Wake Up Now Blog

Recently a student asked me to reconcile the statements “This is it” and “Everything is empty,” because for her they seemed contradictory. If this is all there is, she explained, and it’s empty, then what’s left? Precisely! I replied. There’s nothing left!

This luminous, incomparable moment is the only reality. Just this is! At the phenomenal level, this is the perfect expression or manifestation of spirit, or consciousness, or source, or big mind, or whatever we choose to call the sacred, absolute, unmanifest dimension of being.

But this moment has absolutely no substance in itself; though we can touch it and taste it, it’s just a fleeting appearance or apparition with no lasting meaning or significance, as is this body and mind that we like to call our own. That which is touched and that which is touching are equally empty. Emptiness is their essential nature, and this emptiness is inseparable from its manifestation. As the Heart Sutra says, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” (For a translation of the Heart Sutra, visit www.dzogchen.org/chant/heartsutra.htm)

But what do these words mean? Take them to heart and find out for yourself!

My teacher Jean Klein used to say that the words of the guru are redolent with the perfume of their source; that is, the sayings of the teacher arise directly from Consciousness and have the power to evoke a direct seeing in the student. One expression that struck me quite powerfully when I first heard it was the following: “None of the thoughts and feelings that pass through your awareness has anything to do with you.” This complete and utter denial of any kind of ownership cut deep, and I could suddenly penetrate through the identities I had accumulated over the years and see their essentially empty nature.

The truth is, this life doesn’t belong to you, because there is simply no you to which it could possibly belong. Everything is unfolding just as it is, in a completely impersonal and inscrutable way, arising moment by moment fresh from the Mystery, which is its source. “You” are not in charge of “your” life, and you’re not to blame for the apparent mistakes you’ve apparently made. How much suffering we inflict on ourselves with the elaborate stories we tell ourselves about what might have been if only we had acted differently. In the perfection of the eternal Now, nothing could have occurred otherwise. Instead of trying to figure things out, assign blame, or wallow in endless  guilt or regret, the only response fully in alignment with Truth is awe, gratitude, and forgiveness (for nothing!) in the face of the sacred Mystery of life.

One venerable metaphor for describing the relationship between the illusory separate self and true self, consciousness, Being itself, is the wave and the ocean. The construct you take yourself to be—a loose conglomeration of thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, images, stories, beliefs, held together by the elusive perfume of “me-ness”—is merely the foam playing on the surface of the vast ocean of what you really are. The wave is never separate from the ocean, indeed it’s made of the very same substance, yet the wave is not commensurate with the ocean itself.

The great Zen master Tung-shan (Tozan), one of the founders of the Soto School of Zen, said, upon awakening, “Do not seek him anywhere else, or he will run away from you!
 Now that I go on all alone, 
I meet him everywhere. 
He is even now what I am.
 I am even now not what he is.
 Only by understanding this way can there be a true union with Suchness.”

By this, Tung-shan means that Being itself is my essential nature, yet I can never claim it as my own, just as the wave can never claim the ocean as its own. The wave and the ocean are inseparable, and at the same time the wave is merely an expression of the ocean. The one you take yourself to be is an expression of your true self, just like everything else in the phenomenal world, but it can never own or possess your true self, for that is what you are prior to all separation.

But these are just philosophical distinctions if you don’t realize this truth for yourself. Let them be pointers to the living experience! Who is this me you take yourself to be? And who or what is really living life through this body? Experience the powerful, limitless, luminous ocean as your true body and breath, and all questions will naturally come to rest.

In my work as a psychotherapist, I find that personal transformation is intimately linked with self-realization. When we wake up to who we really are, much of the conditioning we’ve accumulated over a lifetime falls away because it no longer has a center to hold it together. Like spokes on a wheel, the repetitive, distorted patterns of thinking and behaving that cause us suffering require a hub, a me, to which they can refer and attach, and with the dropping away of the me, the old patterns drop away as well.

