About half a year ago, several essays on dying appeared in THE SUN. I was surprised by the reactions. Some readers thought we were being morbid, celebrating death rather than life; one even worried that I was contemplating suicide.
So, I’ll preface this by saying I’m as attached to life as any of you. My interest in dying is the same as my interest in living: to move beyond the superficial, to open to the unknown, to touch what Stephen Levine calls “the deathless,” that part of us that exists beyond birth or death.
Who Dies? (Anchor Press, Doubleday, $9.95) is “an investigation of conscious living and conscious dying” — which, according to Stephen Levine, turn out to be much the same:
“We speak of dying in wholeness yet we see there are aspects of ourselves that have never fully seen the light of day. We see how much of ourselves is submerged, feels yet unborn, how much we push away life. It is as though we had never fully touched the ground of being . . . If we examine our fear of death we see in it a fear of the moment to follow, over which we have no control. It is a fear of impermanence itself. . . . To become wholly born, whole beings, we must stop postponing life. To the degree we postpone life, we postpone death. We deny death and life in one fell swoop.”
Who Dies? is a manual for dying — there are useful chapters on working with pain, dying children, the moment of death, grief, funerals — and a manual for living, too. The author of A Gradual Awakening and co-author, with Ram Dass, of Grist for the Mill, Levine is a long-time practitioner of Buddhist meditation; it shows. He writes clearly and poetically of “what is,” without judgment, reminding us, “We participate in our natural spaciousness so seldom that we have come to believe we are whatever arises in the mind.” My only quibble with this book are the incomplete sentences I sometimes found confusing. I’d like for this book to be accessible to as many people as possible. It’s wise, beautiful, important.
Levine is co-director with his wife Ondrea, of the Hanuman Foundation’s Dying Project in Santa Fe, New Mexico (Box 478, Santa Fe, N.M. 87501), which now has a Dying Center, with a full-time staff, where people can come to die. Ram Dev (Dave Borglum), the director of the Center, will be in Chapel Hill October 8 to give a lecture at the Wesley Foundation. On October 9 and 10 he’ll do an all-day workshop at the home of Bo and Sita Lozoff. For more information, call (919) 942-2138.
Our thanks to Stephen Levine for permission to reprint these excerpts from Who Dies? (Another excerpt from the book appeared in THE SUN, Issue 74).
— Ed.
When we think of our death, we imagine ourselves surrounded by loving friends, the room filled with a serene quietude that comes from nothing more to say, all business finished; our eyes shining with love and with a whisper of profound wisdom as to the transiency of life, we settle back into the pillow, the last breath escaping like a vast “Ahh!” as we depart gently into the light.
But what if just as you are about to “Ahh!” out of the body, your mate turns to you and confesses they have been having an affair with your best friend? Or your angry child comes bursting into the room saying, “You’ve always been a jerk, why don’t you stop playing your games!”? Would your heart slam shut like a stone door, would your mind whirl with confusion and self-doubt, would you need to say something in return to try to defend yourself, would you contract in painful agreement?
How can we die in wholeness when we have lived our lives in such partiality? When we have lived our lives so much in the mind’s precious idea of itself, how can we die with our hearts wide open to the mystery of it all? Where will we take refuge? Where will the confidence in the perfection of the moment come from when we have so often pulled back from what we feared?
It is difficult to think of dying consciously when we notice how incomplete we feel, how frightened we are of life. It is almost as though we were never completely born, so much of ourselves is suppressed and compacted just beneath the surface. So much of ourselves postponed. So little have we investigated what has caused us to retract in pain from our lives. So often our inquiries into who we are have been “called on account of rain” because it was too painful to go deeper.
We speak of dying in wholeness yet we see there are aspects of ourselves that have never fully seen the light of day. We see how much of ourselves is submerged, feels yet unborn, how much we push away life. It is as though we had never fully touched the ground of being. Never placed our two feet squarely in the present. Always shuffling and toe tapping, waiting for the next moment to arrive.
If we examine our fear of death we see in it a fear of the moment to follow, over which we have no control. In it is a fear of impermanence itself, of the next unknown changing moment of life.
To become wholly born, whole beings, we must stop postponing life. To the degree we postpone life, we postpone death. We deny death and life in one fell swoop.
