The Unfolding Now

by A H Almaas

  So whether we are meditating or doing inquiry exercises or having a meal or talking with a friend or doing our job, we can always practice by being present, by being aware of what is happening in our experience and not doing anything to it.

  Because awareness is a manifestation of True Nature, it is natural for there to be awareness. But awareness is also necessary so we can recognize how we are meddling. We are usually meddling in a thousand different ways, but we often only notice one or two ways. Why? Because we are not completely aware of the situation. The more aware we are, the more we see the meddling, and the more we see the meddling, the better the possibility of ceasing and desisting, of not continuing to meddle.

  Now if you catch yourself meddling, that doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong. Let’s establish that right away because for sure you are going to catch yourself doing just that. When you meditate or practice, for example, you will find yourself interfering, manipulating yourself, splitting yourself. Since we know this is going to happen, we practice with it. We see it, we let it be, and we don’t do anything to it.

  Remember that ceasing to meddle doesn’t mean that you do something to stop. Just being aware that you are meddling—and seeing what meddling does—is usually sufficient for it to stop by itself. You won’t have the feeling that you are stopping it; it just stops.

  And if you don’t do anything, you might begin to experience feelings arise in response to the meddling. You might feel kindness in response to the suffering involved in the meddling. You might feel the determination not to meddle, or you might feel the strength and the capacity to say, “I will be able to stay steadfast and not interfere.” Or you might feel enough love just to be genuine and not divided in yourself.

  EXPLORATION SESSION

  Recognizing Your Own Meddling

  Think of a challenging or uncomfortable incident or situation you went through recently. As you review it from the beginning, explore all the ways you tended to meddle with yourself while it was happening. How did you try to internally direct the experience—corral it, control it, change it, improve it, shape it?

  Notice whether you meddle with yourself as you are recalling and writing about the situation. It is important to be as kind a researcher as possible so you don’t judge yourself for what you find.

  CHAPTER 4

  Making Space for Everything

  YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED THAT we are taking one little step at a time. To take even one step in our personal journey usually requires a lot of work and understanding. Much growing, maturing, and learning is involved, for instance, in going from seeing where you are to not meddling with where you are. And that includes working through many obstacles and patterns. However, in this book, we are not exploring the issues that arise with each of these topics. We are just looking at our practice of being real, exploring how things manifest in our practice, and discovering what guidance is available to support us as we take each step. Our desire, in whatever we are experiencing, is to be able to answer the question: How can I practice being real in relation to this experience that I am having right now?

  As you are working with this book, be aware that you might notice all kinds of patterns and limitations in yourself coming up. For example, as you become more aware of the issues that make not meddling and not controlling your experience difficult, your tendencies and compulsions will become much more apparent. It is important to recognize this and allow the time and attention that is needed to address these issues. It is up to you to use your wisdom in finding the best way to attend to these personal conflicts and barriers.

  TRUE NATURE AND NONINTERFERENCE

  So let’s take a deeper look at noninterference—keeping hands off—because it is one of the main keys to our practice. Noninterference is referred to in Chinese as wu wei (often translated “nonaction” or “nondoing”), and the followers of Kashmir Shaivism call it Anupaya Yoga. It is one of the tantric methods and, in that kind of yoga, it is usually reserved for the last stage of teaching. The instruction is this: Do not do anything to anything; just be present and aware, and whatever obstacle is there will dissolve to reveal its True Nature. If you feel an emotion completely, without adding anything to it, for example, it will transform to reveal its true condition, which is our True Nature in one particular flavor or another. Some emotions lead to joy, others to compassion or strength or peace—all distinct qualities of our True Nature.

  But that direct transformation can happen only if we are already present and aware and fully in touch with our True Nature. Most of the time, however, we are not in that place. When we are in our usual consciousness, even if we can stay present with an emotion or manifestation, it doesn’t immediately transform into its True Nature. It usually transforms into another emotion or feeling. In other words, we must undergo a several-step process before the experience finally reveals its True Nature.

  Plus it has to be understood that an emotion is not just a simple reaction to whatever is happening in the present situation. Usually the emotion has an entire history. If you just let that emotion be, it begins to reveal that history and its implications. So, although True Nature is always present, the infinitesimally thin barrier that separates emotional reality from True Nature may contain a hundred layers of history that are obscuring the truth. So, realization of True Nature is a gradual process.

  INDIVISIBLE TRUE NATURE

  We need to remember that the revelation of our True Nature is a process, so that we can be more realistic and more kind to ourselves about where we are. Thus our practice is to just be aware of and present with whatever is arising, to let it be and not do anything to it except allow our natural curiosity to unfold it and reveal what it is about. That process will at some point reveal the ultimate nature of that emotion.

  As you notice, I didn’t only say, “Be aware.” I said, “Be aware and present.” Awareness and presence are not two things, really, but if I only say, “Be aware,” you might think of that in terms of normal awareness, that is, observing experience from a distance, with the detachment of a subject viewing an object. When I say, “aware and present,” I am saying, “present to what you are aware of,” which means that you are not only noticing it, but you are also in contact with it; you are touching it, feeling it, sensing its texture and quality. You are not only looking at it from the outside, you are aware of it from the inside as well and from all directions, from everywhere. So presence brings in the quality of immediacy of awareness, which means having no distance between the awareness and what we are aware of.

