Like a Fish in Water

Note: I've been traveling this week, visiting good friends in northern California, so I've gone into the archives to offer this replay of a blog from a while ago. It remains the primary message of awakening and I trust it will serve as an effective reminder. I'll be back with my current insights and musings next Sunday.

Do you take spirituality seriously? I mean is it so important to you that you find yourself soberly obsessed with its achievement? Over my lifetime of spiritual study and practice, I have often been intensely serious and humorless in seeking spiritual awakening. Less so these days as I realize that what I’m seeking is not a product of intense study and unflinching concentration. Why the very word enlightenment contains the word suggesting the opposite, ie “lighten.” Synonymous with lighten is to make lighter, to ease.

What if our usual driven approach to reaching a desired aim has no place in spiritual realization? What if effort is counterproductive? What if a posture of no effort is essential to waking up spiritually? If you knew that unequivocally then how would your spiritual practice change?

To arrive at this effortless approach we must begin with the primary nondual understanding which is that what we are seeking is not at a distance, not apart from us in time or space. That is the absolute premise for those of us who affirm that there is only One Reality, an infinite presence that is present in its fullness at every point in time and space. If there is no place to arrive at, and no time other than the present moment, then seeking itself will never yield realization, only frustration.

The irony within the ubiquitous nature of the reality we overlook is illustrated by this often-told story. There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Like fish in water, we can hear this and think, OK, so now I’m going to go find water! I’ve heard about this (holy) water from all the great (Water) Masters, that it’s the Ultimate Reality, the Source of All Life, and the Substance of Love, Happiness, and Wellbeing. I will go and find it. And so we set off on this journey of seeking. And this can go on for years, decades even, of sitting on a meditation cushion, watching our breath, and listening for the Voice of God, or for Buddha to speak to us, or for the brilliant Light of Truth to break upon our consciousness and finally enlighten us. But somehow those journeys remain endlessly unproductive, and we may, at last, give up and come to conclude that what we are seeking does not exist, that the whole spirituality story is just one more fairy tale, or maybe at best it's so high and esoteric and far beyond us mortals that it is unattainable.

Or, if we can completely relax into the truth that what we are seeking is already at hand, as Jesus and many enlightened teachers have affirmed, then we will actually call off the search, pull back the seeking mind and notice with present moment awareness what is actually here and now. In the field of pure awareness, there is only infinite capacity to notice, and the ten thousand things are secondary to the awareness in which all things are perceived.

There is nothing heavy about this process of awakening, only in the mind that treats enlightenment as a journey of time and space. However, when seeking gives way to recognition and realization it is a weightless (wait-less) endeavor of the heart to behold what we already are, and that we have already arrived. In this knowing, we deeply realize and experience the reality described by the Apostle Paul, “In God, I live and move and have my Being.”

And so it is.

Namaste,

Rev. Larry