This

  But as we’ve seen, the cost of being this sort of being is that life is suffering. We get caught in our own stories like an actor forgetting he is playing a part, and we take the weight of the world onto our shoulders. Freedom from that has been the entire point of this book. So how and why would one create anything in the world from a place of nondual awareness where everything is already experienced as music? How does one judge one particular lyric to be “better” than another if he knows that all words are already the perfect lyrical expression of THIS? How does one decide which story to tell in her film if all stories go together and are all seen as exquisite, interconnected constructs of the mind and equally beautiful expressions of the ineffable? How does one change the world through activism if one does not fundamentally desire for THIS to be anything other than it is? Isn’t clinging to that desire for the world to be other than it is the very root of suffering that we’ve been examining for this entire book until now?

  Yes. But—pay attention to the subtlety here—the way that the world is also includes your desire to change the world.

  Think of a bird that builds her nest. Is a bird’s nest really the product of that one particular bird desiring the world to be other than it is? Or are the instincts with which she builds the nest part of the way the world is? Isn’t any single bird’s nest really a creation of all birdkind and not simply a separate bird ego? And beyond that, isn’t all birdkind really a creation of the entire ecosystem of Earth? Keep zooming back far enough, and eventually there is no bird making anything. There is only THIS telling stories.

  So how do we create the world anew when we see that it’s all already perfect? Perhaps we can answer this question with another question: How does the sun decide what sort of light to shine?

  The sun doesn’t decide what sort of light to shine. It is the sun. The sun shines. The sun is its shining. In the same way, you are not simply your body, but you are also what your body does. There is no separate you who breathes. You are the breath as much as the breather and the breathing. In the same way, there is no you who creates or imagines. You are that creation and imagination.

  As I write this book, I have to choose which words to write. To do that, I have to have a desire of some kind that interacts with a mythic framework of some kind, but that doesn’t mean that the brain with these desires and mythic framework needs to create some feedback loop within itself that thinks of itself as an “I” that has to “decide” between this possibility or that one. When this happens, it just stalls the engine. It is possible to create in a way where one does not stall, but instead spontaneously and naturally creates just as the sun spontaneously and naturally shines.

  When I used to go into the studio to record a song, I had all of these stories that my ego wanted to try to create of its own accord. I (the little, illusory I) was to be the creator, and so I had a list of questions and stories that I felt needed to be seriously addressed:

  Was this song clever enough?

  Was it hip/fresh/unique enough?

  Was I making a difference in the world with this music?

  Was I being true to myself?

  On and on, the stories looped onto each other. And truth is, anytime I would start thinking like that, it would lock me up. The creative engine would stall. It was only when something directly caught my full attention that I was able to move forward into creating. A chord would draw me in. An instrumentation choice would present itself and the illusion of choice would disappear. That instrumentation simply was what would be in the song. There was no other choice to make.

  To try to create is to stall the creative engine that is your mind and body. Children do not try to play. They simply play. In the same way, you do not need to try to imagine, innovate, create, or change the world. You simply can be what you already are—a human being with an imagination and desires to create and change the world. Again, the difference between spiritual freedom and spiritual captivity is not that in freedom you lose all of your uniqueness, emotions, and desires. Freedom is when you are no longer imprisoned by clinging to those stories.

  When we cling to our desires, beliefs, aesthetic preferences, personality traits, or any other stories, we actually limit our ability to freely be who we are at any given moment. We doubt ourselves. We hesitate. We stall the engine.

  In Zen and the Art of Archery,22 Eugen Herrigel describes how it took him years of training with a Zen master to be able to release the string of his bow without intending to do it. Day after day, he would pull back the string of the large Japanese bow, and try to bring it to its absolute farthest point of tension before letting go as he had been instructed. But every time he did this, the arrow would jerk a little upon its release. Even though the master demonstrated a perfectly smooth shot time after time, the student couldn’t get the hang of it. The master told him to not try to intentionally release the string, but just to let it happen naturally and automatically, like a ripened fruit falling from a tree. Month after month, year after year, Herrigel failed to understand what his teacher meant.

  In his third year of study, the student took some time during a break between lessons and figured out how to manipulate the muscles in his hand to simulate the natural, smooth shot. It was not the same effortless action as the teacher had instructed him with, but he found that it did the job—the arrow flew straight. When he arrived back with his master, he was instructed to shoot. He did. He contorted his muscles with effort, but the shot looked perfect. It soared smoothly and reached its intended target. The teacher looked at him blankly. He instructed him to shoot again. The result of the second shot was even better, technically speaking, than the first. The master said nothing. He simply snatched the bow away from Herrigel and went to his cushion, sitting with his back to his cheating pupil.

  Herrigel had to beg the teacher to resume lessons with him, but the teacher made it clear that he would only continue if Herrigel promised to never try to cheat the art again. After all, for the Japanese, archery isn’t just a sport like it is for us Westerners. For them, like swordsmanship, flower arranging, or tea ceremonies, it’s not only an art but a spiritual practice. I recently met a woman who was in her seventh year of studying to be a “tea master.” She told me that it usually takes at least twelve years, and after seven, she still didn’t know if she would have what it takes. To serve tea. . . . Very different mind-set than we have in America.

