Choose Again

the unquiet mind

You know how you sometimes find yourself in an environment in which there is a constant mechanical noise of which you don't become aware until it suddenly ceases? Maybe a refrigerator humming or a furnace or air conditioner or some constant traffic noise out in the street? And in that moment of cessation there's an "ahhhh" out-breath, a sigh of thanks, a relaxing of the shoulders? Yes, everyone knows this experience...

You were reacting to something in the outer environment with a tension-response, a stress-response, but you were completely unaware of it until the cessation of the stressor made you aware of your discomfort.

This is a lot like the situation in the mind of a spiritual seeker. Maybe you begin every day reading your favorite books, or sitting in meditation. Maybe you go to workshops or retreats and listen to spiritual leaders tell you how to get free of this feeling of unworthiness, or of just not "getting it."

Sometimes these experiences make you feel really good and you think, "I've got it!", only to find in the next day or the next week that doubt has crept in and once again you are your same old crappy self.

Or maybe one day, out of the blue, you have an experience of oneness or of light and bliss, and you think, "That's it!" and you spend the next several months wanting to repeat the experience and finding it more elusive than ever—a cruel drop of water to a raging thirst.

I'm here to tell you that within this analogy, YOU are the air conditioner. Your thoughts are the street noise. Your emotions are the sound of a pile driver in the distance. Your tiniest little thought about the past or future is the refrigerator humming. The slightest motion of your mind into thought, or narrative, or longing for something other than this, here and now, is the only problem you have—and it is voluntary.

The thought that you are not getting it, the thought that you are not enlightened, the thought that things should be better, the thought that you want what someone else seems to have, the thought that you ARE enlightened, the thought that you know more or better than someone else, the thought that you possess some special knowledge—any thought—any experience—anything but the silence of a quiet mind right here, right now, IS the stressor. There is no other stressor.

It's just an ingrained mental habit. Bring yourself back from thought, over and over, hundreds of times a day, whenever you notice yourself drifting into the narrative, the running inner dialogue. Resist the desire to entertain yourself with rehashing some experience or rehearsing some other experience. Turn away from it and into this here and now.

Do it whenever you remember. Eventually, finer and finer motions of the mind, finer and finer levels of undetected mental noise become apparent. You begin to discover that you have been tormenting yourself. You have been running the whole mechanical contraption. And the on/off switch has always been right in your own hand.

getting at the root

When I was a teenager in school I developed a plantar wart on my heel. If you haven't had one, they are different from other types of warts in that they hurt a lot when you walk on them, and it's hard to get rid of them.

My uncle was a dermatologist and he had lots of folksy, effective remedies for such situations. In this case he told me to get a sheet of salicylic acid plaster from a pharmacist and cut a small dot of it a little bit larger than the wart itself. Then I was to tape over the plaster and wear it for 3 days, after which I was to soak my foot, and remove whatever depth of the wart had been burned away by the salicylic acid (which is essentially aspirin). I repeated the procedure until I had a neat hole-punch hole in my foot through which I could see the roots of the wart. Once I could see the roots clearly, I was to tease them out with a tweezer, and the wart would be gone and would not return.

I remember, after about three weeks of treatment, gazing into the little hole in my heel and seeing the roots of the wart, like strands of black thread. They pulled out easily, and the wart never came back.

It would be nice if we could work with the ego, the false self, in the same way. Wear away at it through procedures of meditation and forgiveness, hoping to eventually expose the root and pluck it out. And then, and then, we'd be free! Right?

Wrong. Here's the thing. The "you" who wants to expose the ego and get rid of it, IS the ego. The "you" who is seeking freedom and desiring release.... that you cannot ever achieve release. That you is a dream character. You are a dream character. The desire for release is the feeling-tone of this dream of seemingly being in a body. It's the game, the theme, of the dream—like a video game—same basic search-and-destroy maneuvers, but played out in the field of spiritual seeking.

The desire for things to be different from the way they are now is what creates the dream. The desire for enlightenment, release, freedom will lead you endlessly around in circles until you begin to see this. The truth is that the seeker can never find, because the seeker is that which does not want "now."

