The Conscious Process

“You fight others all the time for your survival as a separate body-mind, a particular name and form. To live you must destroy. From the moment you were conceived you started a war with your environment – a merciless war of mutual extermination, until death sets you free.”

~Sri Nisargadatta

By virtue of merely being born into this realm, we are told by the preachers that we have inherited various sinful and undesirable qualities as part of the total human package – nasty companions riding along on our shoulders, disturbing our peace, and poisoning our experience. Perhaps they come in the form of negative traits and tendencies carried over from our poor performances and failings in previous lives, as some religious stories would have it. Then again, maybe they arise as the result of an “Original Sin” caused by a regrettable decision made long ago by the progenitors of the human species, as other religions hypothesize. In any case, we are told that we are stuck with this primordial calamity, a spiritual infection that resembles a kind of malignant software program that in turn needs to be purged from the system if we are to have any chance of lasting peace.

Certainly, we had better “do something” to rid ourselves of this apparent affliction! We are encouraged by the authorities on sin and karma to embark on some sort of purification process or pursuit of redemption in order to attain the peace which is inherently lacking. Thus begins the endless internal conflict where the mind is divided against itself in a war zone of its own making, featuring opposing camps of light and dark, good and evil, grasping and aversion, and the ensuing elaboration of an all-encompassing struggle in life and relationships.

This never-ending battle manifests as the felt sense of chronic discomfort and dis-ease, self-doubt, neurotic ambivalence, and for many, the more clinical psycho-pathologies. To these, all sorts of methods, schemes, and life-long strategies are systematically prescribed by the priests and doctors as remedies against the projected nemesis. In fact, the preachers have been kept in perennial business by promising via all manner of propaganda that their cult or scheme is the best one for the job of pacifying the mind and heart, even to the point of waging physical war with other cults over which one is superior in producing peace (regardless of how ironic that might seem to an outside observer).

So, how does the conception of this disease become reified in our psyche? From where does the dissatisfaction stem? Upon sincere and thorough investigation, we can recognize that it arises from ignorance – ignorance of our true nature and condition. To begin to understand the root of this ignorance, we need look no further than our own mind, since this misunderstanding is nothing but a state of consciousness. When we stop and break it down, we can observe that there appears to be a steady stream of thoughts which we take to be ours, apparently infected with all manner of bugs and bothersome critters, so that we can never truly and deeply rest. In the course of our cognitive development, we become so habituated to this state of chronic disturbance that we never even question it. We just assume that it is the “normal” condition of being human – “normal neurosis”, in psychological parlance.

To complicate the matter, we tend to imagine that we are independent entities, separate from the world of myriad sentient beings around us. In our struggle to acquire and maintain what we believe we need to survive and flourish , we engage in a perpetual state of competition and conflict with these perceived “others”. Of course, such a paradigm of virtual war precludes the experience of any true compassion. Moreover, such a state of precarious consciousness is reflected back to us in all our relations, because everyone is under the spell of a similar delusion. Ignorance is self-reinforcing, rendering us all suspicious of each other. We walk the earth — a threatened, restless “stranger in a strange land” – alienated not only from others, but also from ourselves. It’s a literal nightmare, a horrible dream!

The wise, rather than merely accepting and even fueling this fabricated struggle, will instead turn attention around and trace back to the beginning of the conflict itself, eventually recognizing through inquiry and consequent insight that whatever appears is mind, and that mind itself is essentially a shadow. Attempts to catch it and control it are futile. That’s just shadows chasing shadows. One can’t control or eliminate a shadow by running after it and trying to grasp and manipulate it. As the great Adept Milarepa noted: “When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick. Every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once.”

There is a famous line in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 13: 12-13) that reads: “For now we see through a glass, darkly . . .” Indeed, whatever is seen, felt, thought, imagined, or remembered is not really so. Upon thorough inspection, we can see that it all amounts to mere fantasies of interpretation on perception. Furthermore, we can recognize that the conflict itself is essentially our own creation — stress and suffering we’ve been perpetrating on ourselves, based on second-hand beliefs and dysfunctional programs we have been incorporating into our system since we were children.

