by Bruce Tift
To take it another step, say there’s a table sitting right in front of you. You might look at it and say, “Well, that seems pretty real. That’s not a rainbow or a ring of light. It’s a table. It’s solid wood.” But unfortunately for the human sense of pride, it turns out that our capacity for sensory experience is not the gold standard for the universe. It’s not the only criteria for reality! Imagine if you were an aware photon, flying through space. Such an aware photon would not find a table in front of it; it would only find a slightly more dense cloud of energy.
I offer these analogies to help with an intellectual understanding of a very basic Buddhist concept—the simultaneity of appearance and emptiness. This view asserts that we are always going to experience vivid appearances, but upon investigation, we will never find an essential nature to any of those appearances. So what about the observer of all of this experience? Well, it’s the same thing. There’s a vivid appearance of self, a sense of agency. There’s an identification with “me” and an experience of that “me” being located within a separate and solid physical body. It would be silly to try to get rid of this sense of self. And yet upon investigation, we may never find any solid, continual entity we can call a self. Instead, we appreciate and work with the appearance of self, while we gradually stop taking this appearance as if it were evidence of an actually existing self. Just as we gradually learn to appreciate the rainbow without trying to possess it or protect it from fading away, we might learn to appreciate this experience of self without needing to protect and improve it.
AWARENESS AND PERSONAL IDENTITY
The more we allow experience to be just as it is, the more we find that all experience tends to arise (from no one knows where—it’s really sort of mysterious), remain for a period of time, and then dissolve. Appearance arises and then falls apart, moment by moment. This cycle is always happening, and there is no need to control or manage it. This brings up another Buddhist concept, which is that experience is self-liberating. That is to say, we don’t have to do anything about our experience; it will take care of itself. This does not mean that we shouldn’t work to improve our experience, but that we might first pause and see if we must improve it. When we discover the confidence that whatever we are experiencing is workable, as it is, we engage from choice. When we feel we must first improve our experience in order for it to be acceptable, however, we engage from compulsivity. Often, when we intervene and try to manage our experience—interpreting it, suppressing or hanging on to aspects of it, creating stories about it—that experience seems to then appear frozen. As the slogan goes, “What we resist, persists.” The result is that we then seem to have an ongoing chronic condition to work with.
We saw this process in the achievement of neurotic organization as young children. Realistically, we could not tolerate and work with certain intense feelings. So we learned to manage our disturbance by continually driving these experiences out of our conscious awareness. In support of this repressive function, we usually then added dramas about why these particular feelings are bad, shameful, dangerous. While this is a necessary and healthy developmental accomplishment, it results in a chronic sense of being divided against oneself, of being a problematic person. Most of us seem to have an intuition that moving in the direction of increasing awareness is going to be disturbing. It turns out that awareness, in its unconditionally open nature, provides absolutely no support for personal identity. So, as we move toward immediacy—toward considering that all of our experience will take care of itself, that we don’t have to make ourselves a project, that nothing is missing, that we might as well commit to working with things as we experience them—we find less and less material to support our familiar dramas. These familiar dramas, like those we talked about in the previous chapter, are very understandable, given our history. They had origins in our childhood, and in many cases, they served our health and our survival. But as adults, they reinforce the idea that there is some type of problem or issue with who we are or with our immediate circumstances. Many of my clients, like Darren and Ana, become aware that these familiar dramas—these chronic reactions—are causing more harm than good. At this point, I suggest that they investigate developing a commitment to their immediate experience rather than to their interpretations of their immediate experience.
From the fruitional view, the question is not how our history has shaped our identity dramas, but how we manage to perpetuate patterns of experiencing that used to be relevant but now are no longer necessary or useful. Because we are only living in each present moment, we must re-create these patterns over and over, even as our current adult experience provides little evidence that they are valid. To do so takes incredible effort and creativity. As we’ve discussed, most of us are unconsciously and continually looking for evidence that will justify these out-of-date survival strategies. The evidence we create and selectively attend to is used to prove that certain feelings will harm us if consciously acknowledged. We don’t realize that it’s our refusal to experience these difficult feelings that gives them the appearance of threat and unworkability.
As with Ana, I invite my clients to investigate whether there’s actually any sort of problem in being who they already are. I have them turn their attention toward their experience at the level of sensation, beneath the interpretations. You may remember that I suggested Ana give herself permission, out loud, to feel dead—on and off for the rest of her life—while noticing what came up in her body. Then I suggested she ask herself whether those sensations were truly a problem. Was she really going to die from them? The answer, of course, was no. Slowly, over time, this practice of investigating our experience—and discovering that there is no problem in the present moment—helps dissolve (or at least begin to unwind) the neurotic patterns that we carry from childhood.
