Every frustration, every moment of discouragement and every feeling of lack appears in the same open awareness, and that awareness is what you are.
This is the second of two posts responding to the concern you raised most often during our year-long journey through The Nature of Consciousness: how understanding becomes experience. Part one explored why the simplest fact of experience is so easily overlooked, and what reading offers. This part turns to the frustration, effort and discouragement that can arise along the way.
If you find yourself involved with or lost in the content of experience, just come back to being or being aware. The object-knowing mind may be frustrated or rebellious at first, for there is nothing for it to know there. And this absence of anything for the mind to know makes the mind feel redundant. In fact, even worse, the mind feels that it is dying, and as a result it will try to persuade you to get involved with the content of experience again.
If this is the case, so be it. ‘I am frustrated’: emphasise the ‘I am’, ignore the frustration. As any feeling of frustration subsides, a subtler feeling of boredom may arise. ‘I am bored’: emphasise the ‘I am’, neglect the boredom. As the feeling of boredom subsides, an even subtler feeling of emptiness, blankness or void may arise. ‘I am just feeling empty’: emphasise the ‘I am’, neglect the emptiness.
To begin with, you may find that your attention is almost exclusively involved in the content of experience. You are only able to rest in being, as being, for a few brief moments before the old habit reasserts itself and you go back to the content of experience. But each time you disengage from the content of experience and make the gentle effort to come back to your self, you weaken the force of attraction that objective experience exerts on you. And as a result, you find it easier and easier both to go back to your true nature of simply being and to rest there.
You do not acquire any new knowledge or experience as a result of the understanding. Nor is any new knowledge or experience a prerequisite for this understanding. All that happens is an old belief is removed. Sometimes, this old belief is removed in one moment of clear seeing; these instances are rare. More often, it is a series of incremental glimpses or recognitions. But either way, whether this recognition is clear or incremental, instant or gradual, it takes time for its implications to percolate into every aspect of your life: the way you think, feel, act, perceive and relate.
This recognition is just a fleeting recognition that is quickly overlooked again in favour of the content of experience. But with repeated glimpses or recognitions of your true nature, you find more and more that you stay there. And at some point there is this shift. It is like John Smith, the actor who plays King Lear. Instead of feeling ‘I am King Lear, who occasionally visits John Smith’, you feel ‘I am John Smith, who is temporarily clothed in King Lear.’
When you describe your spiritual search or practice, its progress and its setbacks, every second or third sentence comes with either ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘myself’. ‘I’ is the protagonist of this story. ‘I’ is disappointed. ‘I’ is seeking enlightenment. ‘I’ is feeling loving. It is ‘I’ who is doing it and feeling it and thinking it and so on.
So the most important thing, much more important than what this ‘I’ is doing or feeling or thinking or not feeling or not progressing or progressing, is: who is that self? Because if you don’t find that out, in 20 years’ time you’ll be asking somebody else the same question that you’re asking now.
Does awareness need to meditate? No. Does awareness need to seek something? No. Is awareness ever disappointed? Is awareness on a path? No. Could it ever become anything that it is not already? No. Is it ever diminished by any experience? No. Does the thought ‘I am sad’ or ‘I am failing’ or ‘I am succeeding’ or ‘I am not making progress’ arise on behalf of awareness? No.
You can’t bear to stay there for more than two minutes, two seconds. And then you’re off again. Why do you take off again? You cannot bear that void, that emptiness. You briefly touch your true nature, but then there’s this emptiness, this sense of lack, and you can’t bear it.
If you are very sensitive to a gap in the stream of thinking, even if it’s brief, you may notice that it’s not completely peaceful there. If you’re sensitive and, of course, honest about your experience, you feel that there is some existential feeling of lack. Something is missing. There is a tension, a contraction, a more or less subtle sense of dissatisfaction, a sort of emptiness, not a peaceful emptiness, but a void that is always seeking to be filled, to be fulfilled.
Most people escape the discomfort of this void into substances, activities and relationships and so on. Once these have failed to fulfil you, you may then turn to a religious or spiritual tradition. You rebrand the search for happiness, the search for enlightenment or the search for God. And you go on with the great search, trying to escape or avoid this emptiness you feel at the core of yourself.
I would suggest that this great search, that almost everybody is engaged with, cannot be fulfilled. It cannot be fulfilled materially, and it cannot be fulfilled spiritually. It can only be undermined, it can only be dissolved, it can only subside. And what does it subside in? It subsides into the peace that lies just below this void, this emptiness.
You can’t force it to come to an end. That doesn’t work. It has to come to an end in understanding. By understanding, I don’t mean intellectual understanding. I mean experiential understanding.
When a difficult feeling arises, ask yourself: ‘Is there any resistance in me to this current feeling or sensation?’ Don’t expect the feeling to disappear. Don’t even expect its intensity to diminish. Just ask yourself: ‘Is there any resistance in me to the feeling, however intense or subtle it may be?’
No feeling by itself is inherently unbearable or even unpleasant. It is your resistance to the feeling that confers unpleasantness or unbearability onto the feeling. As you welcome the feeling in your loving openness, it is in most cases gradually divested of its unbearable and even its unpleasant quality.
It’s like going deeply into the density of a dark cloud and finding only the emptiness and luminosity of the sky. You go deeply into the discomfort of the feeling, or allow the feeling to come deeply into you, and you find only the peace, the transparency, the luminosity of awareness.
In the innermost sanctuary of your heart, your being stands naked and free. That placeless place in yourself, which is you, has never been hurt. It has never been violated. It does not need to be healed.
Stay there. Because when you stay there, you taste its innate peace. You don’t have to do anything to be your self. You don’t have to cease doing anything to be your self.
The recognition that you are perfect, whole, complete – the recognition that you do not need to be healed – is the great healing.