By earnestly investigating its smoke parade and inquiring into the nature of this conditioned and conflicted mind, we can notice that attention becomes quiet, supple, and fresh when freed from any fixation on the mind’s streaming contents. If we persist in that attitude of “non-dwelling” – grasping at no provisional identity based on the sense of separation and opposition — we can let go and relax into the ensuing dynamic stillness.

Sitting, standing, walking, lying down – we stay with this stillness, refraining from attaching to whatever arises in mind,  surrendering any effort to manipulate thought forms. Even if demons or angels appear, discard them. Let go, let go, let go. Ultimately, surrender even the one who would surrender, the apparent witness of mind. As the Taoist sage Lao Tsu noted, “To a mind that is still, the whole world surrenders.”

Persisting in this practice, we can recognize something that is, after all, rather obvious. That is, regardless of any effort or non-effort, there is not a single thought that we can hold on to. Thoughts automatically become self-liberated. As Nyoshul Khenpo writes in his “Letter in Praise of Emptiness”, “In this there is not a thing to be removed, nor anything that needs to be added. It is merely the immaculate looking naturally at itself.”

One thought arises, and then before the next thought arises, there is an empty space. That empty space is the native natural state — fully, nakedly revealed. The thinking mind is absent in that space. All we need do is simply relax into that, remaining free of all focus in that transparent, sky-like spaciousness. The practice then is just returning to that unfabricated aware space as often as possible, even in the midst of activities, rather than chasing after and being run around by thought forms. It’s brilliantly clear, awake, and “knowing” without the need of thinking, because it is always between two thought events.

The sense of self — the feeling “me” — is a thought event, a mental construct, that appears in the space of awake awareness like a cloud appears in the empty sky and vanishes in the next moment. It’s just another thought. It is not ours, not who we are. We are the awake-ness that knows itself as itself. Resting in the spaciousness of one’s own primordial state, we can recognize that the same energy which was manifesting as thoughts, feelings, memories, and sensations now appears as the pure delight of our own innocent nature.

In the course of this natural ease of being, we may notice that we are not even really “located” in any fixed space, whether between or somewhere beyond thoughts. Rather, everything appearing is recognized as our own omnidirectional display, the display of a holographic projection of mind, expressing itself as the immense vastness of the celestial heavens, as well as the humble weed flowering between the sidewalk cracks. Spirit manifests subject and objects to infinity, while remaining unidentified with and un-implicated by either. Timeless, motionless, inconceivable.

Awareness and experience are not two — there is no distance between them. Each moment, however it manifests, is the perfect form of our self-expression. There is no right or wrong, better or worse, higher or lower form. All forms are recognized as the quicksilver shine of the light behind the veil of mind – luminous and transparent. That is the “second birth” — spirit baptism. This clear radiance will illuminate and clarify all, including the empty nature of both self and phenomena. In the process, loving kindness and compassion are also realized to be inseparable from emptiness.

For those who might imagine that this realization leaves one floating in some cloud of spiritual bliss, oblivious to the mundane world of pain and suffering, nothing could be further from the actual reality. Rather than leaving one standing aloof and detached, it brings the whole spectrum of experience vividly to life, as if one had been sleepwalking, and is now fully awake. Moreover, in such brilliant clarity, a genuine empathy for all of life arises naturally, because the illusion of separation has been directly seen through and dissolved. At such point, loving one’s neighbor as oneself is simply the right thing to do, because one realizes that the appearance of separation is a hoax we may have once fallen for, but in light of this recognition, it becomes utterly clear that our neighbor literally is our self. Now, living a life of simple integrity, while refusing to indulge the poisons of greed, envy, hatred, and ignorance, is joyfully embraced as the natural way we were meant to live and express our true nature.

At last, even emptiness and fullness are revealed to be mere conceptual designations by the light which shines beyond both. When this light is joined with one’s living experience and “embodied” in conscious relationship to all, then life becomes spontaneous and actually very simple. Somehow, this heart has found its way back to itself – not as some independent “I” — but as That which lives me. The war with oneself is ended. Shanti, Shanti Om.