  Presence gives a sense of immediacy, of fullness, of hereness in the experience. It gives a sense of immediacy and directness that suffuses the experience, that pervades it and fills it, so that our awareness, our consciousness, is not only observing it from a removed place but also from within it. It is as though our nerve endings were inside the experience, outside the experience, and in between; they are everywhere and feeling the experience in all its possibilities. That’s when we really know the experience fully and completely. If we have that kind of awareness, then we recognize that to be aware of something is not just a function, and it is not just a capacity. The awareness, in fact, is our essential presence, our hereness, our substantiality.

  This points to something important about our True Nature, our natural condition: True Nature is indivisible. True Nature cannot be divided; it doesn’t have separate parts. It is not like a machine that has many parts, and it’s not even like the body, which has many differentiated organs. Everything implicit in True Nature exists everywhere within it. It is not as though True Nature had love, for example, and this love is sitting in the gall bladder; it doesn’t have a gall bladder. Love is everywhere in True Nature and so is awareness and so is strength. All of True Nature is one unified presence, and the same is true of awareness. True Nature and awareness are inseparable, and that fact can serve as guidance for our practice.

  THE ONENESS OF OUR EXPERIENCE

  Presence, like True Nat
ure, is indivisible; it cannot be broken down into parts. It is unlimited, but not in the sense of being big, because presence has no size. It is unlimited in its qualities, possibilities, and potentiality. The reason this is important for our daily life is that when we are really being ourselves, we feel unified. We are whole—indivisible—there is no division, no contrariness within us; there are no parts opposing each other inside us.

  Whatever impression, image, thought, feeling, sensation, or form of experience we become aware of always emerges within our consciousness; it is in the field of our awareness. It is not that our awareness is aware of something other than itself. Whatever we experience is always part of the field of our awareness manifesting as a particular form. Our awareness simply recognizes this change or this arising within it.

  If we consider our inner experience as it manifests in the forms of feelings, emotions, thoughts, images, impulses, desires, and so on, we see that these always arise within us as part of us. You could describe them as waves in a field of the same substance or as wave modulations in the same kind of medium. Each wave arises with a certain flavor, texture, color, and quality that makes us experience it as one thing or another. But it is not as though our consciousness were a vacuity, and some object pops out from it. It is not that we are separate, looking at that object as if it were something different from us. Whatever arises is always inseparable from us.

  We might not be aware of this if we don’t yet know our True Nature. But the moment we know our True Nature, we recognize that everything arises within this True Nature. Everything arises within this field, within this presence, and is no separate from it. So we realize that if we fight anything off that is in our experience, we are dividing ourselves.

  INTERFERENCE AS DIVISION

  This brings us back to interference and the difficulty we have in keeping our hands off our experience. Interference in our experience always implies a division: We separate ourselves into parts through meddling. So, maybe there is me interfering with my fear. Or me interfering with my love.

  Now, this division is recognized, or reveals itself, most clearly when we meddle with an experience, or some aspect of an experience, that we would rather not have or don’t feel good about experiencing. Maybe it’s something that’s scary or painful, or it’s something we think is shameful. Perhaps it is something that we feel is too much—too delicate, too sweet, too strong, too powerful—anything that threatens or contradicts what we take ourselves to be. When we are not informed by our True Nature, then whatever it is that we find threatening or objectionable, we tend to oppose or reject. We want to fight it off, to push it away or push against it. We don’t want to feel it or we don’t want to feel it fully. This tendency to fight with ourselves and the elements of our experience is what we usually call resistance.

  Sometimes we don’t even want to be aware of what’s bothering us, we don’t want to know it is there. In these situations, it doesn’t matter whether it’s something positive, negative, painful, pleasurable, expanded, or contracted emerging in our consciousness. If we are not familiar with it or are scared of it or feel bad about it, we don’t want to be aware of it. So we end up opposing something that hasn’t even manifested yet. We resist it.

  We dull our awareness and thicken it in a manner that opposes and pushes away whatever element is arising in our experience that we prefer not to have. And when we do that, it becomes very difficult just to be present. How are we going to be there, how are we going to be ourselves, if we are fighting something in our experience?

  We are trying to divide ourselves; yet, as we have seen, we are indivisible. We are trying to partition ourselves, but our consciousness doesn’t have parts. So, all that happens is that we get thick and dull, and our awareness loses its lightness and lucidity and clarity. In fact, our normal awareness has already lost its clarity and lucidity because we are dividing ourselves in so many ways automatically, consciously or unconsciously.

  THE NATURE OF RESISTANCE

  The stance of the ego-self that doesn’t know its nature is to fight some experiences and hold on to others. The ego-self has preferences for what should happen and shouldn’t happen, according to its ideal of what we believe is enlightened or not, and what we think is pleasurable or painful. We have all kinds of value and judgment standards about what’s good and what’s bad, what is scary and what is not. Some of this is conscious, some of it is unconscious, and much of it divides us within. This division creates a kind of war, like a resistance movement within us, whereas our True Nature is inherently undivided and indivisible.