There is so much of ourselves we wish not to experience. So much fear, guilt, anger, confusion, and self-pity. So much self-doubt, so many weak excuses. Is it any wonder, considering the bizarre insistence of our conditioning — the conflict of one value system with another in the mind — that we feel so incomplete. One moment the mind is saying, “Take a big piece,” and then the next it says, “I wouldn’t have done that if I were you.” No wonder we are all crazy, so fractured, trying to protect ourselves from who we fear we are. We dare not share our minds with anyone, even ourselves. We are so frightened of who we might be, of not being loved or lovable for the convolutions of our thoughts.
But states of mind, though uninvited, are constantly coming and going, and some we wish would never come again. They do, and we find ourselves scrambling for leverage to keep our fear down, experiencing the nausea of our immense insecurity and self-loathing.
This persistent elimination from awareness of unwanted states of mind leaves us constantly feeling threatened as we look and say regretfully, “That can’t be me, that fear isn’t really who I am. Anger isn’t me. That self-hatred, that guilt, can’t be who I am.” But there it is. And you wonder who you really are. How do you open to that which you deny? That which you think somehow shouldn’t be there even though it is?
We wish we were otherwise and that is our hell, our resistance to life.
Coming to the end of our life, we look at our participation in the past and wonder how we can die fully when our life has been lived in such partialness. We wonder who, beyond all our self-projections, it really is that dies.
It is almost as though we have become a fractured image of our original being. Our experience with the world has become like looking into a mirror that a great stone has fallen on and shattered into hundreds of pieces, broken from a single unified reality into some splintered reflection of what is seen, of what is imagined to exist. As we look at this fractured reality, we notice with dismay certain parts of the reflection are not what we wish to see or want to be seen. “I don’t want anyone to see my lust; that’s not such a good thing to have. I’m not supposed to be like that. No one’s mind is as crazy as mine.” So we take a piece out. “Oh, there I am really sorry for myself. If they only knew what my life had been like! Ah, but they don’t.” And that piece is removed as well. You notice your greed and self-interest, the sexual fantasies, the competition and confusion of the mind. And you start picking these pieces out. Because these are unacceptable parts of who you think you are supposed to be.
But I think it is very useful, and indeed more accurate, to call it “the mind” instead of “my mind.”
Because when you call it “my mind,” you start removing so many pieces that when you look down at this fractured mirror it reflects back very little of what is real. It only displays those qualities you wish to project as being who you are, eliminating all the rest, eluding your wholeness. We think we have something to hide. Yet this self-protection is our imprisonment. Imagine if for the next twenty-four hours you had to wear a cap that amplified your thoughts so that everyone within a hundred yards of you could hear every thought that passed through your head. Imagine if the mind were broadcast so that all about you could overhear “your” thoughts and fantasies, “your” dreams and fears. How embarrassed or fearful would you be to go outside? How long would you let your fear of the mind continue to isolate you from the hearts of others? And though this experiment sounds like one which few might care to participate in, imagine how freeing it would be at last to have nothing to hide. And how miraculous it would be to see that all others’ minds too were filled with the same confusion and fantasies, the same insecurity and doubt. How long would it take the judgmental mind to begin to release its grasp, to see through the illusion of separateness, to recognize with some humor the craziness of all beings’ minds, the craziness of the mind itself?
To be whole we must deny nothing.
We think we have something to lose, and the reinforcement of that feeling that there is something to protect cuts us off from life, leaves us a fractured reality through which we attempt to express our naturalness. But life becomes confusing when we eliminate the truth. And we wonder, how do I live my life or die my death with room for the whole being, no matter what is arising in the mind. Because we see that when we wish not to experience certain qualities in ourselves, our heart closes whenever these qualities arise.
We wonder, how can I keep my heart open when what I am experiencing isn’t pleasant, when I see my self-interest, my fear, guilt, my doubt? When the predominant state of mind is confusion, can I still stay open to the moment? Or do I have to escape elsewhere? We show so little mercy to ourselves. We barricade the heart and feel alone in a hostile world. We seldom let go of our judgment and make room in our heart for ourselves. How can we so lack compassion for this being we feel suffering in our heart? If, without self-pity, we fully acknowledge our pain, it would be difficult not to be swept with a care and compassion for our own well-being. The very nature of having to pull away from what is, of having to be someone else, makes life hellish. It is a resistance. And we live a great deal of our life in hell.