“Let go of what has passed.
Let go of what may come.
Let go of what is happening now.
Don’t try to figure anything out.
Don’t try to make anything happen.
Relax, right now, and rest.”
~Tilopa

See also:

The Silence Behind the Mind and True Transformation

“When you wake up from a dream, do you go about searching for the characters in that dream, to awaken them?”

~Ramana Maharshi

We often encounter passionate voices in the alternative media seeking through various means to “raise consciousness” and “shake people awake”. Contrary to the popular sentiment in that field however, not everyone is here, incarnating in this realm, to “awaken”. In fact, true Awakening has always been the provenance of the very few, who have chosen that steep route for their own evolutionary purposes. In any particular generation, out of the billions of human incarnations, only a handful thus embodied will awaken in the true sense — that is,  break through the dreamy amnesia that characterizes our temporary earthly state into the direct realization of our true nature and primordial (Divine) identity.

Rather, for most of us, the purpose in assuming these particular forms is more along the lines of finding out what the range of human experience entails, in much the same way we might immerse ourselves in a flight simulator to discover what flying is all about. Of course, if we knew it was just a simulation, we would not be able to get the full experience, and so we “forget” that it is just a virtual reality, in order to enjoy the full impact of living the animal existence that is human, for the brief duration of the bio-vehicle’s appearance.

Once we are fused with the human container that we are temporarily occupying, we accumulate memories and experiences of our time as humans, and use them as fuel for our ongoing self-discovery. One of the primary tools is “ego”, which allows us to explore all the nooks and crannies of the psyche to see what we are really made of. We use this ego (which is an activity, not an entity) to learn how to behave, how to do the right thing in each situation presented to us by virtue of our human experience, and also to learn the consequences of failure to do the right thing. In that respect, it serves a kind of navigational function in our quest for experience.

When we become entranced into identification with the activity, however, and imagine it to represent who and what we are, we turn the verb into a noun, an ambivalent noun which we must somehow deal with, or if we have been conditioned by certain spiritual propaganda, we might come to believe it is a noun which we must make every effort to eliminate, as if it was an evil mask which we had better remove before we scare off all of our relations.

In reality, if we see that idea for what it is — a mental fabrication, or fictional story which we have inadvertently granted a reality to — ego begins to lose its power to disturb us, and so reverts to its natural function as an integral part of human embodiment.

In any case, what most in the “alternative” field tend to believe constitutes “awakening” may involve seeing through the propaganda dished out by the arbiters of consensus reality and discovering the mechanisms by which this realm actually operates. For that, it might include peeling back the curtain on hidden government manipulations, on the war economies maintained by the Powers That Be, on media lies, on secret agendas of climate control and food and water poisoning, on alien contact, or on any or all of the various deceptions that constitute this world’s charades and fraudulence.

On the more positive side, it may involve becoming aware of alternative fuels and sustainability strategies, on the marriage of art and science in developing new programs dedicated to the evolutionary advancement of the species, or on any number of new (or ancient) techniques and methods that can be employed to make life more fulfilling and transformative, or serve us in recognizing our essential interdependence.

In any case, as compelling and provocative as those issues might be, or as hopeful and encouraging, they all still belong in the category of impermanence, and so fundamentally represent modifications of consciousness. Such modifications are endless, but of no lasting significance, any more than clouds in the sky. Real Awakening, on the other hand, is the direct recognition of That which does not change, and is not modified by events or circumstances that appear and disappear in and as consciousness. It reveals our original nature, prior to consciousness itself.

Just so, trying to get others to awaken (in the sense generally implied in the alternative arena) is more a matter of transfer of certain data, and any data transfer is dependent on both the transfer vehicle and the receptor. If the receptor has the capacity, it will receive, but remember, we are only talking about modifying consciousness, not getting to its root (which again is what real Awakening is all about).

