Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  From the developmental view, the larger context in which our “unworkable” experiencing is placed is called our unconscious—what we have repressed or disowned. Even though we do our best to have a positive sense of self, that project is happening within the larger context or environment of what we’re trying not to feel. As discussed previously, our very efforts to not feel certain difficult feelings unfortunately create the sense that these feelings are not workable and somehow larger than us. Most of us experience a basic split between conscious content and unconscious content, and the work of the developmental approach is to bring that which is unconscious into consciousness.

  From the fruitional view, on the other hand, it doesn’t really matter whether the content of our experience is conscious or unconscious. Again, there is an attitude of nonbias. We’re not trying to bring everything that has been repressed into consciousness. We accept that we will always be a mystery to ourselves. All of our experiencing—our thoughts, feeling, fears—is held in the context of awareness, regardless of whether it’s conscious or unconscious. The work, from a fruitional point of view, is to gradually dissolve the apparent split between the content of our experience and the environment of awareness, whereas the work of the developmental view is to gradually dissolve the apparent split between the conscious and the unconscious.

  Think about going to the movies. The whole setup encourages us to be captured immediately. Within seconds, we’re captured by the display on the screen. If it’s a happy movie, we laugh; if it’s a sad movie, we cry. If that’s all that we’re aware of, we don’t really have much choice. However, if we were to take that same movie and project it on a screen in the middle of an open field in broad daylight, we would be much less likely to get captured. If there’s a big explosion or a love scene, perhaps we’ll pay attention for a little bit, but then our attention will get drawn elsewhere. We see dogs playing, we feel the grass beneath our feet, we hear a plane going overhead. Everything in the environment is so much more real, vast, and vivid than what’s on the movie screen that we don’t get so fascinated by it as easily. The movie is still there, but we’re not bound by it. Our attention is free to roam beyond the film’s storyline, because the context has become so much bigger than the dark theater. From this point of view, we can consider that freedom may not actually come from improving the story that’s playing on the screen. In fact, it might come from placing whatever that story is, in all of its complexity, in a larger environment of awareness. Perhaps we don’t have to improve the story we tell about ourselves, about life, in order to experience freedom.

  IMMEDIACY AND THE CONTINUITY OF SELF

  Another way to approach this somewhat abstract language of awareness or freedom is to talk about the practice of immediacy. Most of us generate a state of mind that appears to be continuous. This state of mind seems to be about us, and it seems really significant. We create this continuous state of mind by linking moments of experience together as if they were related to one another. For example, perhaps I am having a conversation with a colleague, and she asks me a question. I answer it, but my answer comes out awkwardly. The next moment, I feel some embarrassment arise. The next moment, I’m linking the experience of embarrassment to having said something awkward. The next moment, I am judging myself for having done that, and the moment after that, I think, “Well, maybe she was to blame for having asked that question in the first place.” This linkage of experience after experience, moment after moment, hundreds or thousands of times a day, every day for decades, generates a sense of continuity. We add a constant self-referential commentary to the linkage, and soon we actually think that there is an “us.”

  To use a silly analogy, let’s say we have a doughnut. We think we actually see a hole. There’s no hole, really; there’s just space. But because it’s surrounded by all this doughnut, we actually experience a hole. In a similar way, if we point toward our self over and over again, sooner or later we just take for granted that there is a self there. How many of us believed in Santa Claus when we were young? There were stories and pictures, we wrote letters and sang songs about Santa, we saw Santa’s helpers in the stores. All of these references to Santa Claus created a vivid experience, which, of course, we took to be true. Santa wasn’t a theory. He seemed to be a real person with whom we had an emotional relationship. But at some point, perhaps with some disappointment, we discovered that a vivid appearance does not mean that something actually exists. Maybe our belief in our self will turn out to be just as reliable as our belief in Santa. Maybe this “obviously real” self is actually maintained through linking our continual self-referential commentaries and is supported by our pervasive social agreements about the reality and significance of this self. We pay attention to aspects of our experience that seem to be relevant to our self. We engage the world with all sorts of dramas about our self. We have issues with our self-worth or lack thereof, and we spend time trying to heal those issues. We take all of this effort as a type of self-evident proof of having a solid, significant, continuing self. From a Buddhist point of view, however, this is fantasy. There’s the appearance of a self, but the fantasy that it’s an objectively existing, solid, and therefore alienated self gives rise to unnecessary suffering and confusion in our lives.

  From the fruitional point of view, one powerful practice we can explore is that of immediacy. The practice is simple: Whenever it occurs to us, we bring our attention into our immediate experience. We notice what is actually going on right now—what’s most fundamentally true in this moment. One of the first things we encounter in this practice is that we’re very rarely experiencing reality in a simple and direct way. Instead, we’re constantly making interpretations about what we are experiencing; we’re thinking about it. So we might be saying, “I’m stressed out.” But what does that really mean? A complaint like “stressed out” is an umbrella interpretation that we give to a series of different feelings. We might be feeling overwhelmed, afraid of failure, or anxious. As we investigate our moment-by-moment experience, however, what we discover is that underneath our interpretations are feelings. Even one step deeper than our feelings, we find our sensations—what we’re actually feeling in our bodies. We become aware that we are feeling warm or cool, relaxed or contracted, heavy or bubbly, and so on. And if we want to go a layer deeper still, we might find that underneath our sensations is an experience of intense energy or aliveness that is actually very difficult to stay with.

