Wake Up Now (12 page)

Be careful, however, not to interpret these energetic experiences as meaning more than they actually do. They are just experiences and don’t necessarily signify that spiritual awakening has occurred. Be aware also that genuine energetic experiences of this kind can’t be fabricated; they can only be allowed as an expression of the natural unfolding of presence.

In the end, meditation is supremely simple: just sit down and let everything be as it is. Any attempt to manipulate or
calm the mind or make meditation happen just interferes with your natural state of true meditation. “Remain as you are, without question or doubt; that’s your natural state,” said Ramana Maharshi. These wise words speak for themselves, though it’s crucial to remember that the you he’s talking about includes everything, without exception. Ultimately, “you alone exist.”

You offer a pointed critique of mindfulness
practice. But can’t it prepare the ground for
the practice of presence?

Perhaps, though I wonder why any ground needs to be prepared. Just be present for what is. It’s quite direct and requires no preparation.

But how can I work with my mind and
get it to settle down?

The idea that the mind needs to calm down is just another spiritual belief put forward by the progressive approach to meditation. It’s a diversionary tactic designed by the mind, which loves to do battle with itself. Try as hard as you can, you’ll never get the mind to settle down. Indeed, all your efforts to calm it just make it more agitated. Rather, let the mind do what it does, and rest as the primordial awareness that isn’t disturbed by the perturbations of the mind.
The mind’s nature is to move, but you are not your mind; you’re limitless, silent, ungraspable presence. Paradoxically, of course, when you leave the mind alone, it tends to calm down by itself.

My mind just runs my life. It’s busy all the
time and gives me no rest.

You don’t suffer because your mind is so active, you suffer because you identify with the drama it creates and take it to be the truth of who you are. Instead of struggling with your mind, become aware of the beliefs and stories it churns out and then inquire into their validity, as I describe in the “Wake-Up Call” at the end of
Chapter 3
.

How can I tell the difference between being
“invited” to sit in meditation, as you put it, and
sitting because I think I should?

There will be moments in daily life when your mind spontaneously stops and an empty space or gap opens up. In this space, you have an intimation of a stillness and silence beyond the mind. Instead of immediately rushing to fill the gap in your effort to stay busy, let the silence and stillness solicit you. Enjoy these empty, unfurnished moments and gently allow them to expand. This is how you’re invited to meditate.

By contrast, when you look at your watch and say, “Oh, it’s time for my daily sitting”—or even more to the point, when you decide that your mind is too busy and you need to do something to calm it down—you’re meditating because you think you should. When you have the thought, “I should meditate now,” ask yourself, “What is missing from my experience that I think meditation would provide?” Then ask, “Do I really need to go off to find it, or is it available right here and now?”

Wake-Up Call

The Practice of Listening

Set aside ten to fifteen minutes for this exploration. Begin by sitting comfortably with your eyes closed. If possible, sit in or near a natural place like a garden or park, or at least a space where you hear only background sounds like the hum of a refrigerator, the rumble of traffic, or the sounds of birds. Make sure you’re not going to be disturbed by voices, music, radios, or TVs.

Now open your awareness to the sounds around you. Don’t focus on any particular sound or jump from sound to sound, just open your awareness like the lens of a camera and listen to the play of sound with your whole body, not just your ears. Allow listening to happen. The sounds come and go, shift and change, in this expanded, global awareness. Everything is happening in you.

Keep relaxing, letting go, and allowing listening to happen. If your awareness habitually focuses or jumps from sound to sound, just let it
do what it does as you continue to relax in global awareness. You may find that you naturally include other sensations as well: the contact of your body against the chair, the air against your skin, the rumbling of your stomach, the beating of your heart. Just keep allowing the play of what is, without efforting to pay attention in any way.

Eventually, the sense of a separate experiencer may drop away, and only experiencing remains. No separation between subject and object—just this!

As you continue allowing experiencing to happen, you may discover that it arises in a limitless stillness and silence that can’t be experienced in any way. This is your very own Self, unconditional presence, consciousness without a second, the source of all experience. You can never know it with the mind; you can only be it knowingly.