We show so little mercy to ourselves. We barricade the heart and feel alone in a hostile world. We seldom let go of our judgment and make room in our heart for ourselves. . . . The very nature of having to pull away from what is, of having to be someone else, makes this life hellish. It is a resistance. And we live a great deal of our life in hell.
Anger arises in the mind and we become confused. “If I’m a spiritual person, I shouldn’t have anger. I guess I’m not so spiritual after all. I mustn’t show this anger.” But anger is the truth of that moment, and if we push it away, if we pretend that it’s not there, we’ve lost another opportunity for freedom, another reflection on who we really are and who we really aren’t. Because we don’t know what anger is, though we may have experienced it thousands of times. Just as we don’t know what fear is, or doubt is — because each time they arise, instead of using this mental state as an opportunity for investigation, it becomes an emergency, a threat to our self-image. Very seldom, as we’re walking down the road, if something arises which threatens us, do we go straight into it. Instead we attempt to dodge to the right or to the left, to elude the next moment, to escape. We wish to rush away to the safety of a false reality, a fractured being, in which we somehow feel safe. We are constantly attempting to escape from the truth. We are frightened of the open space of investigation, frightened of becoming vulnerable to the truth of the moment, open to what is. We want to capture the world, to control reality and turn it into some image of ourselves.
It’s that very attempt at control that is at the root of much of our suffering. Attempting to re-create the pleasures of the past, to barricade the future from the pains of unfulfilled yearnings. But events are, in a very real way, beyond our control. They are this way one minute, and another way the next. And sometimes the truth is that there is anger or fear or greed, that there is lust or ignorance in the mind. All of which is O.K., because these too are opportunities for seeing deeper, for going beyond the identification with these states as being all we are.
But if it isn’t O.K. that these states arise, there you are pulling back from the present, acting your life instead of opening to it — is a conspiracy to deny the truth with each person you meet. Pretending that both of you have your feet planted solidly on the ground, neither admitting the groundlessness of the other. It is the social game. Because it’s not polite to admit that both of you are hiding the truth of your being. In the same way that it is not polite to be angry or frightened. In the same way that we fear we will not be loved if others knew how our mind worked, if we were real.
Anger is a good example of how we hide our experience from ourselves. For many people, anger is a very unacceptable phenomenon on the one hand, and a very compulsive way of acting on the other. But when anger stimulates investigation, it becomes a meditation on life rather than a distraction from it — then the escape syndrome, the resistance to life, becomes recognizable and we start to come out of hiding. We start to emerge into the light.
The mind compares itself with images of Buddha or Jesus, with saints and selfless beings of which we have read. And the mind finds itself wanting in the balance. The mind condemns itself for being what it is, though it fears letting go into the spacious freedom that would release it from its bondage. Like the battered child carried gently from its mother, its tormentor, the mind cries out in pain for what it is leaving, fearful of what is yet to come. To the mind, even hell is acceptable and preferable to the unknown.
We berate ourselves for the contents of the mind, for the anger and doubt, for the fear and loathing. And it is this very act of judgment that continues the judgment of the mind, that causes us to feel separate from ourselves and all else. It is constantly rating us on our behavior and participation, and seldom disappears long enough for us to merge with our experience, to become one with life.
I have met several very clear beings, yet I don’t believe I’ve met anyone who is completely without anger. To be without anger means we have no desires, no models of how things should or must be. No desires means no frustration. No frustration, no anger. (And yet this, too, is a model which if we hold to can lead to frustration and confusion.) If the mind doesn’t cling to anything being any way at all, then there’s no anger. Our anger is a kind of spontaneous combustion that occurs when our idea of things becomes cramped by reality.
Our models, our ideas of who we are and how the world is supposed to be, create a cage. Each concept becomes a bar that blocks the reception of the truth. Each idea of how things are limits our ability to experience them as they really may be. We can’t go beyond our idea of the world to actually touch the world. When we move beyond our models and ideas, we feel threatened and defensive. Confronting some reality which opposes our self-image, our sureness confuses and upsets us. We don’t know who we are because we think of ourselves as our ideas and old models. The world is constantly confronting us with the truth. We are constantly withdrawing. Our experience is pain.
Confronted with a reality which does not confirm our image of how things are, we begin to panic. We look for someplace to hide. Often I am with people who are dying while still attempting to conceal themselves. Indeed, I suspect many beings die in hiding. They are still relating to death and life as though it were outside of them. Just as they relate to anger and fear and their difficulty with others as though it were coming from outside, as though they were a victim of their feelings and their thoughts, rather than the space in which all this mind-stuff is unfolding. We choose to trade off reality for the safety of our cage. No matter how small. No matter how painfully we have withdrawn from life.
