Nitpicking and Neo Advaita

It is a staple of a lot of contemporary neo-advaita writing that we are awareness itself and what happens – the whole of our living – happens inside of us. Here is how John Sherman, a teacher I admire a great deal, puts it.

I say, ‘There is nothing but you anywhere to be found’, and it sounds like this is some big spiritual pronouncement. But just check it out. You can’t find anything but yourself anywhere. You will find all these things that come and go in you. It is all you . . . You are the container of it, that’s all.

John’s point is that there is no time or place or experience from which we are absent. Living is continuous, without gaps. Absent awareness, what could possibly exist?

This is logically sound and we can experience it and the experience can be – especially when it is new – quite profound. We can, as John suggests, look into this experience in a sustained way and see what it is all about. What does it teach us about what we are in truth? John again:

So, always, in all cases, the opportunity is present to just look at this underlying reality. Just to look at it, not to get it, not to become it. That’s absurd, since you are it. Not to get it, not to become it, not to understand it. Just to look at it . . . That’s the inquiry. The inquiry is looking at reality as often as you can, looking at what you know to be unmoving, everpresent presence itself, as often as you can . . .

I agree with John that this is a helpful practice. I use the phrase “give attention” but the basic process is the same.

Where I deviate a bit from this neo-advaita posture is in the conclusion that this “unmoving, everpresent presence” is the self. As John puts it, we are the underlying reality. And I would say that differently. I would say something like “we are manifestations of the underlying reality that can, by virtue of our structure, sense that reality and reflect on it in language.”

I suspect John (and others) would say I am complicating things, or being too intellectual. Just look! Stop being so nitpicky and wordy. Stop being the guy who always says “yes, but . . . ”

Well, yes. But.

You see, we don’t actually know what the underlying reality is. We can intimate its presence and we can investigate it and think about it, but we can’t actually know it. Our structure – which is creative, in the sense that it brings forth a world – is also prohibitive. It is also a limit on experience. We can’t walk through walls or see molecules unaided or smell lilac bushes from a mile off. We can look inside – intensely and deeply – but there is no assurance that what we encounter is consistent with reality. As Francisco Varela puts it, “there is no a priori reason why introspection should have access to the process (es) that generate it, and thus introspection itself is useless for the elucidation of its mechanism.”

Given that simple fact, epistemic humility is in order. I am not contesting that we experience a sense of presence – of awareness – forever attending our living. I am suggesting that we not rush to any judgment about what that means. I am saying it could simply be what it feels to be a human observer, one with a brain and kidneys and a history that will terminate at death and all that.

What tends to happen is that folks confuse the structure by which they sense a reality for the reality, as if there were a 1:1 correspondence. And the suggestion I am making is that we can’t be confident there is a 1:1 correspondence. All we can say for sure is that there is a correlation. It is like seeing a red rose and concluding roses are red. Well, for most human observers, sure. Roses are red. But for a dog, no. For an ant no. For another rose, no.

Thus, the work is to go slowly, to keep looking and to remain in dialogue with experience, with living itself.

Now, part of why I am an advocate of going slowly, especially in dialogue, is because it allows us to focus on how we appear / show up / are implicated in language. That is, what words are we using, how are we using them, how are we responding to the words of others and so forth. In my experience, this is a helpful way to clarify and intensify our shared experience of living.

For example, here is the late Nathan Gill, another writer and teacher in the neo-advaita tradition whose work I also admire.

In the play of life the desire to come to rest in your true nature takes the form of seeking for awakening or enlightenment. The paradox is that your true nature is always at every moment completely available, but is obscured by seeking for it. In turn, the agitation felt by seeking serves as a goad to further seeking.

When the nature of this seeking process is understood and then undermined by living in the acceptance of every moment of life just as it is, then seeking and agitation soon naturally fall away. Your true nature is then revealed to be none other than this awake space or awareness in which everything appears.

