The Unfolding Now

by A H Almaas

  But many people think that if mind is gone, there will be no experience. In fact, the opposite is true: awareness continues with more intensity, more clarity, more transparency; colors are more vivid and forms are much more distinct. That is because everything becomes much more itself, since all the veils, all the projections, all the concepts are gone. We perceive without anything intervening, so everything is naked as itself. To believe that when the mind is gone, we won’t see anything, we must believe that everything exists only in our limited, discursive mind.

  Hence, from the place that is beyond mind, we do not reify nondoing, because we don’t conceptualize it. The awareness that is beyond mind cannot make any distinction between doing and nondoing because the distinction between doing and nondoing is conceptual; it involves knowing.

  We see here the layer where conceptualization becomes the obstacle, the barrier. The reification of the concepts of doing and nondoing in this dimension of experience is not the barrier—the conceptualization itself, the knowing itself, is the obstacle. Actually, it is even more subtle than that. The knowing itself is not inherently an obstacle, but because it can easily become the ground for reification, it becomes the building block that the mind uses to reify.

  But the mind doesn’t have to be thrown out altogether. Our capacity to be in the nonconceptual makes it possible for us to use our mind and yet be free from the tendency to reify. Usually, we think that only the knowing mind exists. But both layers of awareness—the conceptual and nonconceptual, the cognitive and the perceptual—are always together. When we are able to discern and be in the nonconceptual, then the conceptual, discursive mind, may go away for a while. Sometimes when it returns, it no longer operates the same way as before; it can become an assistant to the perceptual awareness. And when it assists the perceptual awareness rather than replacing it, the discerning, discriminating awareness can operate through knowing without reification.

  MOVING BEYOND KNOWING

  Everything that we have discussed so far—the rejection, the comparative judgment, the attacks, the identifications, the attachments—is based, ultimately, on the reification of concepts. When we reify the body, we don’t reify the body itself but our concept of the body; when we reify doing, we reify the concept of doing. It is always a mental picture that is reified; we cannot reify anything itself. We cannot do anything to reality; we can only do something about our conception of it.

  So, because everything is based on reified concepts, it seems that we have arrived now at the most basic level of our difficulty—conceptualization itself, the knowing itself. Some spiritual traditions say that since the knowing is the beginning of all the problems, we should get rid of it; we need to throw away the knowingness. The problem with that is: we can throw it away for a while, but we cannot throw it away forever because it is part of us.

  So how do we resolve this dilemma? We need to find out how to use the knowingness in a way that doesn’t ensnare but liberates. The fact is that we need knowingness to get to enlightenment. Without knowingness, we would just become stupid saints. A cow is a kind of saint—she grazes peacefully, lies down when she has eaten enough, has no hatred for anything, doesn’t want to kill anyone, is completely harmless. But a human being in that state would be called a stupid saint because the knowingness that brings in creativity and learning would be missing. Our human intelligence, our knowingness, our discerning capacity, is what opens many of our potentialities. But it is a double-edged sword; it can turn back on itself and cut us into pieces, disconnecting us from the primordial place of unity and innocence.

  The more we learn to be in that place and not fight it, the freer we can be from the dangers of identification, reification, and the reactions that happen in the mind. How do we do that? If you remember, we cease fighting only by recognizing how we are fighting. And as we recognize where we are, without trying to change ourselves, we begin to have insight into our identification and reification. That process, at some point, reveals what underlies the reification—the inherent knowingness. And the inherent knowingness eventually reveals the pure, transparent, clear, empty light that is just the light of awareness and perception, which is fundamental to any experience.

  So in the nonconceptual, pure light of awareness, there is no knowing, but there is no deficiency either. I don’t become like a cow, and I am not a stupid saint. It is not that I don’t know because there is something wrong with my brain, or because I am stupid or I lack information or I haven’t inquired enough. The reason I don’t know is that I am perceiving things from a place that is prior to knowing, that is more fundamental than knowing. When the knowing tries to go to that place, it just dissolves and becomes pure transparent light.

  NOT KNOWING AND NO KNOWING

  This place of not knowing is different than the not knowing we encounter in inquiry when we have a new experience or one we’ve had before but have not investigated. The latter is the kind of not knowing that we need to move through many times on our inner journey. We need to first recognize through our inquiry that we don’t know something before we can begin to know it. So, for example, we cannot recognize our essential presence before realizing that we don’t know what essential presence is. Because if we continue to believe that we know it, we will never find out what it actually is. So inquiry always requires letting ourselves experience that “I don’t really know what this is . . . I don’t know what is happening right now . . . I don’t know who I am.”

  It is possible for us to be in that place and still be aware because the nonconceptual awareness is there. But that doesn’t mean that we are aware of the nonconceptual dimension directly. The nonconceptual is supporting that process, but our conceptual, cognitive mind is still present—it just hasn’t yet grasped something. It doesn’t know, but it knows that it doesn’t know. In contrast, in the nonconceptual you don’t know and you don’t know that you don’t know. There is no knowing, where before there was not knowing.