  When you are resisting, you are basically resisting yourself. It is a kind of self-resistance. Instead of being with yourself, you are resisting being with yourself. Instead of being yourself, you are resisting being yourself. That is what it means to resist our True Nature. The ego experience, which is by its nature not an experience of simply being ourselves, implies resistance to being.

  The moment we take the posture of ego, of identification with our history, it implies resistance. There is no such thing as ego with no resistance, and the ultimate resistance is the resistance to simply being, the resistance to our True Nature. And that’s because ego is always trying to do one thing or another, and True Nature isn’t doing anything. It just is. It is nature. It is luminous presence.

  The nature of ego itself is an ongoing resistance to what is. Even just manifesting as ego implies that we are resisting our nature, because if we didn’t resist our nature we would instantly be our nature. So, the fact that we are not experiencing ourselves as our True Nature, the fact that we are not this spacious presence, implies resistance.

  The resistance can be quite subtle, and of course, there are many reasons for it. It might be that we don’t believe that we are our True Nature. We believe instead that who we are is the one who is resisting, and we are attempting to preserve our identity. It might be that allowing ourselves to feel our True Nature would threaten us too much by bringing all kinds of vulnerabilities, fears, or insecurities into the open. In fact, truly being is a kind of death. I talk about things such as resistance and how to be allowing, but to really be without resistance means ego death, ultimately.

  Resistance happens in many ways and can be explicit or implicit. Explicit resistance occurs when some experience we don’t want arises or is about to arise, and we defend against it by thickening, contracting, dulling ourselves, or pushing against what is there. For example, a hurt is arising, and you say, “No, it’s too much; I don’t want to feel that.” Our consciousness then thickens to push it away, to close it down. There is a direct rejection, denial, or pushing against our experience or some element of it.

  On the other hand, sometimes it happens that resistance is implicit or indirect. In that case, we don’t try to avoid or stop feeling the objectionable part of our experience—we attempt to manipulate it. For instance, we may try to control our experience or direct it or want it to be something different. We may believe that we are accepting our experience and trying to work with it, but we can’t do that without resisting what it is, without fighting off what we are experiencing. We know this must be the case, because if we are not fighting, or resisting, we are spacious—we are allowing whatever is happening to just be as it is.

  WORKING WITH RESISTANCE IN PRACTICE

  Since most of the time you cannot just be yourself—you cannot be real—you will find yourself resisting and interfering a lot. However, if it should happen that you can be real, let that happen. Otherwise it would be resistance again. Whatever is happening is happening. If you happen to be open and present, and things are arising and naturally transforming and freeing themselves from a contracted condition and revealing their underlying lightness and luminosity, that is wonderful. If not, continue to do your best not to judge the things that are arising or do anything with them, because True Nature itself will transform them. True Nature might transform them by revealing their story or meaning. We call the revelation of this story the
process of inquiry. We will have much more to say about this process throughout this book.

  When I say that resistance is contraindicated in inner practice, I remind you that I am not saying that you should never engage in a resistance movement in the sense of taking appropriate action regarding external circumstances. Remember the rotten peach. What I am referring to is nonresistance within ourselves, within our own field of awareness of experience.

  It takes a subtle and full understanding of our own field of experience and of how to live harmoniously within it to understand what to do with an external force. In the meantime, we can only do our best until we get to that point. The more we understand how we respond to what is arising within us, the easier it becomes to learn how to deal with what is arising outside of us, so to speak. (At some point, we recognize that whatever happens is not really outside of us.)

  When we are pushing against our experience, fighting it off, it doesn’t have the opportunity or the space to be itself. And if it doesn’t have the chance to be itself, it doesn’t have the chance to unfold. And if it doesn’t have the chance to unfold, it doesn’t have the opportunity to reveal its nature. So it continues to be whatever manifestation initially arose. In other words, resisting something is one good way to preserve it in the form that we experienced it to begin with. We resist, hoping to get rid of it, but what we are actually doing is encapsulating it and keeping it in its original form or expression.

  So, as you see, resistance is futile! Everything that initially appears to have its own identity, its own reality, at some point will be absorbed again into the indivisible unity of True Nature.

  Resistance implies a division inside of us. It signals that we are not recognizing that what is arising is a manifestation of our own consciousness, of our own awareness. When hatred arises in us, for example, or fear, it is our soul, our consciousness, taking that form at that time for a reason we perhaps don’t understand yet. If we are able to allow the fear or hate, embrace it, hold it, and feel it fully in its totality—in all its texture, color, and vividness—we will give it the space to be itself. And that will happen naturally because it is the nature of our True Nature to move, to unfold, to illuminate itself, and to reveal what it is about. And as our experience reveals what it is about, it will at some point reveal its True Nature because each experience we have is somehow related to our True Nature. And by understanding it, seeing the truth, and following the thread of truth, we are following that connection to True Nature.