What Can’t Be Shared

I will apologize in advance. This post may be completely unintelligible. I have something that seems important to share, out of sheer honesty and the impulse to express what I have gone through lately, yet I cannot find the words that are equivalent to the experience. Yet since I have promised to share the uncertainties along with the insights on this journey of awakening, I will give it a shot as I intuit that this is part and parcel of realization and might be of some vicarious value to some of you. Here goes.

A few weeks ago, in the middle of the night, when I couldn’t sleep, I was reading a dialogue between a nondual spiritual teacher, John Wheeler, and a student. (Dialogue does seem to establish an effective dynamic that often breaks through a seeker’s mind into recognizing truth that surpasses just reading about principles and practices.) At one point in the dialogue, the student shared that he knew that awareness was always present. The teacher responded saying, that’s good but the key point is do you know that you are this? Upon reading this line, I sat back and reflected on that simple statement and it felt as if all sense of me fell away. I became pure awareness, no sense of a person with awareness but pure, unadulterated awareness. It lasted for several minutes until I drifted off to sleep.

When I woke the next morning, I recalled this remarkable experience but I wasn't able to recreate it. I have read countless descriptions of the awakening process and in so many descriptions dissolution of the sense of a separate self is frequently cited as confirmation of the clear seeing of Truth. This seemed to be the most significant breakthrough in my spiritual journey; to go from seeking to realizing. And true to the nature of my mind, its seeking impulse went to work once again looking for a strategy to recreate the experience. This is one area where the mind and its constant need to predict and control experience actually is an obstacle to the realization of Truth. What I had experienced was a recognition of my own Being (nondual), not a person having an experience (dualistic). So, my efforts to go after a return to this experience have, consistent with this dynamic, only resulted in frustration.

At first, I just kind of stewed over what seemed to be an insoluble dilemma; that my desire to awaken could not be satisfied by any overt effort and left me feeling feckless and downhearted. Why? Because we’re so strongly conditioned to see only one way to get what we perceive is missing, and that is to go after it. But that’s the perceptual error, the delusion of consciousness, in which we feel that our true self is somehow a work in progress, a yet-to-be state of personhood, separate from us in time and space. The belief/feeling is I’m not there yet! That actually has been what has driven me (you?) toward endless self-improvement. But this seemingly elusive state is not a state at all. That is, it is not a characteristic or quality of one’s nature that has to be cultivated or developed. It is our natural state, fully formed, already and always what we are, here and now. Therefore, unlike everything that has so far alluded me and you, and justifies a search, or efforts toward acquisition can only be uncovered and realized presently.

So back to the present moment, I again must return. I don’t think there is a more difficult, and seemingly unnatural tendency of the mind than to keep attention in the here and now. It’s incredible how our mind leads us backward and forward, while assiduously avoiding the present moment. Yet it is here, we are told by all the enlightened masters and sages, where the gold lies.

Second perhaps, in level of difficulty, is to refrain from labeling, analyzing, and comparing our experience. That is, to simply trust our experience, not our thoughts about our experience. For it is in staying with our experience, without commentary which taints it, that keeps us fully present and in touch with Being itself. We don't need the mind's commentary to realize the singular recognition of what we are at our core, which is no less than the Self that God created.

This is my current journey and approach. To stay with knowing that I am awareness itself, and to trust and stay with an unmediated, unfiltered sense of being with every experience. Notice how passive this is; how little the mind is involved. It’s weirdly silent, perhaps actually stillness itself. Yet somehow, I am this. You are this.

Namaste,

Rev. Larry