Look closely at the things you believe will eventually set you free and ask yourself if a character in a dream can ever be set free. Ask yourself if a character in a dream can ever awaken. If you believe that it can, ask yourself what that would look like, and see if that vision does not contain a hidden complaint—a desire for a better dream for the dream character.

oscillating

I've been corresponding lately with two readers who have teenagers and/or grown children, and are both working hard to be mindful of their own reactions in relation to their children while simultaneously getting occasionally sucked under by the force of conditioning. There is great difficulty involved in remaining clear, for lack of a better word, in the face of the emotional sandstorms that are part and parcel of parenting.

When babies are born, your job is to sustain their very lives. But with every day that passes, a little bit of the responsibility that was yours on day one, has to be given back to them. Sometimes they try to wrest it back before they are ready, and sometimes they have to pry open your unwilling hands to take what has long been rightfully theirs, but whichever one it is, retiring from the job of minding someone else's business so thoroughly is hard to do.

What I'm trying to say is that we think we understand what it would mean to be mindful all the time, to be aware all the time, to be functioning in an enlightened way all the time, and it is this thinking that is the major problem.

Attention oscillates. One minute you are fully identified with the body, the next minute you are pulling way back for a wide-angle shot and there are no bodies, just Beingness. Working with that oscillating nature—accepting it, not judging it, not using it to spin further off into thought—that's what's called for. Who you are, really, contains both experiences and everything in between.

I like to use the analogy of riding a bicycle. Did you ever coast to a stoplight on a bike, with your feet still clipped into the peddles, and try to remain upright until the light changed? It's a matter of sensing the fall and correcting for it, constantly. Sensing and correcting. If you correct before you sense, you fall. And there's nothing wrong with falling.

Trying to remain clear is the mind's way of killing the process. It thinks it knows what is called for, but it knows nothing. The process itself is automatic, like growing from a baby to an adult, which you have done without knowing how you did it.

The answer is always right here, in the quiet mind that has stopped trying to find it.

home early

I got home from work early tonight, early being 5:30, thinking I might catch an hour or so of conversation with my son, who is home from film school in Canada for the holidays. He's fun to talk to. Deep, perceptive, interesting, challenging.

But, as I had simultaneously hoped, he's out (his friends are arriving home daily for their holiday visits). So I heated up some leftovers, poured myself a glass of wine, and started reading a hand-me-down issue of the New Yorker that we got from a neighbor, dated in September some time.

It was the issue published shortly after McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate, and it was filled with the horrors and dreads of that particular timespace.

I found myself reading with great relish the story of her nomination, the fervent prayers for McCain's health if elected and the glee of the religious right. At that time, if you recall, I absolutely could not read the news, and I simply stopped visiting my favorite news sites for a couple of weeks, so nauseating was the idea that she might become our next president.

But knowing the outcome made all the difference. And it made me think about the idea that this life is already over and we are simply remembering it, as if remembering a dream, from the safety of our Being as—whatever our Being is.

It made me think of this:
Each day, and every minute in each day, and every instant that each minute holds, you but relive the single instant when the time of terror took the place of love. And so you die each day to live again, until you cross the gap between the past and present, which is not a gap at all. Such is each life; a seeming interval from birth to death and on to life again, a repetition of an instant gone by long ago that cannot be relived. And all of time is but the mad belief that what is over is still here and now. - T26.V-13

My son and I were talking last night about a novel we had both read. We had very different reactions to it and he was explaining his. As he spoke I realized that he had read more carefully and thoughtfully than I had, and that his tolerance for the main character, for whom I had no patience, was based on his understanding of the intention of the author—whereas I had not considered the author's intention at all.

It was a good moment—looking into the eyes of my beautiful child, who is no longer my child—and realizing that he is teaching me something. What he said was that even though the main character in the book was being mindless and self-indulgent, it's okay to be mindless and self-indulgent. It's a temporary state, and we all do it, and it's not a sin. It's not who we are. He felt it was clear that the author was observing, and not identifying with, the character.

And I realized that he was right. I don't forgive my own mindless self-indulgence, let alone that of a fictional character.

where i've been

Holiday frenzy around here.... college kids home from school, parties, work, blizzards, cold, distractions. I shall return.

all perception is dreaming

If what you desire is awakening, or enlightenment, it's helpful to realize that all seeking behavior—behavior based on the idea that there is a state of mind to desire and therefore to get—prevents finding.

