by Bruce Tift
In fruitional practices, we work to bring conscious participation into our always-existing open awareness. We stop pretending that our most basic experiencing is not already that of open awareness. We discover that this basic awareness provides no support for a personal self, and we may realize that our self-absorption has actually served as a no-longer-needed defense against open experiencing.
As we dissolve the vivid appearance of self-absorption, what we experience gradually becomes less about “me” and more about the experience itself. The weather becomes about the weather, not about how it affects “me.” Our partner’s behavior becomes about our partner, not about how “I” am affected. In general, our engagement with life becomes more practical and less emotionally reactive. As we develop an attitude of nonbias, we are increasingly able to see life as it is, rather than through our self-referential, and thus distorted, filters. Our good state of mind becomes resilient and reliable as we shift from what we experience—which is always changing—to how we relate to everything we experience. And how we relate from open awareness is to be unconditionally engaged, appreciative, embodied, and present.
A view is being asserted here: It is possible to have a good state of mind while we simultaneously feel very disturbed. It’s possible to feel grief or rage or anxiety and to have these difficult experiences arise within a type of well-being that is not dependent on positive thoughts or emotions. This view is unfamiliar in our culture, so it must be investigated, not taken as an unquestioned belief. As discussed, this investigation requires discipline, because it usually requires our full participation in exactly what we don’t want to feel, what we’ve been organizing our lives around avoiding. We must do the counterinstinctual work of remaining embodied with our fears in order to develop the confidence that these intense energies are not problematic in themselves, will not harm us, and in fact do not even have an independent, ongoing existence.
Discovering that what we have been afraid to feel is, in fact, workable supports our practice of relating to all experience without bias. In turn, relating to all experience with a sense of open confidence supports our investigation into our disowned energies. For example, if I use anger to ignore my fear, it will be very helpful to bring nonjudgmental awareness and kindness to this anger, to not make myself wrong for having this feeling, to discover that it’s workable to feel angry. In turn, finding the confidence that owning my anger is workable may then help me investigate the possibility of deeper vulnerabilities. This positive cycle strengthens my willingness to practice including all experiences, however positive or negative, as equally valid expressions of a good state of mind.
The path of dissolving self-absorption can be discussed in many ways. I remember coming across an interesting summary of this path some time ago, though I regret that I can’t recall who proposed it. We can understand our work to evolve through four stages: absorption in content, awareness of content, awareness of awareness, and absorption in awareness.
Absorption in Content
At this basic stage, our attention is so captured and identified with what we are experiencing that there is little likelihood that we will examine or be curious about whether there’s more to the story than what’s right in front of us. All children and many adults live in this stage, relating to what arises with an unexamined assumption that there’s only one reality, which is what we’re experiencing right now. It’s like watching a movie and being fully captured by the display. It doesn’t even occur to us to think that it is a display. Because there’s no conscious sense of self-reflection, there’s little conscious sense of hesitation or self-doubt. And so this type of experiencing can have a very fresh, alive, and even charismatic quality. Because there’s little self-reflection, however, there will be a strong tendency for one’s life to be run by a continuing reenactment of habitual patterns, of what’s familiar.
Awareness of Content
Out of the normal process of maturing, of education, of having to relate to other people’s realities, many of us become aware that there are other realities than that which is arising for us in this moment. We notice that what we are experiencing is not the same as the self who is experiencing it. At this stage, we are beginning the process of disidentifying with our experiencing—we begin to have our experience rather than be our experience. This may be like going to the movie knowing that we’ll be captured but confident that we won’t confuse what’s on the screen with reality. We may even have moments when we recognize that we’re just watching a vivid display. At this stage, we can become fascinated with examining our experience, and we may try to make everything into something to be investigated. Taken to an extreme, we can generate a lot of confusion and actually feel paralyzed by the attempt to turn ourselves into an object to be understood, to find our “true self.”
As we gain confidence that what we are feeling or thinking is not the same as our self, we are willing to explore difficult aspects of our experiencing and recover conscious awareness of energies we’ve historically disowned. Because there is awareness of the content of our experience, there is choice about how to relate to that content. At this stage we can challenge our identification with our habitual conditioning. This is the stage of most work in psychotherapy.
Awareness of Awareness
If we continue exploring what is most true about our experiencing, we may have more and more moments in which we realize that, regardless of the ever-changing content of our experience, there is always awareness of this content. At any moment, we may remember to ask: “What is it that is aware of what I’m experiencing? What is the actual nature of this awareness?” The process of disidentification continues but now includes the sense of self—the apparent “experiencer.” I have a sense of self, but I may not be a self. This increasingly conscious participation in awareness seems to progress along a continuum of wakefulness and is the stage in which spiritual path work is most useful. There is still a subtle dissociative split with an effort to explore or attain or increase our experience of awareness, as if this were somehow different from our relative experiencing. At this stage, we may experience a shift in our experiential center of gravity, with an organic spontaneous return over and over to awareness as our home base. This is the point at which our sense of “a good state of mind regardless of circumstance” becomes an ongoing experience, rather than a practice.