In other words, when we discuss awakening others, what we are usually talking about is changing someone’s beliefs, but not undermining their whole belief structure altogether, revealing that the person they have taken themselves to be is nothing other than a conceptual designation, a fictitious story, empty of any solidity. Indeed, describing their home and true identity to an amnesiac really doesn’t accomplish much, due to their chronic memory blockage.

In any case, what right do we have to force our views on others? The notion of “shaking others awake” is actually a form of aggression. As a matter of fact, most folks who are led down the “rabbit hole” of conspiracy theories or urged into crusades for this or that cause are often better off left alone to fulfill their term here, focusing instead on just enjoying the human experience in whatever way their light leads them.

However, if some are moved to try to “save the world”, let them – they’ll find out in their own time that the world itself is as unreal as the one who dreams of saving it. This is why the principle of non-interference universally applies — the “prime directive”. If we really wish to be of service in this matter, we might take Niu Tou Fa Jong’s words to heart when he wrote in his classic “Song of Mind”: “Don’t destroy the myths of common people; only teach the cessation of thoughts.”

Moreover, our efforts to awaken others to our notion of what reality is all about can often prove to be merely an additional impediment to both their as well as our true awakening. As the sage Siddharameshwar Maharaj noted: “What you are thinking of as ‘awake’ — some intense new passion for a worthy cause or a deep feeling of love for all existence — is actually the deepest of deep sleep, much deeper than a feeling of boredom or indifference. Yours is an intense association with the Illusion. The bored and the indifferent are on the verge of leaving the lure of the temptress Maya behind, no longer swayed by her shiny attractions. They are on the verge of waking.”

In any event, having gotten some inkling of what’s going on in this realm “behind the curtain”, most people would rather forget what they have seen. For those conditioned by the consensus descriptions of reality, discovering what’s really lurking behind the lies that they have been told can be deeply disturbing as well as disorienting. As Winston Churchill noted: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”

When it comes right down to it, it’s clear that humans are the least qualified to judge each other, mostly because we are operating with insufficient data. The best policy is to always turn the spotlight back on oneself, particularly when we think we see something lacking in others, or presume that we have some special knowledge which they should have. Again, Nisargadatta spoke wisely when he cautioned: “When you deceive yourself that you work for the good of all, it makes matters worse, for you should not be guided by your own ideas of what is good for others. A man who claims to know what is good for others, is dangerous.”

Remember, we are not here to fix samsara – that can’t be done. In fact, this realm itself is nothing more than a stage with ever-changing props, offering us an opportunity to discover what we are really made of. The best service we can offer others is to be a demonstration of what real awakening consists of, and for that, we ourselves need to not only awaken, but also to embody real awakening in our own behavior.

One of the principle lessons in Zen training is about letting go of the desire for some particular outcome. In other words, relinquishing all gaining ideas, all fantasies, hopes, and wishes for some special attainment. This principle is universally applicable. As long as we have in mind some desire to “defeat the evil systems of the Powers That Be”, for example, we will continue to be a slave to those very systems. On the other hand, if one wants to be free, they must stand without desire or fear, relinquishing all concepts of personal control.

There is a universal power at work, but we do not trust that, even though we are its very source. Such distrust is a grave mistake, and one that will cause us endless suffering. On the other hand, if we are able to recognize that we ourselves are being lived by that very power, and conversely, that it is our own expression, then the sense of separation, of frustration and dismay will evaporate, and paradoxically, that is when we will finally be eligible to be of some real service in our life and relations, as the impediments to genuine awakening fall away in the light of recognition.

 Q: I may remove my causes of sorrow, but others will be left to suffer.

 Nisargadatta Maharaj: To understand suffering, you must go beyond pain and pleasure. Your own desires and fears prevent you from understanding and thereby helping others. In reality there are no others, and by helping yourself you help everybody else. If you are serious about the sufferings of mankind, you must perfect the only means of help you have – yourself.

See Also:

The Game

Fighting the Powers That Be

Saving the World

That which is not used becomes obsolete, whereas what is resisted is kept in the forefront of attention. Thus, the creative principle of change initially entails a thorough recognition and consequent discarding of old “tapes”, or storyline scripts, that we have used to assemble, reinforce, and perpetuate our sense of self, the one we have taken to be the central character — “me”. In other words, it involves identifying and then eliminating what doesn’t work, including our neurotic personal self-images that keep us fixated in dysfunctional relationships to life.