As long as you are standing there wanting something that you believe you don't already have, you are standing in the wrong spot. You are standing in the mind of the body-identified false self, the dream character. The fact that you are feeling any kind of lack is like a dream sign—a pre-determined signal that lets you know you are dreaming.

All dreaming involves perception. All perception is dreaming. If you are perceiving a world outside of yourself (which is what perception is—duality—me here and you over there) you are seeing through the eyes of the imaginary, body-identified, dream-character, the ego, the false self.

If you believe you are being tested, or that you will be punished or rewarded for your actions by some outside force, you are standing firmly in the mind of the dream character, for whom imaginary outside forces exist.

All thoughts and experiences of duality are dreaming. The dreams nest within each other, spinning off and spinning out constantly, without what we understand as cause. The idea of causality in the sense of one thing causing another presupposes time and space. And time and space are part of the dreaming.

There is nothing to be done with this understanding. It passes through the intellect and plants itself like a seed. It has a life kind of like a blade of grass growing beneath the sidewalk. The cement begins to crack open and reveal living earth underneath.

As you withdraw attention and energy from the dream dramas, the fears and exaltations of the dream character, and stand in the position of witness, it's a little like fertilizing that seed of awareness. The dream cracks open on its own, from within.

a little bit of first aid

As A Course in Miracles says, over and over in many different ways, all that is needed is to relinquish judgment—to understand that you literally cannot judge.

Unfortunately, in the hands of the false self, the ego, the dream character, this is interpreted as "to think in non-judgmental ways." That's not it.

The experience of verbal thought creates a sense of division. Thought divides. And as a result of this division, a feeling of being separate from the environment is created. As soon as this feeling of separation arises it is invested with identification and a false self is born. The false self is not a steady state. It changes, blinks on and off, morphs all the time. It has no constancy, because it has no real existence. It is merely an effect that we have mistaken for a cause.

Verbal thought is absolutely pervasive. It might be better to call it symbolic thought, or any motion of the mind, because it all has the same effect. Thought creates a sense of self that is taken as real but is not.

If you have any experience with meditation, you know that a quiet mind has no problems. This quiet mind that has no problems is here all the time, behind the cacophonous normal human mind. The quiet mind is not threatened. It holds no grudges, it harbors no blame. It has no hopes and plans; it has no memories. It simply is, and the feeling tone of it, is affection. It does not identify with the problems of the person. It just watches, or it illuminates. It shines through.

This Self, unlike the false self, has no bias towards pleasure and pain. It does not shrink from pain or seek pleasure. It does not interpret either one as favorable or unfavorable. It does not move. It abstains from having opinions, you might say, because it understands that neither pleasure nor pain are real.

So one way to become familiar with this self is through mindfulness practice and meditation. In this way you get used to bringing your attention back from the arena of verbal thought and the moving mind to the ever-present still mind where no problems exist.

Another way, and one that can be used in times of anxiety or despair, when the dream seems awfully real and you feel unable to find a stillpoint, is to say, as in Lesson 94, "I place the future in the hands of God," and in this way relinquish the tail-chasing activity of mind. It accomplishes the same thing in that it gets the mind to stop seeking after pleasure and running from pain—releasing the false self from the idea that it is responsible for trying to fix what appears to be broken, and for the original breakage itself—both of which arose as the effects of identifying with that thought-induced sense of division.

the dream continues on its own

In nighttime dreams we are always convinced that we are doing something. Often the doing is fairly frustrating because intention sometimes doesn't morph at the same speed as the environment, but even so, we accommodate the cognitive dissonance by making excuses for it, in order to stay asleep.

In nighttime dreams, lucidity occurs in degrees, yet true lucidity is a markedly different experience from partial, or intellectual lucidity. In true lucidity the whole game changes.

I have at times had dreams in which I know that I'm dreaming, and I'll even walk up to one of the other dream characters and say, "This is a dream! We're dreaming!" And yet I am not lucid. I still believe that I am the dream character and within seconds I'm caught up in the action again. I'm just a dream character with a foggy notion. My sense of identity is trapped in the character (because that's where my attention is) and I believe that the character actually has substance and the power to act. I have forgotten that the entire dream is occurring within the mind of a larger gestalt that is also "me," even though I am able to pay lip service to the notion that this is a dream. The dream character is just mimicking some intellectual understanding that has been floating around in the mind of the dreamer. The understanding then becomes part of the dream and is rendered useless.