Allow everything to be as it is as you relax into the silent presence that you’ve always been.

Before Abraham was, I am.

—Jesus of Nazareth

As you become more relaxed, open, and present for what is, with less resistance and struggle, you may find at times that the sense of a separate self becomes lighter and more attenuated, or even disappears entirely. The one who is apparently doing the work of being present dissolves into unconditional presence, in which awareness and the objects of awareness are one. No longer is there someone watching and something being watched, there’s just this single, seamless, nondual reality—just this. The Chinese poet Li Po describes it this way: “We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.” Simultaneously, you may experience a profound silence and stillness that underlies everything and seems more authentic and real than the thoughts and feelings you generally take yourself to be.

Such glimpses constitute a preliminary awakening to your timeless spiritual nature and may whet your appetite for deeper and clearer revelation. Indeed, the continued practice of presence, which at a certain point becomes
natural and effortless, may ultimately flower into a complete recognition of who you are, in which awareness becomes aware of itself as the limitless, ungraspable silence, openness, and space in which everything arises. Or you may happen upon awakening quite unexpectedly, without practicing or seeking in any way. Often, however, the process of awakening involves some form of deliberate self-inquiry, some intentional attempt to find out who you are.

Even if the sense of a separate self—what Ramana Maharshi called the “I-thought”—drops away from time to time, it tends to be extraordinarily tenacious and continues to assert its control over your life until you discover once and for all that it’s not who you really are. You may have experienced gaps in the illusion of a substantial, continuous self, but you haven’t realized that the space and openness that reveals itself in these gaps is your true nature. Instead, you keep returning to your habitual, default identity as the body, mind, and personality. Until awareness awakens to itself, this openness remains merely a curious spiritual experience and never flowers into the truth of your being.

After all, you’ve spent your entire life identifying with a particular set of characteristics, emotions, memories, and beliefs and a particular life history. No wonder this identity feels so natural and goes unquestioned. The people in your life reinforce this identity and join you in the consensus view that you’re a separate someone in a world populated by other separate someones who interact and coexist. The
I-thought lays claim to every experience and action and makes them seem personal and centered right here, in this body-mind called me. But radical spirituality introduces the possibility that the separate someone is not the true center but merely a construct, another wave on the surface of the ocean of being, and the practice of presence may offer you a glimpse of this ocean, this deeper reality. The next step is self-inquiry.

In self-inquiry, you have an opportunity to turn the light of your awareness from your outer affairs to your inner experience and investigate the separate self. Does it actually exist as a consistent, ongoing entity, or is it merely an assemblage of thoughts, feelings, memories, and images? And if it’s just an assemblage, a construct, then who are you really? In self-inquiry, you generally start out looking for what you are but end up encountering everything you’re not—your body, your sensate experiences, your thoughts, your emotions—until you find yourself on the outer margins of the known, at the precipice of the unknown. Once the mind exhausts itself in the search, which is the purpose of self-inquiry, you’re available to be taken by the realization of what you are, not as another thought or experience, but as a living reality. The point of self-inquiry is not intellectual analysis or understanding, but direct pointing beyond the mind to the truth of your being, which can never be known by the mind.

For the purpose of this discussion, I’ve divided self-inquiry into three different currents, or forms: spontaneous, formal, and turning words. These are just conceptual distinctions
designed to placate the mind, which loves to divide and describe. In reality, there are as many forms of self-inquiry as there are individuals, and any genuine attempt to discover who you really are can be effective if you undertake it wholeheartedly.

When you fully realize that what you’re seeking doesn’t exist in manifestation and can’t be found “out there” in experiences or states of any kind, there’s a relaxation of being and a cessation of seeking. This is true renunciation, not as asceticism or denial, but because you see that complete fulfillment is only available in the Now. Once this is finally acknowledged by the mind, there is a giving up, and attention naturally turns back on itself in a kind of spontaneous self-inquiry. Such sudden moments of giving up the search can serve as powerful pointers to the source of all seeking, which may reveal itself in an instant, without effort or practice.