To illustrate with one example, I spent a part of my professional career conflicted about living and working in the world, rather than isolated in some “spiritual” community, where I imagined I would be able to make more “progress” towards liberation. It was this very story I kept telling myself that robbed the life I was actually involved in of any power to awaken me, since I was always projecting the real work to be “elsewhere”.

Of course, the more I reinforced my fixed idea, the more self-confirming it became. It was only when I was eventually able to recognize how I was seriously limiting myself by clinging to a narrow “either/or” position that I was finally able to discard the old presumptions and allow my present circumstance, whatever it might be, to serve as the fuel for real liberation.

Rather than waging a prolonged battle with this fictional entity we have created over the course of our lives, we can simply cease granting it any enduring and concrete reality by shifting our attention to awareness itself — in other words, shifting our attention to being aware of being aware, prior to the whole narrative and architecture of personhood, as well as the ensuing complication that artificial edifice implies.

This “house-cleaning” can be initiated by first developing the capacity for calm abidance in silence, where we can better inspect the subterranean elements of our psyche that have been driving behavior and affecting our relations without our conscious knowledge or consent. As we become more accustomed to calm, silent abidance, there is more possibility of open space between perception and reaction, and it is in that spaciousness that we are able to detach enough to begin to “see the forest through the trees”.

From the detached vantage point provided by such stillness, we can then delve into our original motives that led to the creation of our current circumstances. Without clarity here, any effort to make substantial life changes that we might undertake will be tainted by old uninspected and chaotic influences, which will in turn hamper our necessary clarity and integration, compounding our sense of frustration and inner division. The entire structure of our desires and their ramifications needs to be confronted, seen through, and released, to avoid the classic trap of “spiritual by-pass”.

We need to honestly and thoroughly inspect what it is that we have we been doing which is chronically sabotaging our core heart yearning. Once any conflicted programming is recognized and the “bugs” eliminated, we cease to fuel dysfunctional patterns. For that reason, all unconscious mental and emotional habits and their causal negative conditioning need to be brought into the light of day and revealed for the obstructions that they are. In this conscious process, “old tapes” naturally become obsolete when we cease investing in them. This is why the wise suggest that we “empty the teacup” before filling it again with the fresh tea of projected changes.

Once re-aligned with our heart’s true desire, we are ready to combine sincere intent with undivided attention. Solidifying this combination through persistent positive reinforcement is the key to success in terms of making skillful changes in our life and relations. It is an uncompromising yoga in that respect, which requires steady devotion in order to reap results. With the noisy onslaught of conflicting messages and the relentless bombardment of media-driven distractions that characterize today’s social environment, honing one-pointed concentration is more of a challenge now than ever, but what is the option?

Certainly, establishing relationships with those who will support our goals is a great help, and hence the Buddhist ideal of “sangha”, or community of truth lovers. Shared spiritual intimacy with good friends has real power to carry us through the ups and downs which we are bound to encounter. A qualified guide who has already traveled the path we wish to tread can also be helpful in terms of pointing out blind spots and potential dead ends.

Furthermore, wedding our refreshed and awake intent to the “Cosmic Will” can help to insure that our motives remain pure and on-track. Such “union” is no obscure mystery, but really a matter of aligning thought-energy with the order of the universe. This can be done by us “stepping out of the way”, so to speak, and letting ourselves be lived by Love. After all, what other force in the universe would have our best interests at heart more than Love?

Letting oneself be lived does not mean that we must rely on some higher power outside of ourselves, however. On the contrary, to let go and embrace the unknown is most intimate, since it involves relaxing into full acceptance of the Love that we already are, and always have been. It is an act of genuine humility, without which, no real transformation is possible. Such humility is the red carpet to “getting back into our right mind”, in other words, but is only genuine when it is based on the recognition that all methods, schemes, and escape plans one has employed are destined to fail, as long as one is basing them on the presumed reality of a permanent and substantial person, a “me”.