Our fear of death is directly equatable to our fear of life. When we think of dying we think of losing something called, “me.” We wish to protect this thing at all costs though we have very little direct experience of what this “I” refers to other than as some idea which seems constantly to be changing. In death, we fear we will lose our “I,” our “me-ness.” And we notice that the stronger this idea of “I,” the more distinct is the feeling of a separation from life and a fear of death. The more we attempt to protect this idea of “I,” the less we experience anything beyond that concept. The more we have invested in protecting something of “me,” the more we have to lose and the less we open to a deeper perception of what dies, of what really exists. The more we hide or posture or postpone life, the more we fear death.
Protecting this precious “I” we push life away, and wonder at its meaninglessness.
Until we have nothing to hide, we cannot be free. If we are still considering the contents of the mind as the enemy, we become frightened, thinking we have something especially wrong with us. Not recognizing the mind as just the result of previous conditioning, nothing special. That all these states of mind which we fear so much can actually be mulched back into ourselves to become fertilizer, the manure for further growth. Which means that in order to allow these materials to compost, to become rich fertilizers for growth, we must begin to make room in our hearts for ourselves. We must begin to cultivate the compassion that allows the moment to be as it is, in the clear light of awareness, without the least postponement of the truth.
Indeed, we often relate to ourselves as a puzzle from which many pieces have been removed. We gaze at a very distorted and confusing image we have constructed and are bewildered. We look at this puzzle of ourselves and notice only the fractures, only the surface mind of separation and partiality, and wonder, “Who is this really that I am?” When we focus and identify with our fracturedness, we become afraid of ourselves. But as we allow ourselves to penetrate deeper, working to acknowledge these things, to let go of our partialness and hiding, the fractures no longer obscure the whole picture. It is like going beneath the surface of a wind-torn sea, to the stillness that is untouched by surface conditions.
And we begin to penetrate the surface commotion and find that guilt and fear and anger, and all the mental smorgasbord that has been stashed there, are nothing to be afraid of. We imagine that these things we have suppressed are who we really are. But by starting to acknowledge these qualities, to bring them into awareness, to open to them with some compassion for this human condition we find ourselves in, allows us to go deeper to what underlies this seemingly solid reality. As long as we are pushing parts of ourselves away, we cannot go deeper. “Self-knowledge is bad news,” as a frightened friend put it. Or as one Tibetan teacher said of the penetration of this layer of suppressed material, “It is just one insult after another.” Most people are afraid of confronting all the stuff they have pushed down because they still think of it as being who they are. We are frightened of all the forbidden mind states that we have pushed below the surface of awareness to protect our self-image.
Yet we see that we must suppress nothing. In suppression we push below awareness what we imagine is unacceptable. In this very act of suppression we enslave ourselves. We have postponed life once again. Nothing can be free of its prison of darkness until it has been brought out into the light of awareness. Suppression pushes things out of awareness where they become inaccessible. Tendencies that motivate us are still present but we no longer have access to them because they have been forced below the level of awareness. So each feeling must be acknowledged in its turn, allowed to exist without judgment or fear in clear awareness where it may be seen for what it is, an impermanent, oddly impersonal state of mind passing through. We imagine that we are caught in some unworkable situation, that life is a punishment instead of a gift.
Each time we identify with anger as “I,” or with doubt or guilt as being who we really are, we suppress that state of mind and can go no deeper. Whenever you call anything “I,” that’s where you stop. That’s the depth of penetration. That’s where you get off the elevator. But if you stay open to anger, and let anger be there, you go deeper. You begin to experience the space in which these things arise and into which they dissolve. You begin to experience the space anger is floating in. That moment is not a moment of anger, but a moment of clear awareness. And then you stop identifying with yourself as anger. You are observing anger, but not becoming lost in it.
We begin to stop thinking of these different qualities of mind as being “I” and start to open to the space, the wholeness, within which the events are occurring: a nonjudging, exquisitely merciful space that we have access to in the heart, that doesn’t cling or condemn any object of the mind. This space is the essence of mind itself. It doesn’t call itself Susan or Fred or Ondrea or “I.” It just is. It is the space of is-ness itself. It is the root of that which we refer to when we say “I am.” It is the awareness that we mistakenly call “I.”
