“The entire spiritual dilemma, you know, boils down to only one problem — denial. Denial that everything which is born will die. Denial that everything I want to keep — identity, possessions, friends, family, lovers, health, life — will be lost. That denial, that continual avoidance of this simple, basic, undeniable truth, obscures my true nature by forcing everything I do and everything I think to serve an unconscious strategy — a strategy of denial — so that instead of simply living, which means allowing whatever is to be, and whatever arises to arise, I continually attempt to protect myself against the pain of that simple truth: nothing that I think I have, nothing that I think I am, has any permanence whatsoever. It never did, and it never will.” – Robert Saltzman
Spend any amount of time reading the words of the mystics and their advice could be boiled down to the following exchange:
Seeker: “I see at last that life is indeed suffering, that death surrounds me and awaits me and that for every up there is a down. Is there not a path to ultimate peace, to a place where suffering truly comes to an end?”
Mystic: “Seek the one who asks such a question and there you will find your answer.”
Across every spiritual, religious and mystical tradition comes this singular challenge: to know oneself. It is the clarion call of Jesus, the Buddha, and every other major spiritual figure and it is the kernel of truth upon which unwieldy human religious movements have been erected. And it is ignored.
If you are like me, the idea of self-inquiry may leave you feeling jubilant, but in practice it offers you nothing. Which explains why it is so unpopular. The mind likes tangible things – paths, missions, regimens, mantras and affirmations, resolutions and determination. It is why our culture teems with endless numbers of ’12-step’ programs, advanced academic degrees, professional accreditations, diet and exercise fads, self-help movements, orthodox religion, political parties, race/ethnic/sex-based groups, and so on. The mind demands scripture, tenets, doctrines, theologies, it learns from the earliest age to label, conceptualize, EXPLAIN the world around it.
Until it looks within. And let’s be clear here, we are not talking about psychoanalysis. That’s just more mind stuff. “I was an unhappy child, my mom was a drunk and my dad molested me and as a result I have abandonment issues….”
Self-inquiry is different. You are inquiring into you, into the “I” that for as long as “you” can remember has been the hub through which all life experience has flowed. Self-inquiry isn’t about the maskings of life, your unhappiness or cowardice, your accomplishments or bravery. Self-inquiry is about the man or woman who is said to be experiencing these things, the one wearing those masks.
As has been noted in these pages before, Jesus urged us to “seek until you find,” and added that when you find “you will be disturbed.” Why? Because what you find is that nobody is home – that there is not even a ghost in the machine. You don’t exist. At least not in the way you have been telling yourself you do.
The astute reader may have noticed in my previous post that I truncated the Wei Wu Wei quote by lopping off the last line. Here’s the whole thing:
“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think and of everything you do is for yourself. And there isn’t one.”
Read the words of the awakened and the same message comes through again and again and again: you don’t exist. Enlightenment – that holiest of grails that each of us in one way or another seeks – is nothing more than the collapse of the false ego, the explosive realization that that which I call “I” was never born, never dies, never was. That all of existence, the entire universe, is one, unfathomable, singularity of beingness and you are That which Is. I am that I am. I Am.
Long-time readers will recall the dream I experienced some years ago when, as a raindrop, I joyously tumbled and fell through a cloudy sky, ecstatic in the freedom that only a flying dream can deliver. And then I broke free of the clouds and stretching below me was an incomprehensibly vast ocean and I was about to tumble back into it. Terrified I struggled desperately to stop my fall but, as a raindrop, what could I do? My heart thudded inside my chest knowing that when I hit that water “I” would forever vanish, a corpse in a cemetery, forgotten, as if never to have existed. And then I hit the water and instantly I became the ocean itself, my little dollop of consciousness was seen to be the consciousness of the ocean itself. I was the all of that ocean and I had mistakenly believed myself to be separate and apart from it. But I was it and it was me, there was no separation, no duality, there was just consciousness itself. One. This, I believe, is what the mystics have been trying to tell us.