I will be honest: this process is usually anxiety provoking. We find that we have very contradictory feelings about dissolving our chronic patterns, even if we believe they are causing us suffering. Most people, it turns out, are actually heavily invested in their problems. From the developmental point of view, we understood this investment as arising from our best efforts to protect and take care of ourselves—efforts that are now out of date. From a fruitional point of view, on the other hand, we start to consider our “problems” as a form of entertainment. A lot of people don’t like that idea, of course! It contradicts their belief that their problems are solid, significant, real, and involuntary (which unconsciously supports the sense of being a solid, significant, real victim of one’s problems). They may also find it insulting to suggest that they are fascinated—entertained—by negativity and drama. Yet let’s face it, that’s exactly why we go to the movies. Who’s going to pay ten dollars to watch two hours of peace and well-being? It’s boring; most of us would walk out of the theater. What we pay money for are problems: romantic problems, financial problems, problems only James Bond can solve. That’s what entertains us. It captures us, and we want to get captured. But most people don’t consider the possibility that their own dramas—their stories of abandonment, of dependency, of the quest for spiritual enlightenment—are, in a way, pure entertainment. In truth, we have a fascination with getting captured by a story, and the best way to get captured is to claim that our survival is at risk. That’s what is most capturing, actually. So in my work, I’m always—and I mean, many times a day—hearing people talk about their experience in a way that implies, “If I had to feel this or that feeling or if this happened in my life, I would die. Something horrible would happen! This is a survival-level issue. This is really, really important. I have to fix this issue. I have to get clear about it!” We really don’t like the idea that maybe we’re entertaining ourselves with the claim that there’s a problem. But right now, in the immediate moment, where is this supposed problem?
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t address our real-life circumstances intelligently. We should pay our bills, be kind to our kids and our partners, and so on. Our
life will work better if we do. These are practical issues. But in the immediate moment, where’s the threat to our survival, the evidence about our worth as a person? Where’s anything that’s missing? But if there’s no problem, then there’s no entertainment. In fact, the loss of entertainment is one of the effects of meditation. Trungpa Rinpoche said that often after some initial period of very dramatic, intense, disturbing experience, meditators hit a stage where they actually become bored with drama. It’s so repetitive! When we hit this stage, we start to see that the same movie has been playing over and over inside our heads for years. Maybe it’s a good, exciting movie, but we’ve seen it so many times! It’s been playing over and over forever, but it wasn’t until we sat down to meditate that we became aware of it.
Trungpa said this phase of meditation could be called “hot boredom,” when we no longer have a lot of drama arise, but we’re sort of antsy. We want to get out of there. We want the bell to ring and the meditation session to end. If we hang in there, though, we might enter an experience of “cool boredom.” In that phase, we’re not so antsy. Meditation is sort of boring—it’s not that interesting—but we can do it. We’ve committed to the practice, but it feels flat and not so engaging. If we can hang in there still longer, it’s possible that we may start to experience every moment as inherently interesting. We start to realize that each moment is full of aliveness. Life is not interesting because it’s about us; rather, it’s interesting precisely because it’s not about us. It’s just interesting of its own accord. As we’re able to allow every moment to arise fresh, out of mystery, it’s impossible to feel bored.
This process may sound good, but it’s quite threatening to our status quo. To use the movie example again, if we’re watching a movie and it becomes very, very boring, we’re in danger of waking up out of the trance state we just paid money to be put into. If a movie has boring aspects, it might be considered an “art” movie, rather than an “entertainment” movie. Some people like those movies, but most of us don’t want to feel bored as entertainment. We want problems, we want drama, we want challenges, we want risks. If we extrapolate this to our everyday lives, we can see how much of a threat it might be to allow boredom to enter. If we get bored enough, we just might wake up to the truth of our experience—which is that there is no solid sense of self, that there is nothing to hold onto.
Another analogy I like is to imagine that in our natural state, we are all being swept along in the river of life, a stream of experiencing, moment by moment. We feel as if we’re not in control, which is true. We can’t really determine the pace or the direction of our experience. This causes a certain level of anxiety, which naturally we want to get away from. So we imagine that we can dam up the river. We invest in life circumstances and interpretations of our experience that help us avoid the reality of uncertainty and change. We’re in a little calm pool now. But as we gradually take our sense of safety for granted, we start to feel like there’s a lack of aliveness. We feel stagnant. So what do we do? We start a drama to shake things up. One such drama I see frequently is, “Should I have more aliveness in my life, or should I have more security in my life?” We forget that the safe harbor we created is, itself, hallucinatory. We’re actually still in the river, floating downstream. We’re still fully alive in every fresh moment, making it up as we go. But we’ve got ourselves in a hallucinatory sort of trance state, where we’re pretending that we’re in this dilemma between aliveness and security.