Here, Nathan uses the phrase “true nature” rather than John’s “self.” That is more resonant for me because it is less categorical than John’s phrasing. There is a subtle but nontrivial difference between saying “I am the underlying reality” and “my true nature is the underlying reality.”

I say all this this way because I tend to use the word “love” to refer to the underlying reality, whatever it actually is. I am not saying that Love is our reality; I am saying that love moves us in ways that accord with reality. Our living is fused intimately to love: the ecstasy and joy of making love, baking bread, pouring tea, walking to the river, telling stories after dark . . . Even with all our technological progress, our fundament is as it ever was: love itself. We are joined – are as one – in the care and nurture that is the sustenance of life.

It seems to me that whatever is going on, what guides us in and through it, what welcomes us to it, what instructs and informs us in it, is love in its ordinary embodied natural simplicity.

Thus, the work is to see the way in which we are obstructing the free flow of love. Love, as A Course in Miracles points out, is our natural inheritance but in our confusion and misidentification, we obstruct both acceptance and extension of that love. So the work is to see the obstructions. We don’t have to undo the obstructions; we simply have to see them. Seeing them is how they are undone.

This is another way of saying that what we are doing when we give attention to the self and the other and the world is that we are recovering our true nature. We are remembering our true identity. Here is how Nathan Gill puts it.

All I can do is to remind you of your true nature until it becomes simply obvious. We are all the very same one. Our true nature is awareness, acknowledgment of which allows exclusive identification as the individual character to be seen through. There is no awakening in the sense of some fantastic future projected enlightenment event. Rather, the simple acknowledgement of your always-present nature as awareness undermines the whole seeking movement, which is your agitation or dis-ease.

Thus, we give attention to what appears. We make a gift of our capacity to attend: we become students, lovers, sherpas, disciples. We decline to conclude – to finish – and instead go on slowly, continuing to serve one another and love one another. We go on clarifying and refining experience so that love might be brought forth in our living in precisely the way it longs to come forth.

We do this this way because love fixes everything. Love is the light which all our problems are solved, all our distractions set aside. Not right away and not perfectly, at least as we perceive it given the nature of our structure. But love either heals the world or gives us more patience and humility and perseverance to go on offering healing to it. Love makes us happy and happiness girds us against apparent sacrifice and loss. It shows us the next step and holds our hand while we take it.

Religion and the End of Conflict

Religion (broadly defined so as to include spiritual practices like A Course in Miracles) can be a helpful way to work through the difficulties that attend our living, which is to say, to learn how to better bring forth love in our living with others who could be our own self. But it is only effective to the extent one sees the way it arises as a condition of the very problem it aims to solve.

Another way to think about this is to say that religion is not about what is actual but about what is possible at a given point.

What do I mean by this?

Religion evolved as a way of responding to the various challenges that inhere in the experience of being human in a world in which humans live, which living is inevitably circumscribed by perceptual and cognitive horizons. That is, religion provides narratives and rituals that help us deal with the fear and grief associated with, say, death – our own and others’. However, critically, it does not explain death. We cannot, in Merold Westphalt’s memorable phrase, “peek over God’s shoulder.”

Perception and cognition are limits – you can’t see every color on the light spectrum, you can’t survive on uncooked meat, and you can’t make it rain by thinking hard about rain.

But perception and cognition – in part because they are limits, are also creative. Through them, a world comes into being – blue skies, soft satin sheets, compound sentences, ants at picnics, twelve-string guitars on which Bach airs can be played. The world we perceive and think about and do our living in is the world brought forth by perception and cognition. Absolute truth or objective truth are lies we tell ourselves to avoid the responsibility subjectivity entails.

Heinz von Foerster puts it this way:

Objectivity is a subject’s delusion that observing can be done without him. Involving objectivity is abrogating responsibility – hence its popularity.

