True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart (29 page)

Writing and speaking about the nature of awareness is a humbling process; as the third Zen patriarch said, “Words! The way is beyond language.” Whatever words are used, whatever thoughts they evoke, that's not it! Just as we can't see our own eyes, we can't see awareness.
What we are looking for is what is looking.
Awareness is not another object or concept that our mind can grasp. We can only
be
awareness.

A friend who is a Unitarian minister told me about an interfaith gathering that she attended. It opened with an inquiry: What is our agreed-upon language for referring to the divine? Shall we call it God?

“No way” responded a feminist Wiccan. “What about Goddess?”

“Ha,” remarked a Baptist minister. “Spirit?”

“Nope,” declared an atheist.

Discussion went on for a while. Finally a Native American suggested “the great mystery” and they all agreed. Each knew that whatever his or her personal understanding, the sacred was in essence a mystery.

Awareness, true nature, what we are—is a mystery. We encounter the same wordless mystery when someone dies. After his mother passed away, Jonathan looked at me and said, “Where did she go?” I remember sitting with my father as he was dying—he was there, and then he wasn't. His spirit, that animating consciousness, was no longer present in his body. Nothing in this world of experience is more jarring to our view. It takes away all our conceptual props. We can't understand with our minds what has occurred. Love is the same way. We talk endlessly about love, but when we bring to mind someone we love and really investigate, “What
is
this love?”, we drop into the mystery. What is this existence itself, with all its particularity, its strange life forms, its beauty, its cruelty? We can't understand. When we ask “Who am I?” or “Who is aware?” and really pause to examine, we can't find an answer.

Tibetan teacher Sogyal Rinpoche writes,

This inquiry turns us toward the timeless refuge of pure awareness. When we ask ourselves, “Is awareness here?” most of us probably pause, sense the presence of awareness, and say yes. Yet every day we restlessly pull away from this open awareness and immerse ourselves in busyness and planning. Our conditioning prevents us from discovering the peace and happiness that are intrinsic in taking refuge in awareness. Seeing how we paper over the mystery of who we are is an essential part of finding freedom.

Through the Reducing Valve

In
The Doors of Perception,
Aldous Huxley called awareness “Mind at Large.” He reminds us:

Our brain's primary function is to block out too much information, and to select and organize the information that will allow us to thrive. The more stress we feel, the smaller the aperture of our attention. If we're hungry, we obsess about food. If we're threatened, we fixate on defending ourselves or striking first to remove the threat. Our narrowly focused attention is the key navigational instrument of the ego-identified self.

I saw a cartoon once in which a guy at a bar is telling the bartender: “I'm nothing, yet I'm all I can think about.” If you reflect on how often you are moving through your day trying to “figure something out,” you'll get a sense of how the reducing valve is shaping your experience. And if you notice how many thoughts are about yourself, you'll see how the valve creates a completely self-centered universe. It's true for all of us!

This incessant spinning of thoughts continually resurrects our space-suit identity. Our stories keep reminding us that we need to improve our circumstances, get more security or pleasure, avoid mistakes and trouble. Even when there are no real problems, we have the sense that we should be doing something different from whatever we are doing in the moment. “Why are you unhappy?” asks writer Wei Wu Wei. “Because 99.9% of everything you do is for yourself … and there isn't one.”

While we might grasp this conceptually, the self-sense can seem very gritty and real. Even single-cell creatures have a rudimentary sense of “self in here, world out there.” As Huxley acknowledges, developing a functional self was basic to evolution on our particular planet. But this does not mean the space-suit self marks the end of our evolutionary journey. We have the capacity to realize our true belonging to something infinitely larger.

If we fail to wake up to who we are beyond the story of self, our system will register a “stuckness.” It's a developmental arrest that shows up as dissatisfaction, endless stress, loneliness, fear, and joylessness. This emotional pain is not a sign that we need to discard our functional self. It is a sign that the timeless dimension of our being is awaiting realization. As executive coach and author Stephen Josephs teaches, “We can still function as an apparent separate entity, while enjoying the parallel reality of our infinite vast presence. We need both realms. When the cop pulls us over we still need to show him our license, not simply point to the sky.”

Most of us are too quick to reach for our license. If our sense of identity is bound to the egoic self, we will spend our lives tensing against the certainty of loss and death. We will not be able to open fully to the aliveness and love that are here in the present moment. Sri Nisargadatta writes,

A brief reflection: Imagine you are looking through a photo album of your life. There you are in kindergarten, in senior year of high school, when you started your first job, fell in love, had your first child (if you have one). There are photos celebrating your achievements, but perhaps there are also photos of times of great insecurity and loss. Then you look in the mirror. Who are you? Consider how your body has changed, your worldview, your sense of what is important in life, your pleasures, your moods. Now ask yourself, in every time and place, through all these years and moments, what about me has been unchanging? What has always been here?

Can you sense that there has always been, and is right now, a consciousness, a presence that knows, a space of awareness that perceives what's happening? If we can begin to realize this mystery within our own existence, our relationship to this changing world shifts. We can hold the personal sense of self more lightly. We don't react so strongly to things not going our way.