But our minds/egos cannot abide such a truth. From their earliest moments these awesome mental instruments create a world of concepts and labels to make sense of the world around them. I mean, they have to if they are to survive, right? As part of that development, however, the mind naturally starts to sense that it exists in a fixed position in ‘time and space’ (inside the head and body, if you will) and that other ‘like-minded’ humans also appear to be separate and apart. It is only a matter of time that the “I” is born.
In his excellent new book, “The Self Illusion: Why There is No ‘You’ Inside Your Head,” neuroscientist Bruce Hood illustrates how science is at last catching up with millennia-old mystical traditions. In studies of animal and human brains science is demonstrating that the I is nothing more than habitual thought patterns born of an impossibly vast and complex series of neural-synpatic connections. “You” are akin to a deer path worn into a woodland bramble, specific neural paths taken again and again to create – at first a fuzzy, and by old age a very firm – sense of self.
We say that children are malleable and the old are set in their ways for a reason: it’s true. Those neural paths in the young are nubile and flexible; some synaptic connections break away from disuse, new ones are forged, the result of a combination of genetic dispositions and environmental conditioning. As we age those connections calcify and the mind itself begins to reaffirm them (i.e. instead of the world telling us who we are we tell the world). We are both flummoxed and amused by the unreliability and unpredictability of our children; but we are similarly flummoxed and amused by the stodginess and inflexibility of the old. And it’s nothing more than the brain at work.
Here is the key: All of this is taking place, not in the absence of your knowing but rather in the CREATION of the ‘you’ that is said to be knowing such things. In other words, the gradual awakening of ‘you’ takes place in conjunction with all of those events and occurrences – they are thoughts, memories and projections that, in the aggregate, make up the you that supposedly is experiencing and thinking them.
The New Age movement likes to remind us that “You are your thoughts,” but then makes the cardinal sin of declaring you have control in changing those thoughts and, by extension, yourself. But if you are indeed your thoughts, how can your thoughts change your thoughts? Grasp that and you start to understand why Jesus warned about being “disturbed.”
But if you want to pursue the truth, stay with it. Keep “going back,” as Nisargadatta and others urged. Go back, back, back to see where ‘you’ began. And what becomes very clear is this: There was no ‘you’ gestating in mom’s belly, no ‘soul’ implanted as part of some Heaven-Earth exchange. ‘You’ weren’t whiling away those infant years nursing and growing and crapping in your diaper just waiting to make a sudden and dramatic appearance. ‘You’ were being formed and shaped much as a sculpture emerging from a block of stone or piece of wood. For good reasons we must teach a child, through repetition, its name; but decades later we take for granted that process of mastering our name and tens of thousands of other concepts and declare ourselves to be this, that and the other thing. To which one might reply, WHO says?
Which brings us all the way back to suffering. I am alone, separate, apart. I need validation, love, recognition, to feel that I am a part of something larger than myself, to know that I will always be loved, even after death, that there is something – God, maybe? – that will explain all of this and forever nurture and love me. That I can at last find rest and peace (RIP).
After Jesus admonished his followers to seek until they find, and cautioned that they would be disturbed by what they found, he ended by explaining that they would “rule over all, and rest.” What does that mean?
I think it means that all of our human-borne fears and anxieties, our cravings and needs, our prejudices and animosities, all of the mental jungle that defines and so often tortures us – that they fall away with the collapse of the ego-self. When we “die to this world” that desperately lonely, needy, insignificant little self collapses in on itself like a dying star, and we are as that dreamy little raindrop merging once again with the ocean of all existence only to learn that we were never really apart from it.
Robert Adams and other mystics rarely if ever even attempted to explain what enlightenment is, in part because (if you’ve been paying attention) there is no such thing as an enlightened being and because “the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” In other words, it is beyond the comprehension of our little three-dimensional minds. But perhaps because Adams and others knew that those same frightened minds needed something to latch onto, something to feed us as we took those first tentative steps inward, he would add that the mind with which we seek the truth cannot possibly know of what it seeks: love, compassion, humility. We humans speak of love but know nothing of it. How could we? The mind, by its very definition, exists in service only to itself, which means its love is predicated on getting something in exchange. We speak of our ‘unconditional love’ for our mate, child, or pet, little realizing that the mind is nothing but conditioning. Which is why the mind feels so isolated and needy even when it has ‘love’ or money or whatever.