We have gotten so used to looking outside of ourselves that we have forgotten to ask who it is that’s looking.
We participate in our natural spaciousness so seldom that we have come to believe we are whatever arises in the mind. When our confusion arises in the mind, we contract into an incomplete puzzle of things. We lose our natural spaciousness. When we think of dying, we think of losing who we are. We think we will no longer be able to be this or that which we imagine ourselves to be. Yet if we pay close attention, we notice that whenever we say, “I am this,” or “I am that,” there is to some degree a feeling of being an impostor. That whenever the “I am” of just being is attached to this or that in the world, there is a feeling of falsity, of incompleteness, of somehow not quite telling the whole truth. When I say “I am happy” or “I am sad,” “I am smart” or “I am fair,” we see that all the things we attach to this “I am” are constantly in change; that one moment we are happy, and then the next we are proud, and in the next judgmental of that pride, and in the next confused, and then once again, remembering and coming back to the “I am,” and then again lost in the this’s and that’s which we so often attach this “I am” of pure being to. “I am this” or “I am that” somehow feels untrue. Because there is nothing within this universe of change that I can call myself for very long, nothing I can say I am that is the whole truth. In fact, much of the time we feel like we are pretending to be someone else simply by pretending to be anything at all. But we notice that when we simply say “I am” that there is just space, just being; that this “I” does not refer to something separate, to something outside of ourselves, or even to the body or the mind. It is just a sense of presence, of being. When you say “I am” and when I say “I am,” we are referring to the same being. We are referring to being itself. Everybody’ s “I” is the same “I.” It only becomes separate, and a religious war, when we attach a this or that to it. When you say “I am this,” the universality of being is lost. When you say “I am this joy or this fear or this mind or this body,” the truth is shattered like the rock hitting the mirror. The One is broken into the many.
We are constantly trying to become someone or something. “I am this” conveys the idea that I am not that. But if there is envy in the mind, or fear or guilt, how do you incorporate these qualities into your self-image? Or can you just let go of that imagined self long enough to open to the contents of the moment, no matter what they are? How can you open and go beyond what Zorba the Greek calls “the whole catastrophe”? For it’s only a catastrophe if there’s something to elude. How, when jealousy or envy comes up, instead of closing the heart, can you begin investigating that denseness in the mind, seeing how isolating such heavy emotion can be and how quickly these states of mind attract the idea of “I”? How seldom we go beyond the emotions, thinking we must either express them or suppress them, never sensing that we are the spaciousness of being itself.
How, seeing the compulsive response of the mind to its contents, can you not feel compassion for that being momentarily caught in such pain? We cheat ourselves with so little compassion. We treat ourselves in ways that we would never treat another. Somehow we think it’s O.K. to do it to ourselves because we’ve lost the sense of who we are. We’ve forgotten we too are the truth.
Such forgetfulness causes great pain. When we speak of our grief, that is much of what we are referring to. The loss of touch with our original nature. We’ve suppressed so much, so many parts of ourselves have been found unacceptable and frightening, that when these qualities arise we squash them down and tend to feel that this tangled mass is our “hidden identity.” Because these states of mind so conflict with our models, they become yet more bars in our cage. Each instance of suppression makes the cage smaller.
We are cultivating ignorance by attempting to keep awareness from touching what is deeper in our “industrial dump site.”
We fear that is where our “real nature” lies because we don‘t see how anger or fear or jealousy can take us to the living truth. Not what I say to you, or what Krishnamurti says to you, or what Buddha says to you, or what Jesus says to you. Discover yourself. Because you are the truth. And no one can take you there except you. Buddha left a road map, Jesus left a road map, Krishna left a road map, Rand McNally left a road map. But you still have to travel the road yourself. It is like a friend of mine who approached a Zen master to request the teachings that would help free her from the superficial illusions of separateness and fear. She said, “I have come to learn the path.” The Zen master, silent for a moment, pointed to her with loving ferocity and said, “You are the path!”
If we examine our fear of death we see in it a fear of the moment to follow, over which we have no control. It is a fear of impermanence itself, of the next unknown changing moment of life.