Absorption in Awareness
The idea of being absorbed in awareness seems to be a way of referring to the experience of enlightenment. The activity of ignoring has been fully dissolved, with no remnant of a dissociative split, no sense that self and other have separate essential natures. Awareness is inseparable from display, and awareness is “self-aware.” This nondivided awareness is said to be completely ordinary and natural—what’s always present and most basic in all of our experiencing—not some transcendent or esoteric state. But from our usual unquestioned sense of being an essentially separate self, we tend to imagine this experience as nonordinary; therefore, we look for it outside of our immediate experiencing. At this stage, a good state of mind becomes a nonissue. With any sense of division dissolved, every moment is experienced as always fresh and workable. We engage spontaneously and fully because it’s impossible to do otherwise, and we work with whatever arises as the expression of mystery, with an inherently deep and unconditional appreciation.
Progressing along this path is essentially an ever-increasing conscious participation in awareness. We discover that awareness is what is most basic, always present, in every moment of our conscious experiencing. We don’t find anything beneath awareness. It’s not a secondary composite expression of something more fundamental. While all relative experience is constructed, awareness is unconstructed. As such, it’s the most reliable aspect of our experiencing. Happy or sad, healthy or sick, clear or confused—there’s always awareness. It’s described as unconditional freedom, open knowing, mirrorlike, without bias, pregnant with unformed potential, without ascribable qualities. This can
sound very mystical. But awareness is so basic and ever-present that it is also described as “ordinary mind.” The real mystery is how we are able to be so unaware of awareness. The path of waking up is the experiential investigation of this question: how can we stop pretending to not be aware of what is already true, of what is always present in every moment?
This view of path is one of an evolution of experiencing, characterized by a gradual dissolving of self-absorption and a gradual shift from what we experience, to how we relate to what we experience, to awareness of both what we experience and how we relate to it. This interaction of awareness and self-absorption unfolds sequentially. First, awareness interrupts self-absorption; it then calls self-absorption into question. Gradually, awareness becomes as real as self-absorption. It next surrounds, and then pervades, self-absorption. Finally, self-absorption becomes unsustainable.
There are so many different and valuable approaches to this path, but in this book, we have focused on both a developmental/therapeutic view and a fruitional/Buddhist view. Each chapter can be understood as an attempt to work with these basic themes as applied to specific issues that are commonly worked with in psychotherapy.
In chapter 1, we addressed the developmental view as not really about our past, but rather about how—with great effort—we maintain a familiar sense of ourselves in the present. Especially when feeling anxious or vulnerable, we experience ourselves as if we were still dependent, powerless children living in a world in which feelings can both harm us and save us. Our history serves as the simplistic template into which we try to fit our current, incredibly complex reality. Our strategy of self-absorption is most reliably justified by investing in the sense of being a problematic self, living in a problematic world. Therapy challenges this position by helping to bring our experiencing into alignment with current adult realities and capacities. As we engage with our lives more effectively and with more kindness to self and others, we begin to not need our young survival strategies, and we can relax our self-absorption to a certain extent. This work can support our spiritual path, as it seems that it is usually easier to practice letting go of our sense of solid self from a ground of sanity than it is from a ground of neurosis.
Chapter 2 introduced the potentially faster path of bringing ourselves into direct engagement with immediate, noninterpretive experiencing. Rather than improving our sense of self, we investigate the ways in which we maintain it. We find out whether this project is really necessary, now that we’re adults. In each moment, we are free to find out for ourselves if there is actually any problem, anything missing. These moments of open experiencing call into question our investment in self-absorption but do not, in themselves, shift our sense of self out of our habitual patterns.
In chapter 3, we discussed the benefits of alternating between the developmental and fruitional views. Buddhist teachings have almost nothing to say about the profound influence of our young experiences, and psychotherapy has, until recently, had little access to noninterpretive awareness practices. By cultivating our capacity to consciously participate in each fresh moment of experiencing, free of interpretations, we introduce an experiential dialogue between the powerful momentum of our conditioned history—what used to be true—and our immediate experiencing—what is actually true in this moment. We begin to free ourselves of our conditioned history—not by making it go away, but by no longer being captured by it. In Buddhist language, we can think of this experiential interaction as “mixing mind/form with space.” In therapeutic language, we can talk about it as metabolizing the experience of open awareness and integrating this with our more familiar sense of self.
In chapter 4, anxiety was presented as both a signal that our survival is at risk (from an evolutionary, biological view) and an approximation of open mind (from a spiritual path view). If we want to take advantage of the luxury of living more than biological lives, it is important to learn how to hold both experiences. We can learn to participate in our survival panic without having to escape from it, and we can then investigate this panic as a signal that we are being brought into relationship with basic openness. The avoidance of anxiety is central to the impulse to maintain the primitive survival strategy of self-absorption, which is basically like putting one’s head in the sand. Committing to the experience of anxiety is central to the practices necessary to dissolve self-absorption. Deconstructing stabilized struggle is often an accessible place to begin.