  After Herrigel promised to not cheat again, he said it was like he was starting over; his years of practice felt wasted. He continued to ask for clarification on how he could possibly shoot the arrow without being the one to shoot it. The teacher would tell him to stop thinking and just let it shoot.

  Herrigel would complain that it was impossible and that the tension just gets too painful.

  “You only feel it because you haven’t really let go of yourself. It’s all so simple. You can learn from an ordinary bamboo leaf what ought to happen. It bends lower and lower under the weight of snow. Suddenly, the snow slips to the ground without the leaf having stirred.”

  One day, after firing an arrow that missed the target entirely, the master turned and bowed to Herrigel, telling him that this was a right shot. Upon hearing this, the pupil was excited. The teacher cautioned him to not take it as a compliment. It had nothing to do with him. He just hadn’t gotten in the way of that one and it had shot, rather than his clamoring ego. Eventually, Herrigel learned how to shoot without shooting. The target merged with the archer, the pulling with the pulled, the releasing with the released.

  The mind-set that we live, create, and work from is not something we often pay as much attention to in the capitalistic and colonial-minded West. We are often so focused on productivity, efficiency, and deadlines that we lose touch with the nuances of the work and any reverence for the process of what we are doing. In this way, we step out of the flow of nature and into that old myth of separateness that results in us plundering and conquering the world rather than harmonizing and flowing within it. There a
re no big award ceremonies like the Grammys or Oscars for Zen tea masters or archers. A master in these disciplines doesn’t do it to show off or receive glory. They do it as the one-pointed action of their being. The sun shines. Birds make nests. Humans drink tea.

  I think we would do well in the age of Kardashians and viral videos to learn from this ancient wisdom. Many of us are just constantly scattering our half-baked creative projects to the wind as quickly as possible, hoping that someone notices and subscribes. Many of us have lost the art of good, patient, invisible work, and end up missing out on some of the great joys of quietly, diligently honing our craft (not to mention what all of the shitty, lowest-common-denominator “viral” work is doing to our collective spirituality, work ethic, and sense of aesthetics as a society).

  I think the artist, writer, painter, archer, teacher, businessperson, and all the rest of us who imagine worlds into being would do well to pay more attention to not only what we are creating but to the stories that we are creating from. The fruit of the tree, after all, is tied to the deepest roots of the tree. We often focus on getting enough fruit in the basket, even when we’ve forgotten to water the roots.

  For me, this is how all of this gets put into practice: When I go into my studio or writing space to work, I try to first pay attention to my body. Before I just jump into crafting the world, I make sure I’m in a useful emotional, spiritual, and mental state to cooperate with the flow of the stories I want to be inhabiting. Do I want to embody stories of fear, separateness, and violence, or of love, connectedness, and peace? I then do whatever I need to in order to get into the state of “faith” (described as the substance of things hoped for by the author of the book of Hebrews) that these particular stories require, and then I simply show up and lay back into the flow of the river. When I am fully present in THIS, I am able to work for the joy of the present moment rather than rushing toward my imagined end goal. By this, I don’t mean the same thing as the sort of visionless, “present moment” approach to work employed by so much haphazard YouTube, music, or podcast content seeking trendiness with no thought to its lasting value. I’m certainly not saying “just light some incense and have a good creative philosophy, and you’ll be able to write your masterpiece.” Good work takes discipline, practice, time, patience, and vision. The creator still has the responsibility of refining the craft. To get the blisters on her fingers after shredding scales all day or the sore neck after the long hours at his writing desk. But it is possible to engage in the hard task of working without the burden of getting in the work’s way. It is possible to let go in a way that you become like moldable clay in the hands of a skilled potter rather than trying to make your ego be potter, clay, and wheel.

  While creating good work does often necessitate imagining something other than here and now, that imagination always exists only here and now. When even our planning and patience is rooted in the contentment of THIS, we can slow down enough to not only create better work but to enjoy the process. When we allow love to be the context and setting for THIS to occur within, we are free to follow the natural desires of our hearts to imagine and create new worlds. Here, after the noisy ego feedback loops have been silenced and the hard work of practice has been done, all that is left is to let the bow shoot its arrow, to simply enjoy the music of the moment that is happening like a child playing with dolls. This dab of paint. This sixteenth note. This period at the end of this sentence.

  Telling Good Stories

  The direct, fully awake experience of THIS isn’t imprisoned within myth or story. Here, the sensuous universe of taking a sip of cool water is not mistaken with concepts like “sip,” “cool,” or “water.” THIS is beyond words, category, or distinction. It simply and fully is. Still, the stories we inhabit provide a context and setting for THIS to be experienced within for both ourselves and others. Whether we create war or peace, life or death, love or hate, all depends on the stories that we experience THIS through.