  So we could say that there are three different kinds of not knowing:

  1. “I don’t know, and I don’t know that I don’t know.” This is pure ignorance and darkness, for I believe I know many things. The knowing mind is present.

  2. “I don’t know, and I know that I don’t know.” This is awakening to my condition.

  3. “I don’t know, and I don’t know that I don’t know.” This is pure realization, light, no darkness, but the knowing mind is absent.

  Zen masters have expressed these as: First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a mountain.

  On the journey, first we find out that we don’t know. Then we begin to know. We come to know more and more until we pass through all the knowledge and beyond it. When we stay with our inquiry until everything—all the details—have been revealed, then we arrive at the source from which all the knowledge springs: the pure awareness, the pure light of our Being, where the mind is dissolved in wonder.

  EXPLORATION SESSION

  Knowing and Not Knowing

  This exercise is an exploration of your basic orientation to knowing and not knowing. Give yourself at least fifteen minutes for this inquiry and more if you need it.

  The first thing to consider is how knowing helps you to be yourself. In what ways do understanding and discrimination in your experience bring you more in contact with who you are?

  Then consider the opposite. How does knowing get in the way of being yourself? This might include trying to know, believing you should know, holding on to past knowledge, describing your experience, using words—any way that knowing comes up for you as a hindrance.

  Finally, take some time to consider not knowing. What are some of the ways you have experienced not knowing? How does not knowing affect you?

  CHAPTER 17

  To Be and Not to Be

  IF WE LOOK AT ALL THE MENTAL operations we have been exploring that are helping us to better understand our experience, we are able to discern a particular inclination. Observing how our c
onsciousness works, we can see that in every activity of the mind—whether it is conceptualizing, naming, labeling, reifying, identifying, reacting, rejecting, judging, grasping, or attaching—it is as if our mind wants to get away from something.

  We have seen how when we reify and identify with something, we objectify it. We make it exist as an object, we make it concrete. This habit of mind reveals our movement toward objectifying and solidifying our experience. It would be natural for the mind to try to know reality, but it goes further than that; it always tries to pin it down, to establish it, to see reality as a concrete, stable thing. So we see that all our mental operations imply the same tendency—to try to solidify reality, objectify it, make it as concrete as a physical object is.

  In general, what is most real for human beings is the physical. To us, a rock is something that actually exists; it is something to contend with. If everything else fails, we look for a big, solid rock—whatever we consider to be “the bedrock of reality.” Why? Why don’t we naturally move toward liquefying everything? Why don’t we want to make everything gaseous, more like air? Why do we find the solid state preferable?

  When you think about it, you realize that much of the universe and much of our own experience is not that solid. For example, our feelings are pretty fluid and hard to find. Our thoughts are even more so; they basically don’t exist. They are more like ungraspable holograms. But those thoughts, those ungraspable holograms, always want to pin things down, make everything real and established and known in a concrete, storable way.

  We can see how this habit becomes the tendency of the ego-self—or what we call the self—to preserve itself. The self is always looking for something concrete, something solid, stable, graspable, to support itself with, to depend on. That is because the self believes that if there is no bedrock, it is going to sink; if the bottom of reality is not solid, the self will get submerged and drown. So we believe that we have to locate some kind of island or rock of solidity to stand on to keep us from drowning.

  LOOKING FOR SOMETHING SOLID

  How does this relate to our practice of nondoing? From this perspective, the practice of nondoing basically becomes an undoing of this process of solidification. We just see through the various mental operations that conceptualize and grasp onto things in an attempt to make them solid and concrete. We make that process transparent, starting with observing the gross, surface level and moving to the deeper, more subtle subliminal processes.

  Let’s say I have an orange. I throw it to you, and you catch it. As soon as you conceptualize, “It is an orange that is being thrown to me now,” you draw a boundary around it. To reify something means we make that boundary solid: it is this thing; it is an object called an orange. You think, “If I can catch an orange, if it can be thrown to me, it must really exist.”

  Imagine if somebody tossed an orange for you to catch, but instead it went through you. What would you think? “Did I die? I must be a ghost. All this time, I’ve been thinking I am alive, but that orange just went through me, so I must have been a ghost all along!” Your sense of self depends on solidity and boundaries to feel its existence.

  Why do we have such a need to concretize? Because for us to orient ourselves, to feel a sense of reality, to operate, we feel that we need a foundation, a solid center, a base of operation. We believe that we need some place from which to spring into action. And we want our center of operation to be as stable, as solid, and as real as possible.

  This tendency exists in every subtle operation of the mind. If I hate and reject something about myself, it is a way to separate myself from it. I tell myself, “I am not that—I am this other thing.” Or I reify—I recognize this characteristic and start thinking of it and relating to it as though it really were an object.