But some of these patterns are deeply entrenched and tenacioos, and they persist as long as there’s any vestige of a separate self. The key to ongoing deepening and embodiment is to see the patterns that continue to arise in the light of awareness and in the context of truth. As we rest in the knowledge that we are pure, primordial consciousness, unblemished and unconditioned, the old negative beliefs lose their traction. After all, in the radiant effulgence of self-recognition, what can common self-ciritcal thoughts like “I’m not good enough” or “I’m unlovable” possibly refer to?

Just rest as you are, and gaze at what arises through the eyes of truth, without resisting or believing any of it. In this way, thoughts and beliefs arise and pass away without holding you hostage.

But you don’t have to be “awakened” to begin freeing yourself in this way. Even the slightest glimmer of self-recognition, the fundamental knowing that I’m essentially pure and whole, gives us a basic orientation from which to see the inherent untruth of negative beliefs and stories. The Greek philosopher and mathematician Archimedes purportedly said, “If I had a fulcrum, I could move the Earth.” The fulcrum for dislodging the grip of the old, sad story of me is what Tibetans call the view—the unshakable realization that the me, the separate self, is just an empty construct and who we really are is luminous emptiness, the essence of what is. 

When we’re open to what is, without manipulation or resistance, our whole being comes into alignment and we realize our innate, essential wholeness and completeness. Nothing is missing, nothing left out, everything is perfect just the way it is. With this recognition, there arises a profound sense of peace, joy, and contentment.

Most of the time, however, the mind is working very hard to manufacture wholeness (an oxymoron if there ever was one) by trying to sew all the fragments of our life together into some coherent whole. If only, it believes, we can somehow get the right car, the right house, the right partner, the right job, the right retirement plan, we’ll finally experience the satisfaction the mind has been struggling so hard to achieve.

Little does it know that happiness and fulfillment are available right here and now, in this moment and place, when we let go of trying to “hold it all together” and let it all be just the way it is, in natural perfection and completeness. The mind’s struggle to achieve or accomplish wholeness, based on its idea of what wholeness should look like, just obscures the inherent wholeness that’s always revealing itself right now.

But the mind is tenacious, as we know so well . . .

People often ask me if a teacher is necessary on the pathless path of awakening. Certainly there are numerous examples of people who have awakened and whose awakening has unfolded and deepened without the guidance of a teacher. Ramana Maharshi is perhaps the greatest example. On the other hand, there are those who have awakened merely by being in the presence of an enlightened master, without any practice or discipline on their part.

Both the Indian Vedanta tradition and the Buddhist tradition emphasize the importance of a teacher, as well as a community of like-minded seekers and direct access to clear teachings. Teachers transmit the living essence of truth through their presence as much as through their words—indeed, as I suggested, sitting in silence with an awakened teacher can be a life-changing experience. Such teachers point directly and relentlessly toward our essential spiritual nature, which the Tibetans call our natural state, or the nature of mind, and encourage us to realize it for ourselves. 

Once you’ve recognized your “original face,” a teacher can help you authenticate your realization and clear away any doubts or lingering confusion you might have. In my own case, I had a profound, life-changing awakening that was followed not long after by waves of fear, and I spent years doubting the validity of what I had realized because I believed that a true awakening irrevocably brought all fear and other negative emotions to an end. Only with the guidance and encouragement of a teacher did I fully recognize that absolutely nothing is left out in the completeness of who we are and that fear and its companions continue to arise, but it’s our identification with them that ultimately drops away.

Lest we mistakenly assume that only our favorite teachers, saints, or sages fully appreciate the nature of happiness, here is a beautiful definition of happiness by the 18th-century Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

“If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.”

(quoted from the article “Happy Like God” by Simon Critchley, published in the May 25 edition of The New York Times, http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/happy-like-god/?emc=eta1 )

Recently I have been contemplating the nature of happiness as I write and record a series of meditations for an iPhone application entitled Feel Happier Now. Psychologists and neuroscientists have become fascinated with happiness and the brain activity associated with it as the result of experiments with Tibetan monks, who happen to be some of the most joyful people in the world.

