Notes From a Fellow Traveller

The Decisive Experience

We have all had moments when the tumult of life stops and clear and truthful insights arise from the depth of our being. We call them “aha” experiences. These moments of understanding are neither planned nor organized. They come unexpectedly and spontaneously. They are brief and carry with them a sense of truth, authenticity, and authority. We don’t know how or where they come from. We might not be able to explain these insights to others, but without question we know them to be our truth. They have a clear and decisive impact on our lives.

These spontaneous insights may be about concerns we’ve been struggling to understand or they may offer a glimpse into the great questions of life. Suddenly there is clarity. But what would it be like if we were able to have a decisive experience that fully and permanently resolved the essential questions of every human life – How can we find unchanging happiness and serenity in the midst of human life? What is our essential nature, our authentic unchanging larger self? What is the final truth of reality? There are many ways to ask these basic human questions, but I sense you know what I am aiming at. We all want to know what is the essence of human existence.

Throughout human history these are questions that philosophers, religious scholars, and mystics have sought to answer. Not surprisingly their answers have been much the same. For us their answers are instructive, but not transformative. Intellectual knowledge can inform but cannot shift one’s life towards truth. For that we each need to have a personal “decisive experience” that illuminates, in heart and spirit, the direct knowing of these truths. When it occurs, that experience is a blessing. It is grace.

When it occurs, the actual experience of life’s fundamental truths is spontaneous and unplanned, precisely because it is already and always present within each of us. However, it is densely covered over by our tenacious belief that we are our ego, our personal self. The resulting overactivity of our ego with its ruminations and doings obscures the basic ever present truth of our being.

Although we cannot, through the accumulation of knowledge or through any method or technique gain access to these revelations, we can clean up the “room” of our personal identity. We can clean up our runaway mental chatter, fixed beliefs, rigid habits, and so on – so that we can live a calmer more loving life. That increases the probability of a spontaneous breakthrough and realization, a decisive experience.

If we choose to use meditation as a tool for cleaning up our life and taking us to the near shore of the truth, we must choose carefully. Why, because meditation can be as much an obstacle as an aid. Meditation is generally taught as a technique or method to calm the mind with the aim of relaxation and stress reduction. This approach works within the scope of our ordinary mind to shift, at least temporarily, our mind and body towards greater balance and harmony. But these practices all remain within the context of the ordinary cognitive mind, the personal ego mind. To arrive at the answers to the great questions of life we must access a greater consciousness beyond the limitations of the ordinary mind.

If that is our aim, we begin at the end. We drop all of our notions about what meditation is, let go of methods and techniques, abandon hope, effort, or any goal. We simply drop into being, into presence, into awareness. That, you might say seems quite difficult. What do I do with my active mind? The answer is – nothing.

You simply observe mental activity, abiding in awareness, the witness. It’s OK for the mind to be active. The problem is our identification and attention to it. As we rest our attention in awareness and observing, the mind quiets down by itself. We are engaged in a “non-meditation” merely abiding in our true, simple, innocent, effortless, unconditioned and unfettered awareness.  

And that is who we are and as close as we can come to a decisive experience of our true nature and the source of our life. The rest is grace. We merely leave everything go, cease grasping onto mental movements, and just be and abide in awareness. If you get entangled in mind traffic simply abide again in the witness state of awareness. Do nothing. Just be. Trust the natural unfolding of this sacred space of presence and learn from the experience.

That is how we fertilize the ground, preparing it for the light to open, wisdom to arise, and a decisive experience arise naturally and spontaneously.

Website: www.elliottdacher.org

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Come to Me as a Child

Come to Me as a Child

A child is born with a clear, pure awareness. Not an awareness of this or that or an awareness accompanied by interpretations, commentary, judgments, or preferences. A simple clear awareness is experienced without labels and filled with a natural wonder, awe and curiosity. And that miracle of beingness is experienced, but at the time unknown to the infant.

We use the same terms – empty awareness, pure awareness, choiceless awareness, and timeless awareness – for both this natural foundational awareness of childhood and the re-discovered beingness touched later in life, if fortunate, by the spiritual seeker. Thus, the often-quoted words from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning ......

What happens that causes us to forget what we subsequently spend years and great effort trying to re-capture? The answer … Human life! That’s what happens. Human existence. To successfully navigate through the stages of human life we begin to collect skills, experiences, knowledge, preferences, patterns, perspectives, and protectiveness. We develop a personal self, an ego structure. And this mentally constructed ego self separates and disconnects from its source … natural presence, and that is the fundamental cause of human confusion and suffering.

If you are raising a child you can watch the necessary but poignant loss of the pristine self in service to the development of this functional ego and the capacity to live as an adult in culture. Years ago, I recall writing a letter to my young grandchild with the intention that it be delivered decades later by her parents. I wanted the letter to serve as a reminder to my granddaughter of her pure vital essence which I witnessed in her infancy but would soon be forgotten in the rush to “mature” into adult life.

All we really need from a personal self is the simple capacity to carry out the functions of human life – basic memory, work and relational skills, intellectual capacity, and so on. We don’t need the troublesome, but more complex aspects of the personal self. We don’t need excess individualism and its disconnectedness, self-cherishing and self-centeredness, protectiveness and defensiveness, the contortions required for social standing or accomplishment, or the loss of our simple natural self. These excesses turn a simple and carefree functional personal self into a complex seemingly separate self that makes our true nature increasingly inaccessible.

The spiritual journey is not about the reduction of stress and reactivity, although quieting the active mind is a valuable pre-requisite. It enhances the probability of re-discovering the joy of our natural self. The spiritual journey is much as Eliot informs us, returning home to our foundational simple presence and being and knowing it for the first time. To know our essence as an adult, which is impossible for the infant, is to desire, cherish, and devote oneself to living from the heart center of our being – from essence, spaciousness, infinite possibilities, joy, and yes, love.

Of course, our core self never leaves us, it is ever present although obscured by our complex lives. How do we begin the recovery process? First, there must first be a strong and natural desire to return to who we are and let go of who we are not. T.S. Eliot states it this way:

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

What we are not now is presence, beingness, the natural self. In order to reveal this natural state, we must begin with what and where we are now – taken over and run by an out-of-control and endlessly busy personal “I.” We must turn that energy towards the journey home.

As mentioned before, we can begin with one of many quieting techniques (mindfulness, mantra recitation, guided imagery and so on) to quiet the course noise of our usual mind. However, there comes a time, early on, when we must cease utilizing quieting techniques and let go of meditation. It is then that we allow the natural stilling capacity of mind and body to bring us back home without effort.

Like the silt that natural settles to the bottom of an aquarium, sensory and mental activity left alone, that is not given attention, settle by themselves into the emptiness and presence of natural awareness. A word here about leaving mental activity alone. To use a Buddhist metaphor, we allow mental activity to enter the front door of the mind and exit the back door without serving it tea! No effort required. No interest shown.

Allowing the mind to naturally settle, we slowly experience, once again, the presence we lived so naturally in childhood. The more time we practice allowing our mind to naturally settle, in formal practice and during ordinary activities, the less importance we will attribute to the impermanent movements of the ordinary mind, and they will naturally dissipate and dissolve into the ever present background of still, clear, and simple awareness.

And then we shall once again reveal our home, joy, peace, and freedom. “Truly,” the bible says, “unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”