So what happens when the mind falls away, when our true nature is revealed? Says Adams:
“I felt a love, a compassion, a humility all at the same time, that was truly indescribable. It wasn’t a love that you’re aware of. Think of something that you really love, or someone that you really love with all your heart. Multiply this by a jillion million trillion and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. This love is like no thing that ever existed on earth, consciously. There is nothing you can compare it with. It is beyond duality, beyond concepts, beyond words and thoughts. And since the I which I was, was all-pervading, there was no other place for anything else to be.”
Which is why all those mystical and spiritual and religious traditions tell us that “God is love,” that we are love, that love is all there is. We suffer because we cannot, in this mind-made, human form, know true love. To know the love of true Oneness, we must overcome the mind; we must begin the journey within, and find that Self that lies beyond the self.
But then again, what do “I” know?
Hi,
Just wanted to say thanks.
The truth is felt in your words.
Lovely reminder.
Thank you,
Liz
Hello Doug,
I discovered your blog a few days ago and have been reading with great interest, both because it is thoughtful and nicely written and because you and I have some clear parallels.
I also hit the wall in my mid-forties. A promising academic career fizzled, middle-age became undeniable even as intimate relationships remained elusive, my father died, and to top it all off I spent several years trying to break an addiction to antidepressant drugs, which of course in the 90s were supposed to just make everything so much better and then ended up sucking the life out of me in many respects. Several excrutiating attempts at withdrawal, finally successfull six months ago (with the help of guided psychedelic work). But trials continue, depression has crept back, and accentuated by being in something of a social and professional hole after all this.
Your views on how one can finally get past all this resonate with me. But I’m curious to hear more about how you view the process of getting to non-duality. I haven’t read all your posts, but I have to say there is to me something of a black box quality to it all. There is a sense of, well, you have to see this in yourself and then the problem will be resolved. But how do you go about getting to the point of seeing it?
This is a tall order for them of us moderns what have been immersed for decades in Cartesian dualism and continue to swim in it daily in our social environs. It seems to me that there are any number of possible paths to a point of breaking down that duality, but that it is rare that it just spontaneously appears because, well, one “decides” to focus on knowing oneself.
Practice of one sort or another is important, no? Meditation. Prayer. Ritual. Therapy and analysis. That last, I have to say, I think you are a little dismissive of in this collumn; a good analyst–and I feel I am lucky to have one–will be in tune with many of the things you write about and not simply focused on being “in the head.” I’m also reasonably convinced that the sorts of hidden traumas that analysis can bring to life and hopefully heal can often stand in the way of the sort of spiritual enlightenment you discuss. If we are seriously hobbled by those legacies the mind tends to protect itself with even greater vigor, no? If they can be revealed and healed things tend to open up. So says me…but I’m still groping here, so do not aspire to gospel.
And…psychedelics. On that last, I am continuing to work periodically with mushrooms and have considered ayahuasca. I AM actually a little concerned about the possibility of what you call “detours” but also think there can be some important revelations here–I’ve already had some, and while they do have a tendency to fade in the way you describe, I seem to be committed to doing more of this (I’m kind of a tough nut to crack, there are many layes to peel away, my sense is that for some of us it takes some time, practice, continued hammering away, and that one has to have some perseverence and tolerance for feeling temporarily worse as things are uncovered). I certainly have spoken with people (and read others) who really have had life-changing experiences with these medicines that seem to “stick”, much of it related to spiritual revelation and recognition of non-duality.
I suppose ultimately I’m looking for further thoughts from you on how one gets from here to there–knowing, of course, that there are many paths! Of course, if you’ve addressed any of this further in posts I’ve not yet read, please just point the way.
Very much enjoy your writing, many thanks for your work!
Best,
Daniel
I like the way Rupert Spira puts it:
“Like the moth that longs for the flame but cannot experience it, so all the separate self’s activities are designed to find Me alone, but I am the one thing it cannot know or have. The only way the separate self can know Me is to die, just as the moth can only know the flame by dying in it. That death is the experience of love, the dissolution of self and other.”