by A H Almaas
TRUE NATURE IS UNDIVIDED BUT ALLOWS DIVISION
As we have seen, resistance implies an inner division. It is possible to confront the division itself, to see through the duality, but for most of us, that is not a small step. In fact, it is a huge step—or maybe about the ten thousandth average-sized step—on the path. Most of us still need to take the first step, which is just to allow what is happening, just to let that be. Even though we feel the division and duality, we need to allow that duality. Saying, “No, this isn’t right; it’s dual, it’s divided” is a form of resistance; it is taking a position of pushing away what is.
Do you think True Nature is going to do that to duality, to divisiveness? No. True Nature says, “Oh, division . . . interesting, let’s find out about that” and just stays with it, allowing the divisiveness to be and inviting it to reveal itself. “Tell me more about yourself. This duality is an interesting phenomenon. I didn’t know I could do that. I know myself to be completely indivisible—but look, here is a division. Isn’t that amazing! I must be really creative! I can make myself appear as something different from my real nature. This surpasses all special effects. I am not only morphing, I am actually separating out parts of myself.”
You might have heard of fictional beings called changelings, or shapeshifters, which are entities that can alter their form at will. You might perceive them as a human being in one moment, as a bird the next, and as a table or a plant or a cloud after that. But in the process, they don’t break up into parts and change those; they shift from one complete form into the next. But we as changelings can actually change in such a way that our manifestation appears as two or three things—often in different places in the field of our consciousness. You’ve probably heard of the psychic capacity called bilocation, right? We do it all the time.
Though True Nature can manifest infinite possibilities, including the experience of inner conflict and division, it is not in its nature to separate something out and fight it off. This is because of True Nature’s indivisible oneness. True Nature is not designed for division and conflict; it can’t do that. Only its manifestations can appear to separate.
So, instead of a thickening and a bristly fighting attitude toward what is arising in us, our practice shows the importance of the spacious kind of allowing that comes from a place of no division, the openness of our True Nature. We might not be aware of that place of no division, because that is not where we are, that is not what is arising in our experience. But we can remember and learn by recognizing our resistance. Recognizing it, we don’t need to go along with it. We can learn to be spacious by being aware of the resistance, being present with it, feeling what it is like and being curious about it.
START BY ALLOWING RESISTANCE
When I say, “Be spacious, allow what is happening out of a spacious attitude,” I don’t mean that you should deliberately try to create for yourself the sensation or the experience of spaciousness. That might or might not happen by itself, depending on what is there. What I mean is that you include whatever is happening in your awareness; you don’t resist it. If what is happening is resistance and thickness, then that is where you are. You can be at peace with thickness, allowing it to happen, letting it be as thick as it wants to be, feeling that thickness as much as possible. So inquiring into it means delving into it and experiencing it fully. The attitude with which you approach your experience is a lot more important than getting to any particular state of consciousness.
Of course, the thickness is a kind of resistance, an attitude that is not allowing, not spacious. So just be aware of that. The idea is to notice it first, and as you notice it, to allow it and let it emerge even more. If it gets thicker, it might be that more thickness is what needs to arise. It needs to become itself as fully as possible until you become a completely thick kind of presence. When you get that thick, many of your capacities are not available because they get clogged. That is fine. Then the only thing left is the awareness itself. So be it.
And so you continue to inquire into your experience. And inquiry does not necessarily mean you have to do something or ask a specific question. It is more like observing with curiosity, “I am feeling thick. I am so thick that I don’t even know what is going on. Who knows what this is? I really don’t like it. I wish I weren’t thick.” All of this is included in the inquiry. So if you recognize that you really don’t like it, that you’d rather feel delicate and fine, you are recognizing some kind of resistance that might be part of the thickness. That is okay, too. Everything needs to be included.
Whatever it is, welcome it, embrace it. And that doesn’t mean that you need to love it. It is understandable that you don’t like feeling thick. But not liking it is not the same thing as pushing against it, trying to get rid of it, or judging it.
From the perspective of True Nature, it is natural to be spacious, to be light, to be playful instead of glum when engaging our experience. It is important to recognize that we can have the attitude of being interested in any kind of experience. That means not just allowing it but actually inviting it. If we recognize ourselves as being resistant, glum, and thick, we start with that. It’s where we are, so we let ourselves be there and invite it to reveal itself.
So now we come back full circle to remember once again that our practice is to be real. It’s always about being ourselves, no matter where we are. Most of us don’t know how to be real, how to be ourselves, and we can’t just turn some switch on to make that happen. So, what do we do? If we remember the way True Nature works, we have a way to do our practice. Let’s review what we’ve discovered thus far.
The best approach to being real is to learn to be where we are, because where we are is what is already happening.