And A Course in Miracles like this:

Everyone teaches, and teaches all the time. This is a responsibility you inevitably assume the moment you accept any premise at all, and no one can organize their life without some thought system (T-6.In.2:2-3).

Thus, not only can we not peek over God’s shoulder, the very act of trying is a distraction from the work we are actually called (by the world we bring forth by virtue of our structure) to do. There is a moral imperative to not seek the objective stance, the true perspective, the actual source. It’s okay – it’s more than okay – to leave God to God.

Peter Nelson, an Australian psychotherapist and writer, puts it this way.

The quest for foundations is a vanity that takes us away from the kind of knowing that is actually possible for us and leads to a fragmentation and separation that contributes to our destruction, “metaphorically” as well as “actually.”

Our perceptual and cognitive limits point to or intimate the existence of a source or ground of being but they also simultaneously preclude us from ever reaching it. Belief systems – religious and spiritual ones in particular – emerge to help us manage this fundamental state of unknowing and uncertainty. What are we? What happens when we die? What is the relationship between experience and the world? Is there a relationship? Why should I care about my neighbor? Why do bad things happen? And so forth. Religion comforts us, provides a community for us, gives us purported answers, and gives us behavioral models to facilitate consistent living in an uncertain world.

Regrettably, over time, those systems morph from suggestions to absolute truths. “Here’s a way to think about death and dying” becomes “here is the way to think about death and dying.” Once you start to believe you’re privy to the way, the truth and the life, it’s a surprisingly quick trip to torturing folks who refuse to convert to your belief system. We all think we wouldn’t do it but the truth is, we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Don’t kid yourself.

Why do we take a few good ideas for helping manage our living and turn them into absolutes which justify so many manners of violence?

Well at least in part because we are in a war against uncertainty. We want to know. We believe The Truth exists and that we have some powerful natural right to know it unconditionally. We want the way, the truth and the life; not pale facsimiles. And yet our desire is forever thwarted. We cannot reach that whole . . . it is forever foreclosed to us by virtue of our structure.

Perhaps it is like when we are young and our teachers or parents insist we share our toys, not tease others, and shake hands after a fight. Those are fine ways of managing existence – better than fine actually – but they do not explain why conflict exists in the first place, nor how it specifically arises in us.

It’s clearly good to have strategies for managing conflict but we might ask: would it be better to understand the source of conflict and undo it there? And thus obviate the need for conflict resolution strategies?

A Course in Miracles makes sense to me as a method for managing one’s living. It is an effective strategy for being in responsive dialogue with one’s neighbors (thus alleviating apparently external conflict), and for maintaining a healing perspective on one’s interior craziness (thus alleviating apparently internal conflict).

. . . no one can organize their life without some thought system. Once you have developed a thought system of any kind, you live by it and teach it (T-6.In.2:3-4).

But the course is terribly ineffective – as virtually all formal religions and religious systems are – when it comes to explaining how conflict arises in the first case. That’s because A Course in Miracles is a metaphor for what it means to not be able to peek over God’s shoulder. Its “explanations” are stories whose purpose is to teach. They are not unlike Aesop’s fables. There was not actually a stork and a fox who taunted one another about their respective manner of eating, but the story does make a valid point about the importance of respect for the other’s differences. We should take it seriously if it is helpful but we shouldn’t take it literally.

Again, it is critical to understand that Westphal didn’t mean that God literally has a shoulder or even that there is literally a God. Rather, he meant that human beings cannot occupy an objective perspective. We can’t know the truth, nor even whether the truth exists, and what this means is that we are called to a degree of epistemic humility. We can’t know the ultimate or final truth, and if our living is predicated on anything but that fact, then we are bound for unhappiness, and not just our own. We’re likely to hurt others as well.

Do you know the power of “I don’t know,” or the glory and beauty of humility? There is space in you to bring all thoughts and knowing to an end. The one who comes to “I don’t know” is certainly more at peace. And from there, perhaps, something else can begin (Tara Singh Nothing Real Can Be Threatened 94-95).

