by A H Almaas
Being ourselves means not holding on to ourselves. Because Being doesn’t need to hold on to itself. It is itself. Since it is itself and knows that it is itself—without thinking about it or doing anything to keep it that way—it is not concerned with holding on or grasping or attaching or hoping or expecting that it, or any particular experience, will come or leave or stay.
When we are our True Nature, the fact that we don’t know whether the next moment will be the same or not is no longer something to contend with. We are completely unconcerned about whether it is going to be the same or not. We have no need to hold on to the past or to get attached to the fresh and new. We recognize that whatever arises in each moment in the play of light in all its luminous forms is none of our business. We become a dynamic flowing, free presence. And that is true freedom.
EXPLORATION SESSION
Exploring Beliefs about Not Changing
In this exercise, you will have the opportunity to explore your experiences and your beliefs about what doesn’t change in yourself. The objective is not so much to evaluate the correctness of your perceptions but to allow the whole range of your beliefs, attitudes, and positions to be revealed.
Begin by making a list of things about yourself that don’t change. Don’t get involved in the distinction in your mind about whether certain things can change or not. The important thing is to see the part of your experience that stays constant and unchanging for whatever reason. When you have finished, take a moment to look over your list.
Next, explore your beliefs and assumptions about what is unchangeable in your experience. Consider these questions: What benefit do you get from having things that don’t change? How does it serve you or support you? What do you believe would happen if everything were fluid and nothing in your experience remained fixed, stable, or unchanging? What do you believe is keeping the unchanging elements in place? Don’t assume it’s your genes or God or fate. Maybe it is one of those, or something else—this is a chance to find out for yourself.
CHAPTER 15
The Personal Thread of Meaning
IF YOU CONSIDER THE NATURE of your own experience in the light of all we have discussed so far, you can notice certain things: That your experience is always changing. That your perceptions are always changing. That where you are is always changing. It becomes clear at a certain point in our practice that our consciousness is manifesting itself as constant change and transformation. It moves from one kind of feeling or thought or reaction to another, from one kind of state to another.
But have you noticed that it is never a disconnected succession? As long as we are awake, our experience is continuous. It is always a flow of experience. It’s not that we have one particular experience and then there is a gap followed by another experience and then another gap.
There are no gaps, really. Our experience is a seamless flow. Even when we go through a transition from one dimension of experience to another, it’s still a flow. Because it is really the same consciousness that is constantly unfolding, constantly transforming. That’s why our experience is often likened to a stream or a river.
So “being where we are” does not mean finding where we are and staying there and that’s it. Being where we are is a continuous practice in the sense that as we continue to be where we are, where we are changes and transforms. Thus, being ourselves, being who we are, being where we are, becomes a continuity of being—the flow of being.
FLOW OF EXPERIENCE
We’re usually not aware of the continuity of our experience. We know that there is continuity because our ongoing experience has no gaps in it. But we’re not usually aware of the continuity of the forms that experience takes—how one form transforms to another or makes space for another in a meaningful way. In other words, we are not present at each moment to directly experience the continuity.
To truly be where we are combines having the awareness of where we are, being the presence of where we are, and understanding the truth of where we are. When we bring those three elements together, being where we are becomes a practice that is necessary to become aware of the flow of being. You see, we are always someplace—one way or another, we are where we are—but we’re usually not aware of what that place is. We don’t get it; we don’t see it. Our attention, our awareness is scattered and distracted, involved with all kinds of peripheral, secondary manifestations.
However, once we can focus and recognize our primary manifestation, we locate ourselves. And, if we pay attention, we find that the primary manifestation of where we are continuously changes—it is a continuity, a flow. It is not static.
CONTINUITY THROUGHOUT THE STAGES
Looking at the three stages of development as we have described them in this book can help us better understand this continuity of being where we are. When we see what the continuity of being ourselves means at each stage, what we discover is that it is also the continuity of meaning, not just of experience.
In the first stage, to be where we are means recognizing where we are and understanding where we are. We not only have the awareness and feeling of what is happening, but we also know what it’s about and why it is happening. We know in a way that is meaningful—in other words, in a way that makes sense of our experience. And if we’re really practicing, if we’re continuing to inquire, to be aware, to be present, then our experience becomes a continuity of meaning, not just a series of events and states strung together. As our experience flows and transforms, it’s a meaningful flow, a meaningful transformation.
For example, maybe you become aware of a particular feeling, and you recognize, “Oh, I’m feeling this sadness because of that event . . . and now this is happening . . . and now I see how it relates to what happened before, and why I felt that then and am feeling this other feeling now.” The continuum of experience makes sense to you. It’s meaningful.