  Some stories enliven and create new worlds while others imprison, oppress, and destroy worlds. Some offer the possibility of a meaningful, enriched life; others offer only a cold, dead nihilism. So what sorts of stories are worth telling and creating the world from? That seems to me to be one of the most important questions we could ask.

  If one could imagine stories being like trees, some of the stories, like Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, or Buddhism, are like ancient and towering redwoods. In their branches are entire ecosystems of life—sects and denominations that span the globe over millennia. These elders of the forest have sheltered and sustained life for generations, offering frameworks for people to find identity, community, safety, purpose, and meaning within. And even if we don’t fully embrace their teachings, I think each deserves our respect. There are other plants in this forest that are younger and perhaps less majestic sometimes—myths like capitalism, democracy, constructs of race, political party, or scientific materialism. Any of these plants may grow into towering trees someday, too, but time has not yet made clear what the long-term effects of these stories will be, how much life can be sustained within them, or whether or not their stalks and trunks are healthy and sturdy enough to grow tall.

  While I no longer identify exclusively with any one of these trees, I do have great respect and reverence for the unique wisdom that I feel each of them offers. In the following three chapters, I’d like to tell three stories about the nature of THIS that I have discovered as I have walked through the forest. The three stories are:

  THIS is God.

  THIS is Awareness.

  THIS is Love.

  Each of these three stories is an attempt at a sort of harmonization between what are normally considered to be contradictory stories. As someone who has done a bit of swinging from tree to tree, I have noticed some common threads and harmonies between the big traditions and the newer stories that sometimes get overlooked by people who prefer sitting in just one tree. Here, I hope to relay these stories in a way that can not only enrich our own lives and work, but also help us find common ground with those whose metaphors differ from our own.

  Humanity often divides itself into groups of “us” versus “them,” resulting in incredible suffering, violence, and fear. For the sake of the one human organism, it seems to me that finding ways of seeking a harmony between paradoxes (East and West, mystical and scientific, theistic and nontheistic . . . etc.) is a worthwhile endeavor.

  My hope is that you find ways in which these tales can not only serve you and deepen your felt experience and derived meaning of THIS but can also help you live out your ever-unfolding freedom in ways that love and serve others. Of course, I hope that you will keep in mind what we’ve explored up to this point—that stories easily become prisons if you take them too seriously. Canvas can provide a home for magnificent art, but an artist can’t get too attached to the look of their naked canvas, or they may forget to ruin it with paint. When we cling to the stories on which we color our worlds too tightly, we trade THIS for that; we confuse background for foreground, music theory for music itself. So I invite you to explore these meaning-making stories with me with an open heart and a playful spirit, lest, God forbid, you fall into the trap of believing a single word of them.

  THIS Is God

  “Whoever knows himself knows God.”—MUHAMMAD

  Why, after everything that I’ve experienced in my travels in Christianity, atheism, etc., would I want to bring the G word back into this? Is there any word so charged, so polarizing? Any single word that is responsible for more bloodshed, more fear, more shame, more oppression or repression?

  From the Crusades to Manifest Destiny to slavery to present-day arguments against evolution or gay marriage, God has so often been used on the wrong side of history to justify injustice, sloppy thinking, and unspeakable cruelty.

  It may sound harsh to cut off her clitoris, but it’s Allah’s will, as revealed in the Koran. . . .

  Why even bother with such an abused, loaded, and ambi
guously defined word? If people kept killing people over the word “bing-bong,” but nobody even could agree on what “bing-bong” meant, wouldn’t it be better to just come up with some new language rather than spending more energy on debating whether Jesus Christ was really the only begotten bing-bong or whether or not bing-bong could hear our prayers?

  Our attachment to the word God is bizarre when you think about it. It’s as if the latest Gallup poll shows that 90 percent of Americans believe in bing-bongs, but zero percent of them know what the fuck a bing-bong even is! There are schools that give out doctorate degrees to people for becoming bing-bong experts, and there are entire book industries that sell millions of books that both prove and disprove the existence of bing-bongs. And frankly, this is why I’m still talking about God. Because, we humans are really obsessed with that word. Despite the best attempts of the New Atheists, the word God isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. So, I figure that if we are all going to be pledging allegiance and singing anthems to bing-bongs anyway, we might as well at least tell better stories about them than the ones responsible for genocides and Christian rock.

  It’s not just that, though. What other word can we use for the ultimate reality underneath it all in which we live and move and have our being? What other word so quickly gets to the core of our felt assumptions and wranglings about the meaning of life, the nature of being, or the destiny of humankind? We can use words like THIS, Source, All, or Ground of Being as often as we like, but those words will never resonate so loudly in this culture or in my own ears, frankly, as God does. That’s the English version of the word we as a Western civilization have chosen. It’s the word I grew up with. It’s the word printed on our money and prayed to at our gravesides, and we all already have our assumptions about what the word means. God is not ignorable or erasable, so we might as well think carefully about how we think of it.