as they watched me―open, contented―and then suddenly and unexpectedly I burst into tears, overwhelmed with the beauty, the awareness of awareness brimming with more love and splendor than I could contain, all at once. When I recovered, we stood in silence for a while, then continued along the path and back to the car, that blissful vision imprinted forever in my memory.
Safeway was a magic show of gleaming plastic and unrecognizable food, aisles beckoning with garish color and promises no one could keep. Vegetables, fruits, nuts, even boxed goods were “organic,” yet nothing seemed real. I marveled at the “rain” drizzling down over the fresh produce, the canned thunder to let one know it was coming. There were entire sections of prepared foods, bakery products, walls of dairy behind glass panels, processed and packaged meats, fish laid bare on ice as if fresh. What could I possibly do with it? I had no idea how to cook; I had been eating a limited menu of prison food, most of it canned or frozen and all of it low-grade, for over 35 years, served directly to me on thick plastic slop trays with reusable sporks. If it weren’t now for my friend, how and what would I eat, how would I do anything? For with freedom comes choice and the responsibility to know more than survival at the mercy of the rigid structure of prison. I had forgotten what fresh food looked like, and had never seen such a confusing array of packaging. How would I cook it? What were the proper portions, what went together, how much did it cost, how would I afford even the most basic of goods? Order online?—I had never even seen a laptop or a cellphone, except on TV; when I went to prison, typewriters were still common. The names Microsoft and Apple were relatively unknown back then, the technology of personal computers in its most primitive stage. How would I handle the diverse explosion of information with the keyboard chops of a five-year-old?
At the check-out counter I was lost. Had it not been for my friend and his sister, I might have backed away and left with nothing. Paying in cash seemed not an option. Because I was released directly from court and not from the prison itself, I did not receive my $100 “gate” money in the form of a temporary debit card; instead I relied on the generosity of friends for clothing and cash, at least until I could qualify for food stamps or some other assistance before securing a job—but who would hire a nearly eighty-year-old felon with little real-world experience and no knowledge of today’s technology?
As it happened, I needn’t have been concerned. I knew beforehand that everything I needed was right in front of me, or rather, already within me. If it wasn’t, I didn’t need it. It was that simple, and as the answer to all my questions about the past or the future, it was simply the only answer for the present moment, or any moment.
Every possible article of clothing I could want, winter or summer, was handed to me. Checks arrived in the mail. My first month’s rent was paid for by a grant from a senior citizens group in the city where I settled. Because of my poor balance and a need for transportation, money for an adult tricycle showed up. Bus passes, food banks, Medicaid, a local pension of sorts, all appeared as if by magic, right on time. I have no so-called “real world” explanation for such arrivals, and I would never claim that karma or cause and effect are operative. Like everyone else, often without realizing it, I have fabricated these stories of individual experience, stories which in the end turn out to be lame accounts for what is undoubtedly The One with no parts, no separation, no exceptions. I have made up the stories of “life as it is,” and in so doing have made up a world of left and right and up and down, of good and bad and right and wrong and all the multifaceted colors that comprise the drama of life and death. And the world-story rolls on, issuing forth on the wheels of the farmer’s creed: “What ye sow, so shall ye reap.” What more could our “practice” consist of but to See Who We Really Are and act from THAT, as THAT, sowing and reaping the gift of the Source, ever mindful of and ever grateful for this magnificent illusion of change?
The bird-feeder hanging from the eave outside the kitchen window is crowded with sparrows, and a fat squirrel has found my donation of an acorn squash I didn’t want. This old house probably has more spiders than St. Louis has people, and I love how they go about their business as I go about mine. The forecast today is for sun and warmer temperatures the next three days, so it’s time to roll out the trike and pedal this upside-down body absolutely nowhere, marveling at what arrives and disappears into the stillness of this Awake Void, aware that the Void and what arrives are one and the same, Pure Subjectivity. Could this interplay of Who I Really Am disguised as who I am not be more hilarious? More mysterious? More mind-blowing? More that which truly is?
Morning light welcomes me, and this day, like every day, I rise with the excitement of a kid making his first visit to Disneyworld, despite the fact that I have six medical appointments in the next four days for age-related ailments that have mostly been ignored. This body ages, but thank God I don’t. This body, desiccated, prune-like, held together with fabricated parts of titanium and plastic, wobbly and unsure of step, now serves me like it never has, for it has never been clearer that I’m not a resident of it, but that it’s a resident of Me, as are all things, all time, all space. It’s an odd love affair of the apparent and non-apparent, odd because there are not two here, yet a love affair just the same. Void/Form. Emptiness/Fullness. Never different, never apart, always in love.
So I’m up and ready for my Magic Mountain day, today for the excising of skin cancer and a pressure check for glaucoma. It’s chilly this morning, but the sky is clear and ultra-bright. I must remember to get air in my trike tires, and maybe a coffee on the way, cream, no sugar, an out-of-the-way place I’ve never been to before.
BARE NAKED AWARENESS
“In the absence of that which you are not,
that which you are . . . is not.”
―Neale Donald Walsch
As “God” assured us in the Conversations With God books by Neale Donald Walsch, you are making up the story of your life, of life in general, of everything. Without the story, there is simply bare naked awareness that cannot be experienced because it is what you are and you are not separate from it to experience it. There is truly no meaning to life except the meaning you assign to it, which in turn is the greatest possible gift of freedom and the foundation of all gratitude, sometimes called “grace.”
So the question is: How do you experience Who You Really Are when there is no “you” to experience it? And the answer is: That which You manifests as, which happens to be anything and everything, is
that which You experience! Therefore, everything that appears—all scenes, all things, all beings—all of which appear both in and as Who You Really are, are what you experience. So the only thing you can ever experience is Who You Really Are! In other words, Pure Subjectivity experiences only Itself because all there is, is Pure Subjectivity. There is nothing else. That is, there is nothing outside or separate from Pure Subjectivity.
So again, how does Oneness see Itself? Contrary to what one might think, seeing Who You Really are turns out to be the easiest thing possible. Why? Because wherever you look, there you are! Meister Eckhart said it this way in the 14th Century: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
Or do what so many have done over the years since Douglas Harding came up with the easy and direct (and incredibly simple) awareness exercises he termed “experiments.” Simply point at where you believe you have a face, but drop the belief that you have a face. Then look at what your finger is pointing at. What I then see here is space, no-thing, but not simply nothing-at-all (as in the opposite of something) because it is a no-thing that is aware, and furthermore, aware that it is aware. What you see, if only momentarily, is God, and furthermore, it is God seeing Himself, the very same God that Meister Eckhart spoke of in the 14th Century. And you can do so anytime you want (which is always Now) and anywhere you want (which is always Here), whatever your mood or situation, which of course is Who You Really Are appearing as a mood or situation!
Coming to Nothing and Finding Everything Page 6
