Recommended Listening: The Witness by Adam Jones
The self arises like an albatross from the ocean of experience when something inevitably disturbs the surface. And the greatest original disturbance, shared by all, is birth itself. It is a stone dropped into the constant ebb and flow of the waters of the world. With this stone’s throw, we bring into the world all the unmet need, pain, and longings of our throwers and their worlds. Throughout our sojourn through this life, anything that causes additional disturbances on the surface will inevitably reinforce the self arising from that very chain of disturbances. But a gentle wind disturbing the surface is of a different class that the force of a meteor impacting its surface. Our sense of self and I-ness is as strong as the initial and proceeding disturbances. And by strong, we mean rigid and non-ameliorable to change. The stronger the disturbance, the stronger the self. So how to make this self, this burden of disturbance, this curse of being impacted, more flexible and pliant? How can the self be redeemed from this anvil of history and circumstance, this ancient punishment, into a tool to experience that can shape the world? One pathway: first the self must be made not the self. It must be seen through as something that is not what it proclaims itself to be. It must be negated with compassion. For what it proclaims is that it is a mad god, unimpeachable by mortals. But its true nature is simply the initial impact and pain that created it as this disturbance in the oceanic field. Once seen as just the ripples on the ocean’s surface, then it can become the self again but as an entirely new relation between mind/body/nervous system and world. The self becomes a knife to cut through illusion and carve out new realities. And just like a knife, it can be set down anytime it is not needed. Just as a knife in childlike hands can harm and kill, so to can the self. And just as the knife in healing hands can save and create, so too can the self.
Underneath it all, our ordinary, original mind is simple, unchanging, and always present. We spend the vast majority of our time and energy trying to aggressively and actively control and direct the mind instead of trusting it knows exactly how to operate. We keep hoping to find ourselves out there, in the external world, and we attempt to direct our mind to exactly this end. And how could we not when the basic inheritance of what we see, think, feel, and believe tells us that there is an answer out there somewhere which is a key to our suffering waiting to be found. And it obscures all the ways that our mind exists by trying to coerce it into being something it isn’t. The thinking mind, driven by rumination and fear, becomes a trojan horse used for this end sent by an army of hidden oneness. But it is always carrying its original nature with it in every moment, in every thought, in every fear, in every anxiety, in every abyss. My dear, simply gaze at yourself and see that which is beyond seeing. Unleash your hidden army of oneness into the world.
There are only two things that truly matter: tending the fire/sharing the fire and being the light/transmitting the light. In the vast emptiness of space and its abysmal darkness, preserving the light and sharing it with all you can is all that makes this life meaningful. It is all that reduces the darkness of greed, hatred, and delusion. Perhaps you question whether you carry the fire or can transmit the light. You are never without the light for how could you ever be separate from that which you are? Our fear of being the light is that if we accept it, we must face the pain of believing we were only the darkness for so long. And that our love of the darkness was only a brittle protection against the grief of the light that must lose its own nature to not die out.
If we want to understand the true nature of our suffering, and particularly our shame, we must see that we are dealing with a problem of essentializing. In the experience of trauma and its aftershocks, our inherent capacity to see things as having some real, unchanging nature that defines them becomes not a way of interacting with the world and enhancing our experience. It becomes a prison of our own making for ourselves and others. And this prison cell that has been passed down through the generations from our ancestors is a habit. Does your body look this way? Then you are this. Do you make me feel this way? Then you are this and I am that. Has this happened to me? Then I am this and the world is that. But perhaps the greatest suffering we incur from this essentializing tendency is that we seek safety and security in only that which by its nature does not exist in the way we think. We seek permanence in what is by its very nature impermanent but appears permanent from inside the cage. Who could blame us for suffering so much as we do? And who could blame us for thrashing around like animals with our legs caught in a trap inside our tiny little prison cells? If we want to let go of our shame and our suffering, we must let go of any idea that there is something essential and unchanging which could provide us refuge from our fear and pain. Then we are left to feel and experience that which is most present and most unchanging. You must see behind your own eyes. You must walk out of the door of your cage and the cages of all those before you.
You can never truly prepare for anything. Anything. All you can do is be the light of all things within and without and trust you will be supported by all the universe. Which is to say, yourself in all your myriad forms. Even more so, you must ask: who even is the self that is being prepared? The self that can be prepared and therefore stop the universe from exploding is just a map plastered over an unimaginable territory. Preparation is the final lock on the door that is the gateway to liberation.