This genuine humility is not a matter of neurotic self-humiliation, nor does it consist of humbling oneself before some external divinity, as many of the man-made religions would have it. Rather, it entails the recognition that I do not really know what anything is. In fact, I exist in a total state of not knowing, this is my fundamental condition, and so ego-mind has no place to plant a flag and turn my efforts at change into just another vanity project. It’s what real freedom is all about, in that respect, since there is nothing there to manipulate or corrupt.

From that “place” of not knowing, we can see things as they are, without the superimposition of provisional knowledge, beliefs, or conditioned programs, and it is only when we are able to see clearly that we are capable of making the changes in our attitudes and behavior that truly serve us and our relations. Paradoxically, it is only by virtue of this clarified vision that we may ultimately come to the direct recognition that there is nothing and nobody to change. As Sri Nisargadatta points out:

“Nothing you do will change you, for you need no change. You may change your mind or your body, but it is always something external to you that has changed, not yourself. Why bother at all to change? Realize once for all that neither your body nor your mind, nor even your consciousness is yourself and stand alone in your true nature beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. No effort can take you there, only the clarity of understanding. Trace your misunderstandings and abandon them, that is all. There is nothing to seek and find, for there is nothing lost.”

Indeed, at this stage we can recognize that all of our fuss and bother, all of our self-concern and busy efforts to modify, please, and perfect ourselves, has been based on a case of mistaken identity. The direct recognition of the emptiness of the personal self is a great relief, liberating us from the endless “me-project” that has so occupied our life and infected our relations with its insistent demands for confirmation and feeding.

Freed from the heavy weight of the self-fixation, we need not worry about changing a person who, after all, is merely a bundle of thoughts and memories. Whatever is in need of change will happen spontaneously, without the superimposition of a make-believe doer to complicate life’s flowing functioning.

Indeed, it is only by seeing through and surrendering all of our previous identifications with the body-mind-self (as well as its need for validation, preservation, and enhancement) that we are finally available to be changed by the universal intelligence which is always manifesting as that very life and love from which we have never truly been divided.

“You need not do anything,
remain sitting at your table and listen.
You need not even listen, just wait.
You need not even wait,
just learn to be quiet, still and solitary
and the world will freely offer itself to you unmasked.

It has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

~Franz Kafka

“O Architect! You are seen! You shall build no house again. All your rafters are broken. Your ridge pole is shattered.”

~Dhammapada

It’s a bit scary, and often even threatening, to begin the process of questioning one’s entrenched habit of conceptual self-definition. For most of us, it provides a kind of buffer between ourselves and the apparent chaos of the phenomenal world. Our cumulative personal story revolves around how we think of ourselves, and our identity based on such stories is all we are ever attempting to enhance, comfort, satisfy, and protect. Even such a well-regarded spiritual teacher as the Buddhist author, Pema Chodron, recently wrote: “In a book I read recently, the author talked about humans as transitional beings—beings who are neither fully caught nor fully free but are in the process of awakening. I find it helpful to think of myself this way.”

The truth is, she doesn’t really know who or what she is. Nobody does. However, we tend to adopt these pretenses in order to better navigate the objective world. Inevitably, we begin believing our stories, imagining that the personas we’ve assumed actually represent who we are. As a rule, we are unable to rest in our fundamental not-knowing. We become anxious, restless for an adventure in which we can immerse ourselves, as children do in games of make-believe. This whole realm, and even the so-called higher realms, are simply stages where we can perform in various roles for our entertainment and edification.

The only problem in all of this is when we suffer, based on the fate of the character with whom we have fused. We suffer because we have forgotten our essential immortal spirit nature while pretending to be this or that form exclusively. We suffer, in other words, due to our conceptual self-definitions. Instead of holding them lightly, we cling to them desperately and won’t let go, sometimes even after the death of the human body-mind vehicle. Of course, nothing is wasted, even our suffering, which can be transmuted into wisdom if we pay attention to the natural order of things — their transience and transparent emptiness.