In this waking dream, intellectual understanding is equally useless unless it is used as a sort of crowbar to wrest the attention away from the dream character and its dramas, so we can see that the dream is occurring on its own and that the dream character is part of its appearance but without a life of its own.

It's at this point, when you are pulling your attention out of a dream drama in which you are invested, that there can be some degree of discomfort. There is a tremendous desire for resolution in our usual minds and an intolerance of uncertainty. But when you are withdrawing your attention from the false self, the little me, the ego, the feeling tone is one of uncertainty and groundlessness. To the ego it feels like acceptance of defeat.

Basically, you are admitting that you do not know what is happening, you do not know what you are, but you are not going to indulge in the emotions and habitual reactions of the dream character. You have seen that they do nothing but cause you pain in the long run. You stop trying to fulfill the desires of the dream character, even for awakening, and you just stand there, in limbo, with no resolution.

It's at this point that faith plays a part. Call it faith, or devotion—there has to be within the psyche some sense of being supported in this endeavor. It can be faith in a teacher, a guru, the dharma, or faith in God, or faith in Jesus and the Holy Spirit—but at this crossroads, you have to believe that the bus is going to come and pick you up eventually, because you have stopped dead in your tracks in the middle of nowhere.

You are volunteering to temporarily do the thing you've been running from all this time. You are volunteering to suffer uncertainty—to make it your friend—to witness it, rather than react to it.

And so the dream begins to roll on without you. Incrementally for some, and all at once for others, attention is freed from the dream character and comes to rest in that which is already "safe, healed and whole," awake, already here, as the bright and shining awareness that you are.

the feeling of wholeness

It's becoming more clear to me every day that a feeling of wholeness is completely accessible to me, and always has been, but I've been so distracted by the drama of the dream character, the ego, the false self, the personality (call it what you like) that very little of my attention has been available to place on this ever-present completeness.

In that sense, there is some learning/unlearning involved in freeing enough attention to be able to notice what is always there, readily available, as you, as awareness.

Everyone's experience with this is different. For me, it was not helpful until very recently to say that the dream character (me), the ego, doesn't exist. I can't be that unusual, so I figure there are many of you out there for whom another approach might be less discouraging at first.

What helped me, initially, was to begin to chip away at what I thought I was. The concept of neti, neti (not this, not that) is something I stumbled upon recently and that's a wonderfully succinct description of the process. Because I did not have enough free attention to really notice what I was, it was most beneficial to bit by bit understand what I was not.

I think that when you look at the Advaita pointers or read a Course in Miracles or study Buddhism, or whatever your method may be, not much can happen until enough attention is freed from the dream character to place on awareness in this now.

So having someone point you towards what it is will only help if there is that minimum amount of energy available that has been extracted from the dream. This must be the purpose of forgiveness in ACIM— incrementally extracting energy from the dream-drama until a tipping point is reached and there is enough free awareness to notice what has always been there.

Seeing what you are not is a process of disidentification. We have spent our lives identifying, and we then begin to disidentify. At first it is a process of disidentifying with thoughts—perhaps various types of thoughts. So when a type of thought arises, say jealousy or blame, for example, we see it for the destructive energy pattern that it is, and we leave it alone. We don't say "I am" to it. A bit of attention is freed from the dream.

Bit by bit, thoughts, emotions, tendencies, body sensations, beliefs, are seen as something that is "not me." Finally it begins to be understood that the behavior of seeking itself is also not me. This leads to the natural conclusion that what has been sought must be here, now, within my ordinary awareness, but overlooked because my attention had been trapped by the dream.

The seeking stops simultaneously with the noticing of the unchangeable nature of your own clear, bright, ever-present awareness. And yet there is still the mental habit of being fascinated with the dream character, which persists like an echo. It's just a habit. The dream goes on anyway, but you begin to prefer to bring your attention to your awareness sitting up in the nosebleed section, instead of allowing your attention to be fully identified with and trapped in the adventures of the player on the field. It comes and goes, and develops on its own. For me there is some courage involved in disengaging with the dream drama at times. There are things that scare me, or really grab me, still, but I do feel that I have a choice.