No one can convince you, confirm for you, or validate that you are the light. And you cannot do any of these for anyone else. You being the light is only a truth to be rejected or accepted. But the conditions of this choice – when, where, how we choose to accept or reject – are where we have the most power and agency in the great chain of causation. This is the great lie of all binary, all-or-nothing logic: that choice is freestanding and not conditioned by myriad things that are constantly changing. It obliterates context and the most radical conditions of freedom. It makes itself appear as if there is only one binary choice which is inherently objective. While there may be certain either-or choices that are unavoidable aspects of reality, the conditions upon which we make those choices which determine our lives can be influenced and changed. And through this process of planting the seeds of change ourselves in the seedbed of life, we thereby make what appears to be a choice between black and white become an actual choice.
The most important question is not “why is this happening?” but “what is this happening?” When the desire for an activity arises, “what is this desire that is happening?” When terror arises, “what is this terror that is happening?” When doubt arises, “what is this doubt that is happening?” When grief arises, “what is this grief that is happening?” When self-hatred arises, “what is this self-hatred that is happening?” If you can glimpse even for a moment that nameless place from where these things arise, then liberation, healing and peace are yours in that very moment and for all time and space. And it can be glimpsed in every moment of your existence. And when you strike it, it comes as quick as a lighting bolt and as silent as a serpent. Now. Now. NOW.
We are traumatized on the basis of our conditions and particulars. We are wounded because we are born in this time, this place, this body, this family, this brain, this nervous system, this life. And the beautiful and terrible news is that wounding only occurs on the basis of our conditions and particulars. The light we are cannot be traumatized or wounded. So as long as we only identify on the level of the particulars, we develop a love affair with our conditions and particulars. And we also doom ourselves to a love affair with our wounding. And this must also be counterbalanced with the recognition that in our worlds of wounding, the identification with our particulars and conditions is also imposed from the rest of the circuit of which we are but a node. What world do you live in that would ever acknowledge that you are beyond any particular or condition? The only way out is to become both what is particular to us on our own terms and what is universal in us on transcendent terms. And thereby, transcend them both and grant them and ourselves their full being. Which is to say, the chance to actually be alive perhaps for the first time.
In the Bhagavad Gita, there is a moment when the young warrior, Arjuna, humbly requests of Krishna (that glorious being representing all of creation and the Godhead in a particular form) to reveal the true nature of his existence and the ultimate truth of reality. Krishna opens his gaping maw and he reveals the thresher of existence itself to Arjuna. And it is intolerable. It is sublime, beyond all categories of beauty and terror. It is a universal thresher that eats all matter and time itself. Nothing escapes it and we all must be devoured at some point. But what of the children who have been chewed and ground up in the thresher but were unable to be digested? What of the children that were spit back into the world? For some, the universe, Krishna himself, has no choice but to vomit them right back up and they get another chance at existence. Who can say why some are not able to be devoured on the first attempt? May they all find life through and beyond the maw of death and time itself. Each and every one of us.
Being overwhelmed by something, especially by one’s own emotions or bodily sensations, is fundamentally a problem of a divided consciousness. Overwhelm typically arises from a feeling of not being in control of self or others. I can be overwhelmed by the degree to which the thing I am overwhelmed by, and my self which is being overwhelmed, are of two different natures. The fastest route to interrupting this shutdown process of overwhelm is to reopen the circuity of energy and information exchange between the node in the circuit and the rest of the world. This means we must fully identify with what is overwhelming the “you” in the experience. Because I cannot be overwhelmed by something I already am. Control is no longer needed when there is no longer a division between self and other. If you want to not be overwhelmed by your rage and anger, then become the rage. If you want to not be overwhelmed by your sadness and despair, then become the sadness and despair. If you want to not be overwhelmed by your bodily sensations, then become the bodily sensations. And if you want to not be overwhelmed by the world and others, then become the world and others.
When I was very small, I was told by those I cherished most that I was the clouds, not the sky. And so I spent many, many moons believing that I was the clouds. All the while, not knowing behind every shape and size of cloud, there was just the sky silently and patiently waiting for us all to see it. Some days, parts of me kick and scream and plead for answers about why would anyone not tell me this sacred fact that you are the sky. But when I ask the sky, it responds, “Of course they told you this! Who told them they were the sky and not the clouds? No one. So on we go through time until someone decides to look back at the sky and lift their head out of the dirt.” Nothing but clouds naming each other without any awareness they are just formations of the sky.
Grief is not some great ocean wave seeking to destroy you mercilessly. Grief is a hot cup of chamomile tea that you can sip as quick or as slow as you’d like. The only question is for each person to decide is where is the boundary between scolding your mouth and warming and body and mind. Fire burns but fire also heals and nourishes. And how could our grief be any different? This universe was made from fire and the seeds of your grief were born in its crucible all those eons ago. Your grief was poured into this cup for you to drink which is your body and mind. For the universe grieves in its own way and you are its tears and its cries, waiting to be drunk. Grief is a reckoning with this fact and a homecoming for the universe to itself. Grief is the universe returning to itself after its play in the world of appearances.