What then are the mechanics of this construction? In chronic reaction to the perceived dilemma that characterizes “ordinary life”, the comparative mind becomes addicted to imagining various alternative scenarios and then projecting future outcomes, thus reinforcing its presumption of present unhappiness. In just going about our everyday business, such embedded strategies constitute a persistent pattern of avoidance, especially when the circumstances du jour appear to be challenging.

If we are perceptive, we may come to realize that these various challenges are actually gifts in the form of tests of recognition. They are graciously provided in order for us to discover how we will respond in numerous simulations. Will we continue indulging in escapist fantasies, or finally awaken to what is always standing right before us? In that way, they are both an invitation to recognize what we are habitually up to, as well as an opportunity to go beyond the patterned grooves of dreamy sleep-walking and complacency.

As we awaken from the conditioned daze of our amnesia, we can utilize these tests as a means of inquiry into that which we are always trying to run from and avoid. For example, why do we scare ourselves? What is the reactive mechanism within our psyche that is regularly superimposing stress on life, and infusing it with a felt quality of fearfulness and dissatisfaction?

Certainly, we can stop in the midst of our narrative and face ourselves at any moment. However, the implications of that stark possibility disturb us. Instead, we are attracted to and become enamored of all sorts of hopeful schemes, or else seek to linger in a nostalgia of pleasant memory states, with past and future vying for our anxious attention, and all the while resisting the simple act of resting — right here, right now.

Such “resting” requires a profound letting go of our fixations and cherished images, a deep and abiding surrender born of genuine humility. However, the fascination-free state is considered boring to the typical spiritual seeker, who is driven by uninspected motives to fill up emptiness with all sorts of toys and games. The last thing most seekers really want is to have their whole story revealed as compounded fiction, so instead they easily become enamored of blissful energetic states that may appear in meditation, for example, employing them to confirm their existence, rather than recognizing them as transient modifications of consciousness.

On the other hand, by virtue of the radical decision to truly stop in our tracks, discard our distractions of choice, and nakedly face ourselves, the whole theatrical melodrama of “my story” is seriously undermined. By refusing to grant any enduring reality to the passing thought parade generated by the self-fixation, the narrative itself will eventually run out of fuel and lose its seductive and compelling allure. The first act of compassion, in this case, is to take off the mask.

Of course, such a daunting prospect is the last one ego-mind would care to endure. After all, its very survival is totally dependent on the perpetuation of the “me-story”, an all-consuming project of effort and personal validation, and thus it will struggle mightily to maintain that illusion, at least until the futility of such efforts is made apparent by virtue of the grace of failure. As Sri Nisargadatta notes:

“Unless you make tremendous efforts, you will not be convinced that effort will take you nowhere. The self is so self-confident that unless it is totally discouraged it will not give up. Mere verbal conviction is not enough. Hard facts alone can show the absolute nothingness of the self-image.”

To fail completely involves the cumulative recognition that “you” can’t do it. Alert and persistent inspection, typically coupled with the mentorship of a qualified guide, will eventually reveal the utter futility of the ego-mind’s efforts to endure and triumph. The whole scheme, the compounded strategy, is hopeless! As it turns out, the one that would awaken in some glorious enlightenment story is the very one that is obstructing true realization, and it is only in the total frustration of the ego-mind’s ambition that the clear light of our native radiance is free at last to emerge.

Spiritual aspirants tend to expect some drama, perhaps some ethereal fireworks display in their crown chakra to herald their passage, not a boring sort of petering out of their ambition, leaving them with no glamorous flag to wave or shining persona to point at with the pride of accomplishment. The real process is not a matter of addition, but more of a humbling subtraction which is thorough and relentless, until nothing is left — no willfulness — and that is, paradoxically, everything.

The Western teacher Adyashanti describes the process well when he writes: “Asking, ‘What is the Truth?’ is a demolition project. Most of spirituality is a construction project. We’re ascending and ascending — ideas are ascending, kundalini energy is ascending, consciousness is ascending. It just keeps building, and a person feels, ‘I’m getting better and better.’

Sri Nisargadatta