  When we practice immediacy, we start to challenge and dissolve the apparent link between each moment of our experience. In other words, we see how our mind works—how we have an experience, immediately interpret it, and then create a story about ourselves based on that interpretation. The practice of immediacy allows our experience to simply arise, without interpretation. We create an environment of space or openness—no commentary, no discussion. The result is that it becomes harder and harder for us to maintain a continuous story about who we are.

  When I’m discussing this idea in the classroom, I sometimes demonstrate it using a set of dominoes. I set up a row of dominoes on the floor and then have a student tip over the first one. The rest of the dominoes follow suit, and the display starts to look like one continuous event—a wave passing across the floor. Of course, the visual effect is misleading. There are fifty or a hundred individual events happening when a row of dominoes goes over. But they are happening so close to one another, in such rapid succession, that to the eye, it appears as one continuous event.

  This is how the mind works as well. We have a single experience, then another, then another—but they happen so fast, we start to believe that each of these moments is connected to the next. Like the dominoes, our thoughts actually do resemble a single, unified cascade. It appears that each moment of experience is necessarily connected to the next.

  I then take the dominoes and set them up again—in the same pattern, same organization—but I place them several inches apart. When I knock over the first domino, it just
falls on the floor; it doesn’t reach the next domino. It happens in space. At that moment, it’s clear that what appeared to be a linkage or causation between the dominoes was actually just a lack of space. The dominoes were simply close enough together that they touched one another.

  In a similar way, we all understand that when watching a movie, we’re really just seeing a rapid succession of images, not something that’s actually alive and in motion. But given the way the brain works, and given our unexamined wish to be captured by the appearance, we experience this display as if it were reality. If we slow the movie down, however, we just see frame followed by frame, which is not so entertaining.

  Upon investigation, the same is true of our thoughts. The apparent continuity of our experience arises from too close a connection between one moment and the next. The connection is made mostly through our interpretations and emotional reactions, most of which are based on sensations we feel in our bodies. When we have sensations that we associate with feeling very vulnerable or disturbed, we feel threatened and usually dissociate from our embodied experience within a fraction of a moment. Without even thinking about it, we abandon our own immediate experience and jump into interpretations. In our Western culture, at least, interpretation is the preferred escape from immediacy. But what’s waiting for us in our interpretations is our conditioned history. So we interpret our immediate experience based on our historic conditioning, which once again provides endless opportunities to link a story together.

  For example, say there’s a moment in which I drop a glass on the kitchen floor. That experience is entirely unique and complete in itself, with a series of occurrences taking place in rapid succession. Glass in hand, glass out of hand, gasp of surprise, sound of glass shattering—something like that. If I were in the practice of immediacy, I might then experience myself feeling upset, walking carefully to the broom closet, reaching for the broom, and sweeping up the broken glass. But that’s pretty rarely what happens. More likely I’ll hear the glass breaking, and in the next moment, I’ll have some emotional reaction: some shock, some fear, some anger toward myself or—given my style—toward my wife for choosing such slippery glasses. (Emotional reactivity is rarely reasonable.) I could, of course, let that emotional response be complete in itself, without linking it to the previous moment or the next moment. Most of us, however, will interpret the disturbance as if it were about our having dropped the glass. We’ll start telling a story: “Oh, I’m a clumsy person.” Or, “Gosh, why did she buy these new glasses? They’re very hard to hold onto.” We could go on and on, endlessly linking our immediate experiences with familiar stories.

  The problem with this “domino effect” of our thought process is that when we are making these interpretations, we necessarily dissociate from the immediacy of the present. We take the immediate experience we’re having, and we flip through our memory file to find a similar experience from the past. Then we project our past experience onto the present moment, using it to solidify a story. In order to carry a concept across time and link it to a previous experience in this way, we have to make it very generic. If we see a tree, and we want to relate it to another tree, both trees must be reduced to their most generic elements. We see trunk, branches, and leaves—then we can link this particular living organism to previous organisms we’ve seen that have those same elements. But we lose the nuance of this particular tree, the one outside our window right now. The particular color and shape of the leaves, the way the sun is shining through the branches and hitting the grass below. No moment can be truly unique if we’re constantly linking it to previous moments.

  The same goes for the sense of self. If “me” is a representation that we carry over time, all of us have to create a generic “me.” The self must be a very generalized, down-to-the-lowest-common-denominator sense of self, in order to carry it over time. We may be feeling a sense of heaviness in our chest, a sense of loss or longing. Tears may be welling up in our eyes. Suddenly we take this set of experiences and make an interpretation: “I am sad.” Now we’ve created a story that makes sense of the heaviness, the sense of loss, and the tears. We can point toward past moments when these elements were in place and we interpreted them as sadness; so, we make a generic connection. We don’t question its validity; it appears so logical, we don’t even have to think about it. Yet what’s lost is unique awareness of this moment—these tears, this sense of heaviness. When we automatically connect this moment to a past moment, we miss out on the unique experience of the present.