  We do this even with our True Nature. After a while, we think, “I have a True Nature . . . I have an essential nature . . . I have presence . . . and I remember its qualities.” But in our memory, the qualities of True Nature are regarded as though they were tangible things. Presence becomes almost like an orange that we can throw and catch. So even when we discover our essential nature—when we recognize the light, or the presence, that exposes much of our illusory reality—we can end up reifying even that, making it into something solid. We do that to give ourselves a sense of reality.

  It is interesting to watch how our consciousness gropes for something solid. At some point, it finds presence and says, “Well, at least I am not nothing. It is true that I have been imagining something to be real that is actually an image of the past. But now I have let it go and spaciousness has arisen. I recognize myself as I really am. I am truly full and present. What a relief!” We are relieved because for a while we were afraid that if we let go of the image, we would evaporate.

  That is why some teachings have been reluctant to say that there is such a thing as True Nature. Because the moment I think of True Nature, then there is me, there is True Nature, and I can sit on it. I can sit in it, I can stand in it, because it is a solid ground of reality. This idea gives us a feeling of security that we won’t disappear. It gives us the recognition that we are not just a ghost, not just a hologram.

  So we recognize here the subtle tendency in our consciousness to find a place that is somewhat opaque, somewhat solid, somewhat stable for us to stand on, so our mind can feel a sense of existence and presence. But at some point, that place can become a perch for the ego. Presence can, of course, be experienced as spaciousness, fluidity, radiance, or solidity. It can be all of these things, and it is never just one thing, because it is always changing and moving. But we need to understand what we usually end up doing with the notion of True Nature, of presence. We say that our practice is to be where we are, but we can reify that, too: “Be where I am? I’ve got it now! I know what to do—just find where I am and remain there.”

  The teaching of being where we are condones that; what’s more, it encourages it. We finally feel good about being able to be where we are, and we are happy to have support to keep doing that. But when we don’t understand how our mind works, we can’t see that this is actually a way to continue being. The part of “to be where we are” that appeals to the ego is “to be,” because that translates to us as, “I am going to continue to be.” You might say to yourself, “I used to compare where I am to others, or to where I thought I should be, and now I am just where I am.” But underneath that experience of being where you are is still the sense that “As long as I can continue being, I am okay.” And what about the nonconceptual? “Great! I love the nonconceptual because I don’t even have to think about it; I just continue being here.” Because our mind is so intelligent and resourceful, that’s how our thinking goes. Being where we are has then become a subtle strategy for the self-identity to find stability and solidity.

  But if we are aware or attentive enough, if we are curious enough, we will catch what we are doing. Eventually, we will recognize this tendency to try to solidify everything and ask ourselves, “Why am I always doing that?” As soon as this inquiry arises, we will begin to see all the ways and the reasons why we try to solidify things. Maybe we are looking for approval or we want security. We think it is important to have land, possessions, family, children—anything that we can possess we make into something solid to rely on in order to continue being.

  OUR ATTACHMENT TO POSITIONS

  At some point in our inquiry, we recognize that we are carrying a certain attitude, one that we think can provide something we can turn into a base of operations. And attitudes easily move into being investments, positions. No matter what we do, if it is not completely spontaneous, natural, and without self-reflection, it will have an investment in it. So an attitude can become, for example, a position you take regarding a particular issue—a political issue, a philosophical issue, or any other kind of situation.

  We all have positions, and we are very attached to them. Whatever happens, we have a position—for it, or against it, or “I’ve got my own posi
tion that is independent of everyone else’s,” or even, “Well, since I don’t know all the facts, I really can’t take sides; so I refuse to get involved.” That is a position, too.

  So what does having a position do for you? Why do we take positions? At first we may be focused on deciding what is correct or useful about specific issues: “I support capital punishment . . . I am against putting that halfway house in my neighborhood . . . I think abortion should be legal under this condition but not that one.” But after a while, we find that any particular position we are taking has to do with how we see ourselves as much as how we’re seeing a particular issue. We’re not just taking up specific causes, we’re fighting for the position that “I am a Republican” or “I am a Democrat” or “I am a Social Democrat.” Our ideology has become important not only because it gives us a solid place to stand on an issue, but also because it provides us with an identity, a sense of self to operate from.

  But a position doesn’t have to be ideological or political. For example, if we say there is such a thing as a physical body, we assume that this is a fact, but actually it is a position. When it is an assumption from which we operate, it is a position. How about the statement, “I am a being of light”? That is a position. Now we’ve changed how we see ourselves: “I am not a physical body, I am a fluid being of light.” But if you are really a fluid being of light, you don’t need to defend that reality, you don’t need to protect it. If somebody doesn’t recognize what you are, it doesn’t matter to you. So it’s not something you have to take a position about.

  But the moment we get concerned about a matter, the moment we believe that we have to defend our perceptions about it or our personal experience of it, we have taken a position. We have identified something around which we can collect ourselves.

  Our tendency to look for something solid to perch on and anchor ourselves to amidst all our positions about things, can become a subtle, ongoing part of our normal everyday experience. But if support for our position is taken away, if we are challenged by someone else’s position, or if they challenge or question ours, we can become feverish or obsessive about it.