Whatever we are experiencing at any time is part of True Nature, part of our presence, part of our consciousness, part of our awareness.
True Nature is unable to resist anything. It is not in our True Nature to separate something out and fight it off. It is not designed to do that.
True Nature manifests its freedom by being inherently spacious and light. It is a spaciousness that feels weightless and functions as an invitation for things to arise and to be themselves and in that way to reveal themselves fully and completely.
We don’t need to go along with the tendency to resist our experience. We can learn to be spacious by being aware of the resistance, being present with the resistance, feeling what it is like, and being curious about it.
If we are able to allow our experience—to embrace it, hold it, and feel it fully, rather than rejecting it or trying to change it—we give it the space to be itself. Then it will naturally unfold because that is the nature of our True Nature.
As our experience illuminates itself and reveals what it is about, it will at some point reveal our True Nature, because each experience we have is somehow related to our True Nature.
By understanding and seeing the truth in our experience and following the thread of that truth, we are following the path to our True Nature.
EXPLORATION SESSION
Inviting Allowing into the Moment
True Nature is interested in its own revelations because it loves to reveal itself; it is its nature to manifest. This is happening all the time, but we can engage it as a particular practice. We call it inquiry when we attend to and explore any process that is naturally occurring. When we are aware of our experience, consciously engaging it, and inviting its unfoldment through our immediate presence, that is inquiry.
Spend fifteen minutes exploring your experience as it arises moment to moment. The practice is to allow yourself to be where you are. Recognize whatever your experience is and let it be. If you are simply aware of it, with curiosity and interest, it will begin to reveal itself, and it will flow and move to the next moment. If you continue to let it be as it is, all the while remaining interested in what it is, the changes in experience become a process, an unfoldment, an inner inquiry, and discovery.
When you have fini
shed, take ten minutes to reflect on the presence of both resistance and allowing in your inquiry. When was there resistance and when was there more allowing? In this way, you can recognize for yourself what kinds of feelings tend to arise that draw you into rejection, avoidance, manipulation, control, or any other kind of active meddling. Becoming more aware of when you allow and when you resist will help you learn to appreciate the difference.
CHAPTER 5
Opening to Ourselves
WE CANNOT GIVE ANY REASON for the fact that we love being ourselves. We can come up with reasons, but none of them will be true because there really aren’t any; we just inherently love ourselves and our nature. And in our True Nature, we love everything and everybody. That love is simply part of reality. When we feel that we are being ourselves, we feel real. We feel intimate with ourselves, close to ourselves, but not close in the sense of there being two who are close to each other. It is more a sense of nearness of our own beingness, without any distance. That absence of distance, or of dissociation, has in it a sense of intimacy and of relaxation, of being settled in one’s being.
And we are not necessarily trying to describe that sense of being that we are experiencing; it doesn’t matter what quality or dimension of Being is manifesting. We are simply settled in our real self, instead of fabricating ourselves or trying to be ourselves or being in reaction to one thing or another.
THE INTIMACY OF BEING OURSELVES
Being ourselves is a delight. It is an intimacy; it is a genuineness, a preciousness. It is indescribable how satisfying it feels to us. But what I want to point to here is the fact that being ourselves implies an openness, a kind of gentleness. When we are being ourselves, we feel intimate, we feel close to ourselves. Our heart is open, our mind is clear, our soul is settled; there is no sense of thickness or inner agitation or fighting within ourselves. We experience an inner unity that feels peaceful, relaxed, contented. And whether we are feeling one specific quality or aspect of our being or we are feeling True Nature in its transcendence or boundlessness, we enjoy a delightful freedom and satisfaction.
As we progress through these teachings together, we are learning to approach that delight, to practice in such a way that we find ourselves in that condition. Thus far, we have seen that, in simplest terms, the key is to find out where we are and just let ourselves be there, with awareness and with understanding. We have seen that where we are in any moment is the closest thing to our True Nature because our current condition—regardless of what it is—is our present link to that True Nature.
Now when I say “approach,” it is just a manner of speaking; we are not trying to approach anything. I may describe a way to approach the condition of being ourselves, but it is an approach that is not taking us anywhere. We are just accepting what is. We are recognizing what is happening and how we are experiencing ourselves, and we are at peace with that. We are so much at peace that nothing gets in the way of us being aware of our experience, being comfortable as we are fully aware of it and recognizing what it is about totally.
In previous chapters, we have been looking at various obstacles and impediments to just finding where we are and being where we are. We have become more aware of the attempts we make to manipulate and direct our experience in one way or another. We see that this is because we think that our experience is not okay as it is. We have discussed the specific meddling we engage in that resists our experience by actually opposing it, pushing against it, or trying to fight it off. We have recognized this resistance as a thickening of our consciousness or our awareness that makes it impossible to feel the intimacy, the genuineness, and the warmth of authenticity in being ourselves. Now we want to add to our understanding by looking at another form of meddling with our experience that also happens by thickening our consciousness: inner defensiveness.
