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What takes place in the world of action will never be as important as one’s internal understanding of it, one’s response inside. The main thing is to see that there is a discrepancy. There is not an inevitable one-to-one correspondence between what happens out there and what happens in here. Once you see that, once you see that you really do have choices in the matter of how you feel about something that’s happened – well, if you truly believe it, then you can hardly imagine making a deliberate intention to feel bad about anything . . . right? Oh, I’d heard all this for years. I had a therapist once who talked about the idea that every time something bad happens, you sort of “tell yourself a story” about what it means – what terrible thing it says about you, how you had it coming maybe. Or maybe it bodes ill for your future. Or you could tell yourself it was a Growth Opportunity. Some story. The idea was not new to me, that we interpret to ourselves, constantly. But I only understood it in my brain – which is not, in the end, all that useful an organ. It’s as if I went to sleep one night last summer, pretty much the person I’d always been, and when I woke up in the morning, I found that someone had installed a whole new organ in me while I’d slept.
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I can make the shift from one mode to the other, just by the determination to do so. I just do it. It’s like flipping a switch. Once I figured out how effortlessly I can make the switch, by will alone, it helped enormously. I realized I don’t have to be at the mercy of . . . well, in one direction it would be at the mercy of the immersion in this blissful consciousness, whereas going the other way – i.e., absorption in the daily – would feel like entrapment. For a long time I thought the end of fear was the whole story. But it gradually began dawning on me, over the last couple of months, that the absence of fear was really just a symptom – one indication – of a more pervasive change. I have this sensation of disengagement, of distance from worldly concerns. It's as if I used to be a gear in the machinery of ordinary human suffering (my own), and now I've become disengaged from that machinery. I've stopped being “one of the gears,” now assuming a position outside of the machinery – very close to it, watching it, all of it very familiar, and yet I am no longer a part of it. The ordinary drama of human life – all of the stuff that used to so occupy me, and that still occupies people around me – suddenly seems so unnecessary, so poignantly insignificant. The sensation of being “above it all,” or apart from it, has been unnerving at times. It has felt almost inhuman or something, almost like a lack of compassion. But now I'm starting to see that remoteness does not amount to a lack of compassion. It's just that I'm seeing the bigger picture now.
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What did that mean, to be both human and enlightened? Before this happened to me, I used to think that if a person were enlightened, all that being human stuff – being frail, imperfect, subject to suffering, to desire and fear – would be sort of “held down” by the higher state. I supposed the higher state would be powerful enough to constantly overwhelm all that ordinary human stuff, sort of keeping a lid on it. What – in my particular case – would the human condition feel like without desire, without fear? These were gigantic forces in my life. Could a life without desire and fear even be said to be human? Weren’t those emotions inevitable in the mix? How could it be possible to love someone – my children, my lover, my creatures – and not also fear losing them? And if the fear of loss somehow were to evaporate, wouldn’t the love go with it? When the change in me began to occur, it was the feeling of the departure of some of this stuff that was at times unnerving to me, a little scary even. I often said to myself, Wow, who am I without all THAT? It turns out it isn’t a matter of that human stuff being “held down.” The negative just . . . isn’t there anymore. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of recognizable, familiarly human stuff that is very much ongoing. My experience of being human now is that enlightenment enlightens the human state. It enlivens it. There is much about my humanity that feels quite intact, that’s familiar, particularly in the realm of love, delight, savoring. I enjoy things as much as ever – well, even more, because I am not invested in having them, in their continuing. My joy does not depend upon them, is not poisoned by the dread of losing them. So in a way I am freer to enjoy them. It’s not like being liberated in spite of being human. Enlightenment comes through being human. The idea that our humanity would somehow be blotted out or held down or overwhelmed by being enlightened, I now see, is out of whack; but of course I couldn’t see that until I got here. My experience of what’s happened to my humanity is like this. My ways of encountering the world and experience that didn’t serve me or that were a waste of energy – those things fell away, evaporated, and thereby freed up space. This is how I literally experienced the process of becoming free. When fear left, all these other things – abilities, insights, profound tenderness – came rushing in. So enlightenment seems to transmute the human condition by cleansing away the things that don’t serve us, at the same time shining a light into our fullest human potential, infusing it with energy: to be wise, to be kind, to enjoy our lives, to make right decisions, to take effective action. The parts of our humanity that have been blunted by our huge burden of unnecessary suffering become able to thrive and to dance, to become fully realized, to be given air to breathe. So the fundamental nature of humanity – if enlightenment can only be allowed to happen – is vastly more exciting, inspiring, hopeful, restful, creative, and powerful than anybody supposed. Enlightenment isn’t becoming super-human or inhuman; it’s becoming fully human – which turns out to exclude all kinds of things that I used to associate with human nature. Things I believed to be inextricably a part of being human: fear, desire, and so on. Most people believe these things to be innate to our humanity. Everyone senses what potential the human race has – to create, to bring about joy, to alleviate suffering. People also are in general agreement that we tend to botch it, on both the individual scale and the grand one. It has become a cliche, what a bad job we humans are doing, and things seem to grow steadily worse. The fact is, we have it within us to do better – dramatically better – both individually and as a species. I used to think enlightenment was rising above humanity. Now I see it’s coming fully into it. Human nature is enabled to come to full flower. Liberation transmutes the familiar human condition by making it possible to stop the suffering inflicted by the mind. It ends attachment, and it brings about a condition of well-being that is entirely independent of anything external to the inner life.