When we’re not practicing, when we’re not aware of where we are, our experience does not have that kind of meaning. It seems disconnected: “I did this and I did that, and this happened and I felt that.” We don’t know how all of these events relate, because we are not really there. We are not being where we are, so the continuity of meaning is not present.
When we go on to the second stage—the journey with presence—the meaning becomes clear as being the presence itself. We understand our experience at this stage by being the presence that we are and discovering how it threads together the various manifestations—feelings, ideas, reactions, behaviors—in our life. Thus, the capacity to experience the centrality of Being in its various qualities deepens the first-stage level of understanding, moving us to the second.
When we arrive at the third stage, the meaning of our experience continues to be the presence, but now everything else is inseparable from that presence, so all manifestation is imbued with the meaningfulness of presence. And that meaning is the recognition, the comprehension, the direct knowing of what reality is—how it appears, how it works, and how it is manifesting at this moment, in this situation. The primary meaning is the omnipresent presence itself, and the secondary meaning is the understanding of the manifestations that this presence is displaying.
THE PERSONAL THREAD
So as you see, there is always a continuity of meaning for each of us, if we’re really practicing being where we are. This continuity of meaning I call the personal thread. A lot is happening in the universe. The universe itself is flowing and moving and changing, and everybody and everything that composes it is moving and changing as well. Within that shared reality, each one of us is having our own personal experience in terms of where we are—our personal thread. Recognizing our personal experience, being with it, feeling it with immediacy and awareness and understanding—brings not only meaning but a thread of meaning, a continuity of meaning. And this thread of meaning is our own individual unfolding journey of truth.
The significance of an individual life arises from this thread of meaning. Our practice of being where we are supports our l
ives becoming centered on our own personal thread. It becomes the core and the center of our life, because it is the core and center of our awareness, of our experience, of our being here. When we’re inquiring, when we’re practicing, what we’re doing is finding our personal thread, recognizing where it happens to be, and following it.
In Einstein’s relativistic geometry, plotting a sequence of points creates what is called a lifeline—the mathematical equivalent of what we have called here our personal thread. In the physical universe, there are four dimensions: three in space and one in time. Within this universe of space-time, every particle has a lifeline—it has a curve or a line that traces where a particle is and has been at each moment. At each instant, that particle is in a certain place, and you could plot its progression in time and space by drawing the line or curve that connects all the specific instants.
Of course, our experiential universe has many more dimensions than just four: the spatial dimension, the time dimension, the feeling dimension, the knowing dimension, the thinking dimension, the color dimension, the sound dimension, the taste dimension, the kinesthetic dimension, the texture dimension, the viscosity dimension, the density dimension, the presence dimension, and so on. All these are dimensions of experience, and we can locate ourselves in each of these dimensions at any given moment. So at each point, at each instant, where we are can be described as a particular intersection point of all these dimensions. This would be where we are in the experiential universe.
THE LIFELINE
What this means is that our life creates a curve within the experiential universe. If you plot all the points of individual experience, you see that everybody has his or her own curve, or lifeline. This lifeline or personal thread is the continuity of our constantly changing experience, the continuity of where we are.
To be where we are means following our lifeline. And when we’re practicing, when we are being where we are, when we are not interfering with our experience and just allowing it to happen, our “location” not only moves from one point to another in the experiential universe, but it unfolds and manifests new possibilities.
Sometimes our lifeline manifests new dimensions—dimensions of presence, dimensions of awareness, dimensions of emptiness, dimensions of love—that were not present to us before. And even the feeling or thinking dimensions can unfold possibilities we haven’t seen yet. For example, sometimes a deep sadness feels like it’s a million miles deep, as though our heart is going to the center of the universe. It doesn’t start at that depth, of course, but as we stay where we are and don’t resist that feeling, don’t try to constrain it, don’t stop it from changing, the dynamism of our own Being becomes a disclosure, a revelation of that kind of depth in the dimension of feeling.
So you can look at all of your life as an unfolding thread in the experiential universe, a thread that moves within many dimensions simultaneously. And we are all related threads—sometimes interconnecting, sometimes intersecting—within the universe of experience. But none of that make sense if we’re not aware of our experience, if we’re not present in it, if we don’t have some kind of understanding or recognition of what it is, of its meaning. Remember that this is an unfolding thread of meaning as well as of experience.
And even the word “meaning” changes meaning, as we have seen. It becomes deeper. At the beginning of our journey, maybe meaning is an intellectual meaning; then it becomes more of a felt, emotional meaningfulness; and after that an essential meaning. This continues until it becomes a pure presence, a pure awareness that is meaningful.