THE DEFENSE OF INNER HARDENING
Resistance is an active mode of inner coercion that reflects or overlaps with a more passive form of inner manipulation—our defensiveness. As with defense, resistance frequently implies a need to protect ourselves. Sometimes we resist because we don’t like what we are experiencing; we’d prefer something else, so we judge what actually is. Perhaps we are angry at what is happening in us. Or we are tired of it. But much of the time, we resist because we feel we need to protect ourselves. And protection is the basic motivation for putting up inner defenses.
When we perceive a real danger or threat, or when we imagine one, we tend to harden ourselves for self-protection. But by hardening ourselves, we are not only thickening our consciousness, we are also making it stiff and solid, and it becomes impossible to experience that delicacy, that gentleness and intimacy, of being ourselves. That hardening reaction—building a wall of protection and separation—which becomes an impediment against finding where we are, is the ego’s basic mode of defense. Ego is based mainly on defenses—defending itself against dangers—inner and outer, imaginary and real. Ego does not really exist without its defenses.
But when we are trying to defend ourselves internally, we are in some sense trying to run away. We are trying to hide. We are trying to isolate, to separate ourselves, to put a distance between us and the danger. And that happens in many ways. One strategy is to create a passive structure of defense. We can do this by erecting inner walls against our experience of fear, against our perception of danger, against feeling the possibility of threat or attack or pain. Those walls can be inside of us separating different parts of us—such as our heart and our genitals, our consciousness and our unconscious—or they can be between us and what we perceive as the outside.
But the walls are just one manifestation of the ego’s defensive tendency. Ego-defensiveness also manifests in other ways, such as hiding, running away, isolating oneself, contracting, or restraining oneself from showing up fully. These are all ways of resisting what is present in our experience. The intent is to avoid being open because being open means leaving oneself undefended and unprotected. Being open means being ourselves, and we believe that being ourselves is dangerous because then we are vulnerable to all kinds of threats.
HUMAN NEED FOR SELF-PROTECTION
So, to be ourselves, which means to be our True Nature, is to be in simplicity, without defenses. Even just being where we are without fighting it means that we are not trying to protect ourselves against one kind of danger or another. And that is a difficult thing for human beings. This difficulty is related not only to how we were raised in childhood, but also to our genetic history. To a great extent, human beings as a race have evolved in very harsh environments where danger was a clear and present reality. In time, we learned that to have any possibility at all of being ourselves, we have to survive, and that to survive requires protecting ourselves. The fact that self-protection is necessary for survival has been conditioned in us, not only as external forms of defense such as armies and police, but also as internal forms of defense such as building inner walls.
Suppose you are actually being faced with an external danger, that somebody is out to get you. How does building an inner wall help? How does not feeling our fear help? Feeling our fear or weakness or sadness might be difficult when confronted from the outside, but being in touch with those feelings grounds our experience in reality. To wall off our feelings will only cause our external defense to be more hard and rigid and thus less responsive to the danger.
And what happens when we put up walls against what we perceive as inner danger, the real cause of the ego’s defensiveness? What else could our inner dangers be but our own feelings, our own thoughts, our own memories, our own states? We are afraid of ourselves, really, of the manifestations of our being, of our consciousness.
As we know from modern psychology, the ego has a huge amount of past experience that it keeps unconscious through active mental defenses that are themselves mostly beyond our awareness. All kinds of mental operations are constantly going on to protect us from experiencing one thing or another. Our unconscious is teeming with memorie
s and feelings, but most people think of it as teeming with lurking dangers and demons. People talk about their inner demons, their dark side. What is the dark side? It is a scary, dark place inside of you from which you think your personal demons are going to come and gobble you up. What are you going to do to stop them? Many people harden themselves so much that they don’t feel anything. Then no inner demons can get them!
We can be humorous about it, but it is actually a serious situation. And it is a real one, because when we were little, we were delicate and many things were truly dangerous for us. We couldn’t tolerate much of what we were experiencing; we could not comprehend it, and our nervous system was not equipped to deal with it at that age. So we had no way to take care of ourselves mentally or emotionally. We were naturally vulnerable in our openness. The reality in our early years was that we did need to protect and defend ourselves because we couldn’t handle the situation. It was as simple as that. If we had a loving, caring, supportive environment, that helped a lot, but even that couldn’t do the whole job.
The human soul, when it is in touch with its nature, is open. In that openness, it is vulnerable. But being vulnerable only means being open in relation to danger. If there is no danger, open doesn’t feel vulnerable. It just feels carefree and easy. But if danger is present when you are open, you feel scared, a little shaky, and vulnerable.