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This experience of being reordered has been described as death of a kind. It is the only real death. But no wonder it’s feared. The end of all you thought was real, all you thought was you. We cling dearly to it, as if letting it go would mean we’d cease to be. If you had told me, before, that if I let go of fear and desire there would still be something left of me, I’d not have believed you. It turns out that where there is no desire, delight is free to flood in through all the blown-out windows, all the missing doors. The taste of chocolate, of good red wine, of my lover’s body – all these things are richer by far than they were when I feared the loss of my life. The power of savoring has been turned high. I am not afraid to love my children all the way now. I no longer worry they will break their mother’s heart. I no longer feel my love for Peter being cramped and distorted by fear of losing him.
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This isn’t a good mood I’m in. A good mood has a life to it, an arc. It has an end. It is subject to outer influence. It will hang on so long as nothing interferes, nothing comes in to fiddle with the balance. A good mood is a sweet equanimity that is maybe all the sweeter for its fragility, its brevity. But this is not a good mood. My overriding experience these days is a blend of joy and confusion. The confusion comes of trying to figure out the why of it. Why now, why not before – or maybe more to the point, why at all, ever? It’s like I’m holding my breath, thinking: if I could live this way fifty more years, or even one year – however long it is, what a trip to have a bunch of years like this! But here’s the thing: I am not even asking the question whether this condition will last. It’s like I walked out the back door of something, and when I turn around to look, the building is gone. I couldn’t get back in if I wanted to. The reason I can tell this isn’t a good mood, I suppose, is that somehow I can tell it isn’t being generated from without – which means it can’t be damaged from without. It seems to be self-generated: made from itself, by itself. It wouldn’t even be correct to say this state is walled off from outside influence, like being inside some container impervious to hits from the outside. It’s more that the “outside” – regular life – just doesn’t apply. I still have a good time in regular life. But there’s no connection between that good time and the thing going on inside, humming along like a little motor, a perpetual motion machine.
