you don’t hurt.)
You notice that aging is happening. People you love are in trouble. The world is a mess. You are quite aware of it all, maybe more than you were before, when fear ran you. You can take anything. All is tenderness. Your heart is big and cannot be damaged.
Every little thing you do or see — every little, ordinary thing — carries this tingly sense of being. It is hard not to cry sometimes at the most unspectacular things. The lines of the walls in relation to the flat of the floor. Its horizontality. The nap of the rug. The sound of the car going by. The smell of the skin on your arm. All is miraculous.
You have forgotten why it ever mattered so much to forgive or to be forgiven. To get your own way. You can’t remember why you wanted so much to be, finally, understood. To be on the receiving end of love. You have trouble remembering what it felt like to fear death, to mind getting pulled over by a cop.
When you lay your head down on your pillow in your dark room, there is no murmuring in there. No rehash of the day, of the life; no anticipation of the morrow (which you know will take very fine care of itself when it comes). All you know right then is the feel of the pillowcase against your cheek. All you know is the silence in the room, the peepers beyond the screen (or the traffic, if your bed is near a highway). Like a stone set down on the surface of a pond, you drop into sleep that is profound. If something wakes you in the middle of the night, you don’t curse being pulled up out of sleep. You don’t start thinking. All you know is beloved, beloved, beloved. It is all beloved.
The mind no longer runs on automatic. It is like an obedient dog. It responds when you ask it to. Without a request from you, it will not do anything on its own. Torment is gone from your days.
It is easier to describe what is absent from paradise (mental and emotional torment, resistance, effort) than it is to portray what is present. What it feels like. The sweet, plain, steady sensation of aliveness. Joy. Cherishing. There is such a feeling of cherishing: of self, of other, of life, of all that is. It is so restful. Everything is allowed to be as it is. Everything is enough. Every moment is the whole world.
Already Free
It is one thing to say I long to become free someday (free of torment, of the limited sense of self, of the illusion of separation). It’s another thing to say I long to discover that I am free. Already free. The difference between the two is significant. This is not a playing around with semantics. In the “someday” orientation to possible freedom, the eyes are on a later time. On getting something, achieving a condition not inherent. The mind is caught up in the necessity for change. (The task is daunting. So much seems to need changing.) In the other orientation, the “already here” one, the eyes are on right now. Something that is already the case, just not seen.
Someday keeps time alive. But reality isn’t experienced in time. Certainly not later. The truth of our essence is known in immediacy. When this is seen, when it is felt in the viscera, time is felt to have stopped. But really, it’s that time is understood to be an invention by the mind, a convenience for ordering events and making plans. Time didn’t stop exactly; it never started in the first place. Any moment in which there is a direct knowing of the real — including the real as it expresses itself in human awareness — time is not experienced. This is because the mind (where time lives) has grown quiet.
Why is this distinction so important? Of what use is it to deeply get that freedom is already here — to see how different that is from saying Maybe someday I will attain freedom?
When the great waking-up takes place, one thing that is realized is this: I was free all along. I just didn’t know it. What is realized, probably with something of a shock, is that all along, an essential choice was being made: whether or not to locate who I am in the events, roles, and history of what life holds. Understood another way, the choice being constantly made is whether to allow what happens to cause (or to relieve) suffering.
The question is Who am I? Am I my background, the roles I play in my personal and outer life? Am I my values, the way I imagine I am seen by others? Am I the sum total of my prior experience? Am I my physical features (age, gender, health condition)?
The revelation that comes at the radical awakening is that there is an awareness contained in this living body that has nothing to do with any of these things — with who I have always thought of myself as being; with the push-and-pull of outer events, of desire and fear, ambition and dissatisfaction. The discovery of utter calm and well-being within, at the heart of all the commotion — the realization that this content awareness has been there right along — is shocking, for sure. And yet: it is known to be the case. It is deeply familiar, this unconditioned “self.” It feels like home.
Something in us always did know. However consciously aware of that knowing we may or may not have been.
So go back to the other side of awakening. The before part. If a person, caught up in the compelling apparent reality of conditioned life, says to self I long to become free, what is being looked past is the possibility that I am already free; I just don’t know it.
If I sit with the idea that my task is to discover how I am already (constantly) exercising freedom, then a gently insistent pressure is brought to bear on the present, as each moment unfolds. In the stillness of the immediate — in the willingness to look deeply at how the familiar self keeps itself alive, keeps itself believing it is ultimately real — light can enter the seeing. The discovery can be made (it really can) that each moment is brimming with freedom.
The Choice to Carry a Thing
When my mother was dying, which took a long time, I practiced accepting her death. There were so many times we thought — this must surely be it, surely this time she won’t survive. Each time, I got ready for that to be it, for it all to be over. I imagined the after of her: the utter stillness of her skinny body, the no more struggling to breathe, the never again of her voice. The lowering into the ground of the box. As if practice could get me ready for it. But then she’d survive. The ventilator hose would be withdrawn from her throat, leaving it raw, and before you knew it she’d be sitting up. Talking. Maybe even smiling. Of course, eventually she really did die. That time, when the ventilator hose was pulled out, it did not leave her throat raw.
A person can practice to die. Not by imagining the heart quitting, but by constant letting go. This isn’t the reason to do this constant letting go, to prepare for death. That is a secondary outcome. The reason to do it, to let go of everything that comes, is so you can live life as a free being. Actually, letting go is not really the thing. The thing is to not hold on in the first place. Letting go can’t happen if there has been no prior holding on. Talk about free.
A person can also practice holding on. Talk about not free. Often it feels like what happens is that the thing holds on to us. Like, say I’ve never forgotten the pain of the loss of this certain man in my life. It sure does seem as though the thing has held on to me. I prefer to see it that way, that it has stuck like flypaper to me, not that I have kept my fingers curled tight around it. It: the memory of his face, voice, body; the fact that I never had him in the daily way I wanted him. I carried that around in my fist for a long, long time, having no idea it could be put down, or how much energy was going into holding tight to it.
Until one day it all revisited me, and it taught me about itself. I was in the kitchen when it happened. It all came full force into me, not the memory of him exactly, not the data, but the feeling of it, the consuming quality of loving, missing, wanting, grieving. It poured into me, took up residence in my body, shook me, pulled ancient tears up out of me. Then it was gone. For good gone. I knew it. It was like it had come back for the purpose of teaching me something. Not teaching me about him, or about love and the force of loss. But