Chapter 5 explored embodied awareness as a direct and powerful challenge to neurotic organization. Neurosis, as the habitual refusal to consciously participate in certain difficult experiences, is the most familiar way in which we perpetuate our claim to be problematic persons. Finding no problems—only difficult energies—in our immediate, noninterpretive, sensation-level experience, we cultivate a deep personal confidence in the workability of our selves and our lives. As we practice embodied immediacy, we find that self-absorption, based on—and perpetuating—the assumption that we and life are problematic, is increasingly difficult to sustain.
Chapters 6 and 7 focused on relationship as one of the most effective and provocative ways in which our familiar states of self-absorption will be challenged and frustrated. We enter relationship partly as relief from the deadness of our own private, self-absorbed worlds, and we then feel continually disturbed when our partners will not be who we want them to be. The view was presented that all relative experiencing is relational and therefore inherently irresolvable and disturbing. Intimate relationships are an especially intense experience of this open energy. The discipline of fully engaging in the disturbance of intimacy, without fighting to resolve it, can serve as a very powerful antidote to our investment in self-absorption.
SOME THEMES THAT MAY ARISE ALONG THE PATH
As we evolve our experiencing in all of these ways, we gradually cultivate a good state of mind. That state of mind is independent of our history, independent of our life circumstances, independent of our current mood, even independent of whether we’re living or in the process of dying. Along this path, there are often some recurring themes that may be helpful to briefly discuss. These are basic life issues for which there are no formulaic answers and that may arise as we loosen our identification with our familiar sense of self and with our historic conditioning. Engaging with these issues is another opportunity to have the direct experience of “being the question, not the answer.”
Acceptance and Improvement
When I invite a person I’m working with to experiment with an unconditional commitment to some difficult feeling or thought, a frequent response is, “But I don’t want to be like that. I want to live to my fullest potential. If I really accept these feelings, maybe I won’t be motivated to change.” Or in Boulder, where I live, “If I accept these feelings, won’t that create the very reality that I’m working to change? Shouldn’t I only have positive energy, so that I only magnetize positive experience?” This tension between acceptance and improvement is basic and—once again—not resolvable. This tension is good. It prevents us from ever really being able to comfortably take sides and feel that the issue is settled. The problem comes when we take these two energies, or styles of engagement, as if they each have their own independent existence. “If I believe that one excludes the other, then I can never have both; when I choose one, I don’t get the other. If I accept, I don’t get to improve; I’m giving up and surrendering to less than my life could be. If I work to improve, I have to postpone acceptance—wait until various conditions are achieved before I can let myself be fully present and at peace.” More accurately, however, these two energies are co-arising, or cocreative; they are inescapably relational. And so a neurotic expression of either will occur when we do not maintain an experiential connection with both. It’s not either/or; more accurately, it’s both/and. For practical reasons, however, when we act, we lead with one style and allow the other to remain in the background. “At this moment, I am accepting this situation, even while I know that I’m fre
e to shift my stance and work to improve it at any time.” Or, “Right now, I’m working to challenge a habitual pattern, even while I know that an equally valid practice would be to accept this pattern as undeniably a part of my life.”
In a way that is perhaps becoming familiar, we are shifting from a self-referential position to a practical position. Given our priorities, our intentions, what will work best right now? In general, it seems most useful to lead with the style of improvement when we are dealing with more relative concrete issues. It’s very intelligent to try to improve our health, our finances, our relationship skills, our livelihood opportunities, and so on—anything in which efforts in the present might improve the quality of life for ourselves and others in the future. When we are dealing with the most fundamental aspects of our human experience, however, it seems most useful to lead with the style of acceptance. Coming into relationship with whatever we are actually feeling in the moment—existential aloneness, aging, the truth of limitations, the experiences of pain/anxiety/grief/anger, or the experiences of unconditional kindness and of freedom. It seems most intelligent, when dealing with these realities, to accept in the immediate moment our experience of what are probably nonnegotiable aspects of the human condition.
Leading with one style does not rule out the other; it’s just a question of which comes first. In doing the work of therapy and in spiritual path work, I have found it usually most helpful to approach this issue as a two-step sequence. I usually begin with acceptance, as my clinical work is usually addressing the more basic issues beneath the presenting problems. Also, because we are only living in each present moment, it’s helpful to learn how to engage in and be committed to our immediate experiencing, rather than waiting for our preferred version of reality to arise before engaging fully. After identifying what experience clients may be already having but trying to escape from, I’ll invite them in a variety of ways to stay embodied with that energy, to imagine living with it off and on for the rest of their lives, to commit to this difficult feeling as a valid part of their life, to practice bringing unconditional kindness to it, and so on. After this initial step, we then might explore what it would mean to try to improve this experience from the already-explored ground of acceptance. What would it mean to deal with this situation in a completely practical way, without needing to resolve or heal or fix the disturbance?