  If, on the other hand, we experience a moment in its rich uniqueness, it’s very difficult to link that moment to the next moment in a familiar way. One of the effects of meditation practice is to start to place moments of experience in an environment of greater space and awareness. When we do, we find that it is harder and harder to completely believe in the stories we have about our experience. For example, it will be hard for Ana to continue her story of despair if she discovers that, moment by moment, in the immediate now, she feels alive instead of dead. So if we really want to challenge our story about ourselves—part of which may be rooted in the historic conditioning we’ve uncovered through developmental psychotherapeutic work—we practice immediacy. We bring our attention into every moment of experience, without telling ourselves what it’s about. We simply experience it for what it is, without interpretation.

  IMMEDIACY AND PREFERENCE

  The practice of immediacy invites an investigation into the nature of awareness. It clears away some of the confusion caused by our stories and helps us tolerate the possibility that our experience is not “about us.” Sometimes when I’m working with people, I suggest that perhaps even their emotions are not about them.

  Consider the possibility that our emotions are sort of like the weather. The weather happens. We have to deal with it, because it affects us, but it’s not about us. For example, say you walk outside and the sun is shining and the sky is blue and there is a pleasant breeze. You might say, “Oh, it’s a beautiful day!” But that doesn’t mean that the day has an inherent quality of beauty. Just because it reflects our preferences doesn’t mean that there is a fundamental beauty to the scene. Someone who enjoys skiing, for example, might think it’s disappointing that the sky is not cloudy and snow is not falling. Our announcement that the day is beautiful does not mean that it is so; it just means we like the weather that day. Yet in our own minds, we’ve made the weather about us—about our preferences. In the same way, our emotions are something we have to deal with, because they affect us, but perhaps they are not about us, either.

  Yet we’re always projecting our preferences onto our experience and assuming our interpretations are a reliable measure of what’s really going on. “What a great meal!” “What a lousy driver!” We’re confusing external reality with our internal reactions, and we’re behaving as if our experience actually has something to do with us. We’re always trying to have more experiences that we like and to get rid of experiences that we don’t like, which in classic Buddhist philosophy is a primary cause of unnecessary suffering.

  As we start to practice embodiment and kindness toward everything that arises—as we practice immediacy—we find less and less and less evidence that any of our experience is about us. That begins to help us with practicing an attitude of nonbias. We are willing to feel happy. We are willing to feel sad. We are willing to be healthy. We are willing to be dying, if that’s what’s happening.

  We start to boycott, or go beneath, the automatic unconscious addition of preferences to our experience. It doesn’t make our experience suddenly happy. It just means that we are less confused. From the fruitional practice viewpoint, it’s also the first step toward the experience of freedom. It paves the way for us to ask, “If I don’t have a solid sense of self, then what is it that’s aware of this display? What’s the nature of awareness?” This is an experiential investigation more than an intellectual one. As we train ourselves to stay more and more in our immediate experienc
e, without interpretations, without trying to hang on or push away, we actually become more capable of investigating our experience. Our perception seems to be less loaded with the survival-level dramas that began when we were in childhood. If our experience is about us and our preferences, then we always need to be vigilant. If the quality of our life, even our survival, is dependent upon always-changing life circumstances, then it’s smart to always be on guard, always alternating between hope and fear. If, on the other hand, we relate to the display of our experiencing as having its own life, it becomes safer to investigate it with a sense of objective curiosity. When we investigate our experience from the position of immediacy—without interpretations—we find something interesting. Our experience continues to be very vivid in its appearance, but we find no essential nature, no independent existence, to that appearance.

  This is a difficult concept to understand; when I’m offering this material to clients, I try to suggest some analogies. Imagine swinging a sparkler at night. We see a continuous ring of light, yes? It would be silly to say we don’t see a ring of light, because we do. Because of retinal retention and the way our minds organize experience, the display appears to be a continuous ring of light. Upon investigation, however, we’re not going to find a ring of light at all. Instead, we find a single point of light in constant repetitive motion. So there’s a vivid appearance, but we can find no essential nature to that ring. The same goes for a rainbow. If we see a rainbow, it would be silly to say we don’t see a rainbow. Upon investigation, however, we aren’t going to find a rainbow. The display is all relational. There’s no rainbow existing by itself up in the sky; rather, its appearance has to do with the way the sun’s rays bounce around inside raindrops and with the angle of the observer. If we look at this rainbow and then face the other way, there isn’t a rainbow still up in the sky waiting for us. If we spin a color wheel, we’re going to see white. If it slows down, however, we’re not going to see white anywhere on that wheel—we’re going to see the primary colors. If we look at a photograph, we’re going to see a coherent image; but upon investigation, we’re just going to find pixels. It’s the way they’re arranged on the paper and the way our eyes and brains work that give us the perception that there is an image.