When you begin to recognize that you are the path, that all of life is but a reflection of the mind, then each experience becomes an opportunity to free yourself from your prison. At this point, you begin to see that life is an opportunity for wholeness, for opening to the truth. You start investigating “What closes me from this essential spaciousness of being? Who am I, really?”
There is a meditation master in Thailand by the name of Achaan Chaa, who in his early years became a monk because his priority was to try, more than anything else, to understand what it is that sits here, who it is that exists. To understand as he puts it, “just this much,” just this moment of being as it unfolds. After practicing for a few years, he heard rumors about a meditation master in the northern part of Thailand who was reputed to have no anger. No anger is quite an accomplishment; think of what that means. It means a mind that clings nowhere. It means the being has tuned into their original nature to such an extent that they see no object in mind, even anger, as who they really are. They don’t identify with anything that comes up as being separate from the truth.
When he heard of this great teacher, he left the monastery where he had been practicing and went to ask the teacher if he might become his student. He spent about a year and a half with this teacher, and the fellow never seemed angry. Very impressive. Then one day, out of sight of the teacher, in an L-shaped kitchen where they were both working, he looked over as a dog came into the room and jumped up on the counter to grab some tasty morsel. The meditation master looked both ways and then kicked the dog. Achaan Chaa got the teaching! Imagine the painfulness, the incredible mercilessness to pretend for any reason at all that what is present in the mind isn’t there. Yet we all perpetrate this same execution on ourselves, pretending to be something we aren’t, partially born, partially alive, wondering so at the heaviness of life.
To be whole, to live life fully, to die fully, we can deny nothing. I am told the American Indians had a tradition called the “Eater of Impurities”: on a high holy day, like a solstice, the shaman, the wise man of the tribe, would sit with each member of the tribe individually and suggest something like, “Bring into your mind some thought, some feeling that you have that you wish no one else to know; some idea or fantasy, something you feel is aberrant or abhorrent; that you feel you must suppress and hide away.” Often that person would be so frightened that he would hardly be able to allow that thought to arise in his mind for fear that it might somehow leak out his ears and be heard. That someone would overhear the fearful content of his mind. But the shaman encouraged the individual to see how frightened he was of exposing himself, of being vulnerable, of approaching wholeness. And he would say, after some time, “Now, give me that thought.” And the thought or image would be brought out and shared between them. And the darkness in which it was held would be dispelled in the light of the trust and compassion of the moment. And each, once again, saw how little there was to protect, how much room the heart has for all the mind’s meanderings. As one teacher put it, “The mind creates the abyss; the heart crosses it.”
It might be useful to sit down with the following exercise and investigate the mind and heart which closes.
Letting the Mind Float in the Heart
[This is a guided meditation which can be read slowly to a friend or repeated silently to oneself.]
Bring some unacceptable thought into your mind. Some thought you wish no one else knew you had.
Just let it be there.
But let it be there with compassion.
Feel how the mind constricts around that thought, how it wishes to squeeze it out of existence. See how frightened the mind is of itself. Feel the texture of the fear. See how we live our life before a mirror.
Now take that thought and, instead of surrounding it with denial and tension, allow it to float free in the mind. Just let it be there.
Allow that thought to be experienced as a sensation in the mind.
Feel its denseness, its sharp edges.
Now, begin to allow that thought to sink into the heart. Bring that sensation down through the throat and into your body. Let it settle into the heart-space in the center of your chest. Let the thought just think itself there, in the spaciousness where there is room for everything and judgment of nothing.
Whether it is the thought of masturbation, homosexuality, violence, fear, dishonesty. Whatever thought you fear is totally unacceptable in the mind, allow it to sink gently into the extraordinary openness of the heart, where it is welcomed in warmth and patience.
The natural spaciousness of the heart excludes nothing. It experiences each thought compassionately as just another movement in the mind, just another feeling.
Experience that now, floating in this soft compassion. See how fear is like a prison in the mind. Come out into the warmth and love of your essential nature.
What is there to fear?
What is worth the imprisonment of self-protection?
We think we are our thoughts. We call our thoughts “I.” In letting go of thought, we go beyond ourselves, beyond who we imagine we are. Behind the restless movement of the mind is the stillness of being, the stillness that has no name, no reputation, nothing to protect. It is the natural mind.