If you breathe even a single breath where you, all beings, and the universe breathe as one, are as one, then it is a life very well lived. And even if this breath is your very last before greeting death, it still holds true that it was a life very well lived and you can great death with a smile and an embrace. For in each breath where all is one, then there is nothing absent and no goal left to complete. There is no striving and no incompleteness. There is nothing lost and nothing gained. There is nothing not repaired and nothing wounded in the first place. There is no you and there is no me. There is no past and there is no future. But there is a recognition of how long you’ve gone waiting, hoping, pleading for even a single breath that obliterates all separateness. So you can rest easy and know that there is no longer any need to strive for anything.
The world is so much safer when you’re not in control of it. If you’d like to verify this for yourself, please attempt to do so wholeheartedly. Try with all your might to let go of your need to control the world. And notice how when you do, little by little, you have the sudden realization that you’ve never actually tried to not be in control of reality and your world prior to that very moment. For how many of us never attempt to let go of the need to control the world to feel safe until our last breaths are slipping through our fingers? If it is a choice between controlling the world and dying in every moment or letting go of control and dying only twice, I will chose two deaths over an infinite number of them.
One of the most hard-won realizations and deepest pains of healing is to see the ways that as much as we are terrified and feel shame for existing, we have become in fact dependent on and addicted to fear and shame. Your mind/body/nervous system became acclimated and dependent on that which has most been used to feel alive. Being addicted to fear and shame becomes necessary when we see that these were the only sources of aliveness and the only way to feel connected to reality at all in the first place. And when we say reality, we are saying to the larger world circuitry of our bonds of attachment to those around us and the environment to ensure we do not die of starvation and isolation. Hence, fear and shame become addictions to the degree that they have become definitional to what it means to be connected and alive. So the real questions at hand are: what world required my fear and shame to be connected at all and not starve to death? What hell realm would require these as the blood tokens to stay alive? Breaking dependency requires knowing the world of your birth for the first time. And then stepping off the thousand foot pole into utter darkness to see where you land. But on the way down, you may find there is no self that is dependent on shame and fear to survive, just a falling into everything. Falling, falling, falling forever.
I’ve come to see that the primary way that suffering continues into the future through generations is the way we are primarily conditioned to give away littles pieces and big pieces of our mind to everything and everyone in hopes of being accepted, safe, and loved. And we will do this until there is nothing left of our mind at all in hopes of winning our survival and love. The only other choice we feel we have to prevent this catastrophe is, in a state of utter terror, to refuse allow our minds to be given away at all. Which is to say, to doom ourselves to isolation and self-abandonment. But both forms of suffering emerge from the reality that in origination, you did not give your mind away. It was stolen from you. The greatest spiritual and psychological violence you can do to any being, especially a young vulnerable being, is to steal parts of their whole mind (which is to say self) until there is nothing left as a desperate attempt to supplement the loss of your own. The true experience of relating that requires no giving away or stealing of your mind is to share your mind wholeheartedly. This is what is called vulnerability.
In the teachings of Buddhism, it has been said that samsara, the world of suffering, is when the mind/body/nervous system is unaware of its own nature. And it is said that nirvana, the world where suffering has been extinguished, is when the mind/body/nervous system is aware of its own nature. In psychedelic journeys into nonordinary states of consciousness, it is not uncommon to find the realization that this experience of oneness and unity with all things is the world and reality itself. And that our day-to-day state of consciousness and experience of separateness and aloneness is the altered nonordinary state. When we gaze outward of the body and the mind to the world making up the rest of the circuitry of our experience, what systems, structures, and institutions are built upon and perpetuate this nonordinary, altered state of consciousness of separation and aloneness? How do those systems mirror and reflect the altered state of consciousness of trauma and utter isolation in the universe? What may be the case is that each world and its corresponding system corresponds to an associated state of consciousness. And every moment of experience contains the seeds of that form and structure of consciousness. There are as many states of consciousness as there are worlds. So if you endeavor to live in a different world, first ask: what state of consciousness do you desire to experience? And notice what world (inner and outer world as one unified circuit) would be required to experience that state of consciousness. Then, and only then, can we start to realistically ask the question of, “how do I find a way out of samsara?” or “how do I find the true nature of the mind/body/nervous system?” Until then, every question of liberation will inevitably be the ripened fruit of the very state of consciousness and world that demands our suffering. Notice how, if you look carefully, each philosophy or spiritual discipline of liberation always contains some theory and technique of how to alter your state of consciousness. Mind precedes world precedes mind precedes world and so on. And right in the middle, right under our noses, is the ability to consciously plant seeds that shape them.
The bad news is that you’re not who you thought you were or who you were told you were. And the world is not what you thought it was. The good news is you’re not who you thought you were or who you were told you were! And the world is not what you thought it was!
There is no such thing as healing – only remembering for the first time.
