Your Absence is Required

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” – Robert Browning

I’ve been pondering this article for some time now (I ponder more these days…thus explaining the inconsistent timing of posts). I have decided that writing with periodic regularity might be seen as favorably predictable but not as authentic and truthful as honoring the incalculable emergence of genuine inspiration. So now that I’ve got that explanation (that nobody ever asked for) out of the way, let’s get into the current topic that has been simmering here.

For so many years and in countless myriad ways I was a self-improvement junkie. Well before I turned toward spiritual matters, I was desperately combing the self-improvement shelves of bookstores for any and all methods, techniques, and modalities that promised to make me a better human. Psycho cybernetics, self-hypnosis, EST, Sutphen Seminars, Rolfing, neurolinguistic programming, Tony Robbins seminars, walking on hot coals, and more. I was a voracious consumer of all of it.

To go along with those promises of more success and prosperity, better mental health and well-being, I also worked on my body and physical appearance. I felt lacking and inferior in so many ways and the silent refrain that played in endless loops was something like, you are not quite good enough, you could be a lot happier, more successful, more attractive, more likable to others and to yourself if you could just find the right answers to this pervading sense of insufficiency. That lasted through my 20s and when I was in my early 30s I found myself standing on what should have been, according to the world’s promise, the pinnacle of fulfillment.

I had arrived. I was looking out over the Pacific Ocean from our new home, married my beautiful life partner (beloved Denese), and holding our precious firstborn son. But to my shocking surprise, I was not any happier. The nagging discontent was still nagging inside. So I kept up the search, hoping that I would finally stumble upon the right and perfect formula to fill the emptiness that continued to sabotage the happiness I intuited was possible.

This led me to spirituality in my late 30s and there I experienced a breakdown and a breakthrough. I finally saw through the folly and impossibility of finding happiness in external objects, conditions, or circumstances. The lesson of the prodigal son turned me around, and outside/in. My heart broke open and realigned my search inwardly. This felt much more genuine and truthful, and I poured myself into spiritual study, and practices, including meditation and prayer. I was happier, if for no other reason than I was not constantly looking for life events to make me happy or peaceful. I continued on this path for many years, practicing the path and sharing it through my ministry work.

During the early 2000s, I found myself growing increasingly frustrated with my lack of spiritual progress. Even after so many years, I still felt far from achieving any sense of spiritual realization or enlightenment. Although I experienced occasional moments of peace, for the most part, my waking hours were plagued by an ongoing neurosis. I constantly felt vulnerable, with doubts about my self-worth, concern for others' opinions, and the need for validation. But how could this be? Didn’t I believe that I was a spiritual being, made in the image and after the likeness of God? Yes, I believed! But alas, the belief lived as a thought in my mind, not a deep, embedded knowing in the heart. That’s what was missing. I was full of concepts, but the knowing of truth remained seemingly distant.

As the incongruence between what the teachings promise and my felt experience continued to nag at me like a proverbial thorn in the side of my consciousness, I began looking at other spiritual teachings and was led to the “nondual” teachings. 'Non-duality' is a Sanskrit word ‘Advaita’ meaning 'not two', emphasizing the oneness, wholeness, and unity of life, which already exists before any apparent separation. It points us to the heart of life as it is right now, with no reference to time or space, just the intimacy and reality of the present moment. This path and its implicit pointing to who and ‘what we already and always are’ felt fresh and free of the burden of belief and faith that characterized my spiritual practice up to that point. I dove into the teachings with renewed vigor and expectation that at last, I had found my true path to self-realization. I became an online devotee of Mooji, Rupert Spira, and many other non-dual teachers, read countless books, and practiced self-inquiry in the ways of Ramana and Nisargadatta. I had one-on-one sessions with a number of Advaita teachers and experienced a few glimpses of my true nature, but alas they didn’t last, and I was quickly back to being a seeker again.

My frustration and accompanying lamentations echoed in endless looping refrains, What am I not seeing, What am I missing, Why can’t I wake up? I knew the textbook answer was that I was looking for awareness, consciousness, pure being, but somehow, despite my fervent desire and efforts, I could not perceive these aspects of self. I even pondered the aphorism that is intended to defeat the ego trap of overlooking the Truth, “What’s looking is what you are looking for!” Still, the clarity I was seeking eluded me. All of this it turns out was a “fool's errand.”

As I’ve shared in this column previously, the flaw in my best intentions and efforts to awaken was an unquestioned assumption which presupposed that “I” was a “person,” that is, a separate individual in the world, seeking to become more spiritual. And that this “I” character would someday wake up and become enlightened, that all my practice and the expectation-based spiritual effort hinged on some ultimate end game where this me that I take myself to be would arrive in full recognition of my true nature. This entire strategic perspective was simply content of my mind, an egoic ruse, in the words of Paul Hedderman, a “stratagem to hide my true identity, because it knows you won't "find" what you already are!”

For me, it took a clear seeing of what I was not to help awareness dawn and reveal itself as the primacy of being itself. The apparent delay in seeing the Truth was an exclusive pursuit of Presence without first cleansing the lens of perception of what was not true, that was obscuring the reality of being. I recently heard it said quite accurately by nondual teacher, Fred Davis, “You cannot teach a relative being about the absolute, because the recognition of the absolute is the absence of a relative being.” So if this sounds like your flavor of stagnation, you might simply stop looking completely, call off the search for the Truth, and look closely at what you are not. When you systematically see through all the temporary aspects of who and what you’ve taken yourself to be, body, mind, thoughts, memories, etc there will be very little left, and that vast and spacious and empty remainder might just be the hidden kingdom where the journey ends.

Namaste,

Rev. Larry