Experiments performed at the University of Wisconsin have shown that people who practice mindfulness meditation (the staple of Buddhist monks everywhere) regularly report feeling happier than before they began. Other studies have demonstrated that appreciating the life we have and feeling compassion for others also contribute to a greater sense of subjective well-being (ie, happiness). Based on these studies, the iPhone app includes meditations for developing mindfulness, gratitude, and compassion.

But what exactly is happiness? Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to the application:

“Lasting happiness has little or nothing to do with external circumstances; instead, it’s an abiding attitude of acceptance, contentment, and satisfaction with the way things are. Happy people tend to live in the fullness and completeness of the present moment, rather than in regrets about the past or fears about the future. For the happy among us, the proverbial glass is half full, rather than half empty.

“Simply put, the key to happiness is wanting what we have and not wanting what we don’t have, rather than longing for what we don’t and being dissatisfied with what we have. And research has borne out this view: Not surprisingly, subjects who compare their lives favorably with the lives of others, no matter how much they actually have, report feeling happier than those who view their lives in a more unfavorable light.”

In the end, however, true happiness is not something we can fabricate through meditation or even through learning how to be content with what we have. Happiness is our birthright, our natural state, hidden beneath all the accumulated dissatisfaction and suffering of a lifetime. Meditation may help us on a relative level to relax our bodies, reduce our stress, and make us more available to connect with our innate happiness. But ultimate, imperturbable happiness, which can’t be disturbed by the ups and downs of life, only dawns when we recognize who we really are, beyond the horizontal dimension bound by time and space.

At a weekend intensive I taught recently, I emphasized that life is the most powerful teacher, especially when we’re dedicated to the truth at every level. When I returned, I found an email from a friend who had been having trouble finding a place to live because of her chemical and environmental sensitivities. As it turns out, she had to leave her longtime abode and was unable to find a permanent place she could both afford and tolerate. Since her friends were unable to take her in, she ended up at a shelter for drug addicts.

“I used to drive by this place,” she wrote, “and avoid looking at the people outside, waiting for a bed, shooting up, lying on the ground. Now these people are my roommates.

“I am so at the beginning of love. I haven’t really been caring of others, even though I liked to see myself as a loving person. This experience is helping me see reality and loosening false self-images and so many illusions I had about people and the world.

“It feels like I’m in reality now,” she continued, “instead of occupied with my story about reality and where I am in relation to the imaginary finish-line of enlightenment. Reality is so simple–just what is here now, nothing elaborate or mystical. Without my stories–about being homeless, staying in a shelter for crack heads, living out of my car during the day, having a severe, as yet uncured illness–I am just here typing, without a problem.”

Reality can be a powerful teacher.

Not long ago I drove out to the coast about a half hour from my home in northern California to listen to a well-known Tibetan teacher speak about Mahamudra. This ancient Buddhist teaching school is one of the two primary nondual traditions of Tibetan Buddhism and offers both direct transmission of, and many skillful means for realizing, our essential spiritual nature.

Arriving early, I went for a walk on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was a typical April day, warm in the sun, with a cool breeze off the water. As I ambled back to the retreat center, I stopped for a few moments to enjoy the sun, the lush greenery, the butterflies, the bird song.. In an instant, thoughts stopped, a profound silence took their place, and nothing remained but being in all its richness, conscious of and delighting in itself. As always, words fail this simple recognition, which is so immediate and intimate and yet impossible to express.

As I gazed back toward the building where people were gathering to receive teachings, I burst into laughter. How strange we human beings are, the thought arose, that we miss the teachings that are constantly being transmitted by the trees, the birds, the air, the sky. Instead, we complicate what is so extraordinarily simple and ever-present and then feel we need to sit in a room and take notes and receive transmissions to try and recapture what we always already are. But so it goes—until all seeking naturally comes to an end.