Focusing attention on the sensations in the heart center, we notice each flicker of the mind’s contractions, the momentary stagnation we think of so much as “I.” Each contraction in mind, each feeling and thought is felt like a shadow crossing the heart; each time mind draws attention to itself it reminds us to let go lightly of what obstructs our connectedness with our underlying nature. Then each previously threatening state of mind, so often thought of as the enemy, becomes an ally. Each fluctuation of the heart reminds us to let go gently into yet a deeper level of being. When the mind becomes full with itself, its denseness is so obvious it causes us to recall the freedom glowing in the heart and we open into it. Then the heavier the emotion, the more intense the self-interest and confusion, the more these states become teachings which remind us that we are not these painful densities (painful because we fear and resist them, dense because they coagulate the flow), that we are rather the light that shines beyond. Even the thinnest sheet of tinfoil held before your eyes can block the warmth and light of the immensity of the sun.
In the Sufi tradition, there is a saying, “Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world, who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each of us is part of her heart and therefore endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. You are sharing in the totality of that pain. You are called upon to meet it in joy, instead of self-pity. The secret: offer your heart as a vehicle to transform cosmic suffering into joy.”
We have pushed so much of our life away, held it captive so deep within us that when we begin to let go we notice how much our expectations, concepts, and preconceptions have limited our experience. As the self-protection of the mind is no longer encouraged, we begin to see all that we have suppressed come into consciousness once again. All these old holdings rise once again into awareness. But the priority has changed. We are no longer trying to create “someone or something of value” out of this constant changing flow of mind. We are instead attempting to investigate the truth. In this investigation, no state of mind is preferable to any other. Only the clarity of seeing is of importance. It is not what is seen so much as how clearly it is perceived. Then the investigation becomes what is the truth, who am I really, what is it that I call “I,” what dies? Am I these thoughts? Am I this mind? Am I this body?
The more we allow of the mind to exist within clarity and compassion, the less we are tempted to call any fleeting moment “I.” The less we are lost in identification with the superficiality of “I am this or that.” The more we experience just consciousness itself, no longer so distraught with its contents or clinging desperately to its joys. We experience just the spacious stillness of being, without any need to define who it is that is being. Or perhaps, more accurately, what is being. Though the mind may scramble for a dozen definitions and limitations, the experience itself is limitless. And the small mind is seen floating within the vastness.
Then one day there comes a moment when you’re angry and all of a sudden you recognize anger. And you open to it in investigation: “What is it to be angry? How does it feel in my body? What does my mind do?” And settling back into a chair, closing our eyes, we begin to move toward that which blocks the heart, instead of pulling away from it and allowing it to mechanically close us to a fuller experience of the present. Examining anger or fear or guilt or doubt, we begin to see the impersonality of what seemed so much “I.” We see that the mind has a mind of its own. That anger and fear and all these states of mind have their own personality, their own momentum. And we notice that it is not “I” that wishes to do harm to another but that the state of mind we call anger is by its nature aggressive and often wishes to insult or humiliate its object. We watch the fantasized conversations and arguments of the mind, the shadow-boxing that has so often left us breathless and alone and at last we begin to relinquish our suffering.
Then we begin not to cling to states of mind that barricade the wisdom of the heart. Once again love and trust open between beings. Then all which previously kept us isolated in mind — our doubt and anger and fear acting like watchdogs that warned of the threatening approach of others — become reminders of the painfulness of not loving and become a means of opening to, rather than withdrawing from, life. We see how our fear of, and identification with, the ramblings of the mind has made life shallow. We begin gently letting go of all that rises into awareness. We just let the mind be without closing in judgment, and begin to recognize the ongoing process of arising and dissolution in the mind. In recognizing the impermanence of each thought, each feeling, each moment of experience, we come to see there is nothing we can hold to that will give us lasting satisfaction. There is no place we can solidly plant our feet and say, “This is who I am.” It is a constantly changing flow, in which, moment to moment, who we think we are is born and dies. All that we would project ourselves as being is seen as transient and essentially empty of any abiding entity. There is no person in there, there is just process. Who we think we are is just another bubble in the stream. And the awareness which illuminates this process is seen for the light it is. We begin to give up identification with the mind as “I” and become the pure light of awareness, the namelessness of being.
The body dies, the mind is constantly changing. But somehow, behind it all there is a presence, called by some “the deathless,” that is unchanging, that simply is as it is.
To become fully born is to touch this deathlessness. To experience, even for a moment, the spaciousness which goes beyond birth and death. To emerge into a world of paradox and mystery with no weapons but awareness and love.