Meanwhile, we’re still in the river, and we’re not even consciously present. At any moment, we could bang our head on a rock. We could actually get in trouble, because we’re not committed to just being present. So even though there is an entertaining quality to taking all of our experience very seriously—as if it were about us, as if there were always some vague but important survival-level drama at stake—we will probably deal with our lives more accurately by remaining connected to what’s true. We can choose to practice staying present, training ourselves not to continually add self-referential commentary. This practice of immediacy gives rise to a more skillful engagement with our life, which usually means that our life will work better.
UNCONDITIONAL PRACTICES
Considering this view of immediacy, you might say, “Well, now what? It sounds okay, but I can’t just suddenly walk around in the environment of awareness.” But that’s where practice comes in. It’s rare that you can suddenly achieve a goal. But you can always commit to a practice that you hope will move you in that direction. You can experiment with various practices that may invite this type of experience. And generally, if you practice something, you will get better at it. If you don’t practice, you probably won’t get better at it. My suggestion is that if you have this interest, then consider what I would call unconditional practices. Three such practices that I have found very helpful are those of unconditional immediacy, unconditional embodiment, and unconditional kindness. For me, these practices have a deep energetic resonance with the nature of awareness. It’s almost like tuning forks: if you take two forks tuned to the same frequency and you hit one of them, the other starts to vibrate. It’s a process of resonance. I’ve heard that on a sitar, when you pluck one line of strings, another line of identically tuned strings that you never touch will resonate. Playing the first set of strings produces resonance in the second set. The result is this very rich overtone. So my preference is to invite people to practice in ways that have the greatest resonance with the fruitional view. Doing so might invite more and more frequent and conscious participation in what is already always there—which is our open and unconditional awareness.
Other practices are, of course, very valid and useful. We can practice by going to therapy and learning to set boundaries, working with our self-image, and understanding our history. In spiritual work, we can practice returning to our breath and living a decent and respectful lifestyle. But all of these practices tend to be based on a sense that our immediate experience is somehow problematic and needs to be fixed, managed, or improved upon. We’re not quite getting what we want right now; what we want is in the future. In this way, people can actually become addicted to the path. Addicted to therapy, addicted to spiritual practices that can give us the gratifying drama of trying to reach some goal in the future. But from my experience, it’s more direct to commit to immediacy, embodiment, and unconditional kindness—as if there were nothing missing and nothing problematic about any moment. Such a practice won’t create awareness, but it can create conditions that seem to invite awareness.
We’ve already talked about the practice of unconditional immediacy. It has to do with going deeper and deeper, more and more precisely into an investigation of what is most true in this moment. I must confess that the instructions here are an approximation. I don’t actually think there’s any such thing as “a moment.” But this instruction points us in the direction of immediacy, and the more immediate we can be, the fewer problems we find, the fewer references to a self we find. We don’t find evidence of anything missing. We don’t find evidence of our worth, either positive or negative, as a person. We find no evidence of anything being permanent. What we do find is an endless stream of fresh, unique moments, which we find to be inherently interesting and workable.
When working with Ana, one of the first things we addressed was how she was unconsciously elaborating difficult momentary feelings of deadness into a generalized story about her life. By attending to immediate experience, Ana began to see for herself that she was actually aware of an endless display of many different feelings. This made it more difficult to completely believe her drama. By attending to her immediate experience of deadness, she found that rather than an absence of aliveness, there was a very disturbing vulnerability, which she was defending against by first deadening herself and then relating to this deadening as a problem. Often when Ana was telling her story, I would interrupt and ask what she was experiencing in that moment. This technique doesn’t solve one’s story, but it can intr
oduce a type of experiential dialogue between the interpretation of one’s experience and one’s immediate experience. We can then examine which is actually more accurate.
The practice of unconditional embodiment is a very big topic. So big, in fact, that I devote all of chapter 5 to it! At this point, however, I simply say that the more we can bring our attention to immediate, sensation-level experience, the more difficult it is to be captured by our interpretations. When we stay in our immediate embodied experience—noticing our sensations but not tying them to any past experiences—it’s very difficult to link any stories together. Our experience is seen to be very unique. It’s always in motion. Our feelings arise, dwell for a period of time, and then fall away. There’s no such thing as a permanent sensation. We can’t find anything self-referential in sensation, either—I have never found any sensation of shame, guilt, abandonment, jealousy, and so on. These are not sensations; rather, they are interpretations of our sensations. Unconditional embodiment means a commitment to all of our bodily experiencing, without exception. We’re not looking for aliveness or joy or well-being; instead, we are bringing an open curiosity to whatever we find. Feelings of deadness, as with Ana, are just as valid as feelings of aliveness.