Again, the words of Sri Nisargadatta:

Trusting Who We Are

When I first joined the Boston ashram at age twenty-two, I assumed that it would take me about eight years of dedicated effort to realize freedom beyond the net. Stories of spiritual seekers like the Buddha caught my imagination. They had experienced a sudden, distinctive moment of awakening—a liberating moment of realizing their true nature as changeless, luminous awareness. This awakening was irreversible, they were no longer bound by the identity of self. Afterward, their hearts were wide open, their minds clear and free.

While I've been eagerly drawn to “liberated forever after,” this has not been my path. Awakening has been gradual, and the trance of self can still feel sticky and painful. Since I'm public about my foibles, students are often curious about what has changed over the decades. The difference between now and some years back is this: I trust awareness—and the felt experience of living, loving presence—as the most familiar and real and true sense of what I am. Even when I'm most miserable, that trust, the sense of loving presence as refuge, is still in the background, guiding me home.

Some years ago I became increasingly aware of getting caught in a mindset I named “special person.” Feelings of self-importance and specialness had been with me for as long as I could remember. The oldest child of four, I was used to being the boss, being the one who deserved the largest portion and the most attention. As I shared in
Radical Acceptance,
I knew the flip side of “special person” intimately—the sense of being flawed and inadequate. But with my growing role as spiritual teacher and guide, I found myself periodically caught in a form of self-inflation that caused suffering. Whenever I assumed I was in some way better than others—wiser, more spiritually evolved, smarter—I was creating separation. Not only from those I was with, but from my own heart.

I wanted to get rid of “special person.” When I noticed I was in “busy mode,” assuming that others would accommodate me, I'd mentally whisper “special person” and mindfully pause. When students would complement me or I'd get flattering e-mails, I'd pause, sense the swelling of pride, and deepen my attention. “This isn't about ‘me,'” I'd remind myself. “No need to take this personally.” When I caught myself about to ask Jonathan if he could go to the post office because I had too many important things to do, I'd keep quiet. But often I didn't notice special person until after the fact. I'd come home from teaching a daylong workshop and then wonder how much of the time I'd been caught in a role that separated me from full presence and connectedness.

One Sunday evening I sat down to meditate, and immediately started reviewing the lineup of the coming week's activities. Then, as I quieted, an image appeared in my mind. It was radiant light all around me, beckoning. But I was caught inside a sticky bubble—special person. I wanted to release the bubble, pop out of it, merge with the light of awareness that felt so close. But the cherished experience of oneness felt painfully out of reach: my spacesuit self was too constricting, too entrenched. “What else can I do?” said a despairing voice in my mind. “I'm trying as hard as I can to wake up from this. I don't know what else I can do.”

A wave of understanding swept through me. This was so familiar. Of course “I” can't do this—a self can't undo itself, a self can't free itself. And the self isn't a problem. How many times had I struggled and struggled to be different, feeling myself to be flawed, only to realize the answer was to stop struggling? It didn't matter whether the self felt inflated or deflated, the pain was in being at war. A gentle voice inside me said, “Stop. Just stop.”

I wanted to, I knew the wisdom of letting go. But my body was holding on, distressed, wanting things to be different, afraid something was wrong. Again I heard the voice. “Sweetheart, please, stop.” And once again, as I had experienced so many times, the presence of lovingkindness allowed me to open to truth. I found myself bowing my head and cupping my hands in a gesture of prayer. In some way I was offering the whole tight sense of a controlling self into loving awareness. I wasn't trying to get rid of anything. I was simply acknowledging that all this belonged to something larger. The struggle stopped. The words in my mind, the ideas about what was wrong, all dropped away. At that, the bubble of self dissolved. My world opened into a space of quietness, with currents of warmth and tenderness moving through. When thoughts and feelings began popping up, I noticed some hints of special person. “Look what I did, I surrendered and am free of this,” and then of course, “Oh no—she's back!” and then an inner smile. Again, the words “stop … just stop,” followed by bowing my head and letting go. Then letting go of letting go. When the struggle stopped, a quiet presence opened up that I knew was home. And with that, I had a sense of peace, of trusting who I really am.

Remembering to Stop

Most of us are working so hard. It's like we're in a motorboat noisily zipping around, trying to find a place that is quiet, peaceful, and still. We're solving a problem, responding to demands, preparing for what's next, improving ourselves. But we're just making more waves and noise wherever we go. It counters all our ambitious conditioning, but true freedom comes when we throttle back the motor and come naturally into stillness. What we are seeking is not “out there,” not an improved self that just requires more vigilant effort or control. It is the silent awareness that is always right
here
, discovered in the background of whatever we experience.

The most liberating meditation practice is to stop controlling and to let things be as they are. When I teach my students this, many of them are concerned that if they stop actively directing their attention, they'll spend the entire time in a mental trance. I let them know that there are many wise practices—quieting the mind by following the breath, noting what is happening, offering self-compassion, bowing the head in prayer—that help incline us toward noncontrolling. But if our tendency is to latch on to these practices, we reinforce the sense of a self who is in charge of the show. The art is to direct the attention with a light touch, and then let go of all directing. We can't trust a state of mind that is manipulated into being. Only by truly allowing life to be as it is do we come to realize and trust our natural state of awareness. We need to stop.