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It is the eyes that make the world: that create it, literally. The world independent of being seen and interpreted can only barely be said to exist, in any way that is meaningful to human life. I am looking at a dead bat I found. It is not one bat but many, as many as there are people to look. To one looker the bat is death; to another it is rabies; to another it is a tender creature, beautifully made, and only incidentally dead; to another it is the body of fear (though it be a body that is stilled). That last person gets the creeps watching a live bat materialize from the slit between roof slates, or disappear back in there. The bat seems to come from nothing and to return to it – to occupy a space that appears to be non-existent. This bat is inherently none of these. Can we say it even is a bat anymore, being dead? My cat might look at it as an almost-bat, a not-quite-bat: surely to his discerning nose it is fragrant; and yet it refuses to move, at least not on its own. It will not emit bat-like sounds. Enough. Except to say that this isn’t only about bats. This is a story about how all things are subject to interpretation – bats, money, war, even the things we tell ourselves have innate meaning, meaning that inheres in them. We might say, for instance, that the death of a beloved is innately painful. Unless you were to ask the beloved (if asking after death were possible), and then perhaps that death, that giver of such pain to the living, might turn out to be seen as relief from the agony of metastatic cells. This is not an argument that runs like this: “the living are not entitled to their grief because the dead have been released from suffering.” One does not inform or dilute the other; the experience of the dead is what it is, as the experience of the survivor is what it is. It is only to recognize that what feels like all the world to one person can turn out to be only one version of true. What's to be gotten from this? It becomes possible, if you work at it, to look at everything life hands you as subject to interpretation. I don’t mean neurotic navel-gazing, self-absorbed analysis that keeps you up late at night. What I mean is, everything that happens in our lives is filtered by the story we tell ourselves about it. Nothing – no relationship, no phone call, no disaster or piece of good fortune – has meaning inherent to it. It waits for us to talk to ourselves about it. Then the thing has fully happened, in some sense. The recognition of this plain fact is enormously freeing even if you don’t take it any farther. It’s not that you need to get a better interpretation – a more upbeat one, one that puts a better spin on things. Even if you don’t try to change the story you tell yourself, it’s worth doing this – worth recognizing, as you move through your day, that each time some event makes a strong impression on you, that impression is arising in part from what you are telling yourself about that event. In fact, this isn’t at all about “revising” the story you tell yourself about your life experiences. It’s about slipping into the space between the event and the story. It’s about realizing that there really is a space between the two, finding it, and crawling in. A breathing space, you might say. You couldn’t even tell it was there, maybe: like the slit the bat slips into, when it seems to disappear into a non-space. From that perspective, in that “space,” it is possible to relax a little, and – without judgment of any sort (tricky, oh so tricky) – to watch your self interpret. Your “other” self, if you will. The one you always supposed was your “real” self.
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Watch the mind – but don't judge what you see it doing. Neither berate yourself nor congratulate yourself. Don't beat yourself up for what you "catch yourself" doing, even if it's for the umpteenth time. It isn't a tender-hearted, self-forgiving stance that leads me to urge this nonjudgmental approach. I'm not saying "love and accept yourself for all your warts." The point is, it's neither here nor there, how your mind judges what you do. It's the judging that's the problem: because it indicates you're taking too seriously the life of the mind. If you are hard on yourself (or praise yourself) for the activity in your head, you are giving your mind power over you. The point is to not invest any of it with substantiality. Any kind of judgment only feeds the ego with the illusion that this stuff is valuable. Starve the ego to death: its ongoing vitality is like a wall that keeps you from seeing clearly who you really are. Learning to laugh at the antics of the blustering, self-important ego will probably get you farther than all the heartfelt, earnest, self-flagellating striving in the world. Never forget that you have built that wall, just by participating in the human condition (which includes the mind, with its enormous power to delude, and all the conditioning that tells us untruths about who we are). You can destroy the wall – not brick by brick but all at once. This very moment.
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Death takes every scrap of it -- all the stuff we wear, furnish our surroundings with, the names we call ourselves by, the jobs we define ourselves by. All of it eventually comes (we know this) to nothing. When I was in training to do hospice work, one of the more potent exercises was the one in which we were asked to make a list of the things we'd least want to have to part with -– our very definitions of self -– and then had to systematically cross them off, one by one, in order of which precious thing we could least reluctantly say goodbye to. At last only one remained, the thing that would be hardest of all to let go. This gradual reduction in possession and capacity, the hospice trainer said, was the experience of most of the dying people who would be our clients. If we were to be meaningful support to them, we needed to have some understanding of the experience of a person who is approaching a predicted death. Loss of income, of dignity, sex life, mobility, independence, eyesight, loved ones, memory, limb, hair, adequate air supply, mental acuity, and so on. All of that -– though we don't like to think about it -– is familiar. We know what old age and terminal disease and finally death force us to part with. But what I am thinking about is how all of those ways we define ourselves, even long before we are getting ready to die -– how even when we have all of it, and are apparently vital and quite intact -– even then, none of it is who we are. I am thinking if only we could come to that truth before looming death forces it in our faces. The time to figure this out is when things are rolling along just fine, or seem to be -– before the threat of death moves in to remove our neatly-defined containers of self. It's good to look at the question of who-I-am when all the definitions of self have fallen away from me. It's like being inside an enclosure of upright boards -– that substantial piece of construction that has always told me who I am -– and then somebody pulls out all the nails and the boards fall away. What's left? Who am I inside all that, despite all that? What is the pink, tender thing that has no definition, that cannot be lost -- that is not subject to death?
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