THE MEANING OF LIFE
As human beings, we ask, “What is the meaning of life?” From the perspective of the spiritual journey, the answer can only come from where we are. Thus the meaning of life is revealed in the unfolding thread of each person. Because of that, the meaning changes as each of us moves through life. If you ask yourself, “What was the meaning of my life ten years ago?” you can easily recognize that what it was then is different from what it is now. Did it make a quantum jump? It might feel that way, but in fact, the meaning has been continuous. Even when there are quantum jumps in our experience, they still follow Einsteinian law, which is based on continuity.
Einstein believed that the notion of quantum jumps is just an approximation of what happens. We assume quantum changes because we’re not paying close enough attention, and our theories are not precise enough, to see the continuity of change. Reality is actually a seamless, self-existing field. We say that it is light, but this light is not composed of particles. It’s a fluid that is not particularized; it is constantly flowing and unfolding. That is how reality is all the time.
Why don’t we recognize our experience in that way? Because we’re not being real, we’re not being ourselves. We are not where we are. We’re not present where we are. The more we are present where we are, the greater the sense of flow, the sense that there is a meaning to our experience, that a continuum, an unfolding, is at play. So our life becomes meaningful because not only are we in touch with the meaning of our life, we are being the meaning of our life. We are at the place where this meaning is unfolding.
Sometimes there might be gaps in your understanding of your experience that you haven’t even noticed. When you recognize one, that in itself begins the process of understanding. If we don’t recognize that there is a gap, we would believe in a continuity that isn’t real. Even to identify a gap before you understand what it is about is immensely helpful.
Through personal inquiry, perhaps the gap will be filled in, and perhaps not. So the meaning might include times of not knowing, times of emptiness or blankness. And as we inquire into that emptiness or blankness, at some point it becomes meaningful and helps us understand the whole picture. We discover that our personal thread wasn’t cut—it just was invisible for a while.
EXPLORATION SESSION
Considering Your Own Lifeline
One of the most powerful potentials of the practice of inquiry is the revelation of our personal thread. Consider your experience in the past week. Can you identify what your unfolding thread has been?
To do this you need to revisit where you have been—what you know about where you were at various points during the week. Include as much as you can about what you were experiencing physically, mentally, and emotionally. Identify the secondary and primary manifestations you were aware of in yourself. Reflect on what you can see about the deeper nature of what was happening.
As you consider these various moments in time, can you see a flow or a progression between them? What do you understand about how these various experiences might be related? Do you find a thread of meaning? Can you also see the gaps where you have no sense of what connects one experience with another?
Continue your exploration all the way to the present moment. The thread is there, but you may not be able to recognize it yet. It is not something you can figure out with your mind. Do not be discouraged if this continuity of your soul’s subtle unfoldment is not apparent. Simply opening yourself to the possibility will make more space for it to make itself known.
CHAPTER 16
Being without Mind
AS WE BECOME MORE and more attuned to what is happening in our experience, our capacity to understand ourselves at increasingly subtler levels continues to develop. The more we continue to recognize and work with the different primary and secondary elements of our experience that we have discussed so far, the more we feel what it is like to be where we are, to be ourselves.
However, this capacity to know and be who we are is not based on what we understand conceptually about manifestations and how they all fit together. Being ourselves is not the outcome of mentally arranging all the pieces of a puzzle correctly to get the complete picture. It arises—or you could say it is evoked—by seeing through the beliefs we have about who we are and letting go of all the ways we stop ourselves from being who we are. And as this being who we are is revealed, we simultaneously come to know it directly without
relying on our mind. In this chapter, we will be exploring a new dimension of Being that is the ground for this nonconceptual self-knowing.
We have been working with the practice of nondoing by learning how to be where we are without doing anything to be where we are. We have seen how by simply being aware, we are able to recognize at some point what is happening in our experience, to understand it, see the meaning of it. We have seen that this meaning over time becomes a thread of meaning, our personal thread, which transforms into essential meaning, which is the presence of True Nature itself.
We have seen how our mind recognizes our experience, reifies it, and then identifies with those reifications. We have explored how the reification process makes objects out of the elements in our experience and how, through identification, our mind constrains the flow of that experience. And we have noticed how our mind blocks the natural unfoldment of our experience by attempting to hold on to some parts of it and reject or change others, thus creating a fixed sense of self.
If we were left with only this situation, the outlook would be bleak. Who would be able to avoid the pitfalls of reification and identification? The mind engages in these activities naturally, easily, and almost instantaneously after each experience. As a result, they are so second nature to us that it is difficult to recognize that they are even going on.
As we look closer at these subtle ego activities, we discover the tendency to reify reification itself and make it a kind of object to reject. In our minds, we make it something from which we can push away and separate ourselves.