This was the essence of Tara Singh’s beautiful clarity when he called our attention to the lovelessness of “I’ve got it and you don’t.” The belief that we understand, that we have some insight or potential that others don’t have is a form of violence. Helen Schucman encouraged Singh to keep daily gratitude lists, in essence making gratitude the foundation of his ACIM practice and teaching. Gratitude relieved him of the need to compete with others and thus brought forth a healing love.

Have you ever observed your own perfection and given thanks? Then your life, too, would be a song. Every breath would convey your adoration. To see perfection in yourself and in a brother becomes the function of each one, until there is no imperfection or misperception, and you realize that, beyond appearances, there is no “other,” only God (Tara Singh Nothing Real Can Be Threatened 135).

Conflict arises because we believe that we are apart from the world: we believe that we have separate interests, and that these interests require defense which, in turn, sometimes requires attack. Most of us say we don’t believe this, and we can be very good at persuading ourselves and others that we don’t, but if we examine our living carefully, we will see that in fact we do believe we are apart from one another, and that this separation breeds competition, and we conduct our living accordingly. The people who enacted the Holocaust were not monsters. They were human beings like you and me who erred in a deeply grievous way that you and I could err, given the same circumstances. Our capacity to bring forth peace and love – to not err on the side of hatred – is contingent on our never forgetting that fact.

If we see lovelessness happening, then we can respond to it in the moment. If I’m being a jerk in the classroom, then I can be less of a jerk, and make the requisite amends. If I am selfish in my living at home, the same. But as I used to say with respect to making amends as a spiritual practice: the point is not to become great at saying “I’m sorry.” The point is to become the sort of living being who does not need to make amends so often.

That is why eventually our so-called spiritual seeking moves us in the direction of what can be applied and brought into application. This was part of what alienated Tara Singh from the Foundation for Inner Peace and FACIM and more canonical approaches to ACIM. Singh understood that we have to work out the course in the course of our very living; anything else was insufficient.

Insist upon direct knowing. Let that be your decision. Unless you and I have come to gratefulness and peace, the future will be our master and we will live by the fear of consequences. Take a stand not to be regulated by your “knowings” and the future will have less sway over you. The commitment not to let your assumptions or ideas influence you brings with it its own awareness (Tara Singh Nothing Real Can Be Threatened 128).

I have come to see the wisdom of this but not without considerable effort. But over time I have understood that while we need to give careful attention to our ideas about living, we need also be aware of how those ideas can sometimes take us away from the actual living they imply. J.A. Simmons a Christian scholar whose work I find helpful, even though we are treading somewhat different paths, puts it this way.

Engaging in hermeneutics is absolutely essential for thinking and living well, but sometimes hermeneutic inquiry can invite a second-order existence that fails to find traction in what Wittgenstein might call the ‘rough ground’ of a community’s shared hopes, beliefs, and rituals. This is not an either/or decision between engaged practice or detached theory, but simply a Kierkegaardian reminder not to forget about living while we think about how best to live. Phenomenology in a postmodern/post-secular context should propel us into our historical communities, not away from them. It should call us to critical engagement, not disregard and detachment.

By all means study. Indeed, our cognitive capacities – our gift for logic, rational thought, evidence-gathering, clarifying bias – are incredibly useful in figuring out why we suffer and how to minimize that suffering.

But our study is sterile if it does not reach the moist potentiality of living in the world: its fructivity blossoms in the messy and confused loveliness of our living as loving languaging beings, each one of whom could be the other.

Tara Singh said in another context – I am working from memory, not the specific texts, and thus paraphrasing – that when Jesus said “I and the father are one” he spoke to his reality. When we say it, it’s just words. And so Singh called on us to learn why it was just words so that we could learn how to live in a way that it was our actuality. Or, better yet, find our own actuality, and the language that expresses that actuality without qualification or condition.

That is the work, and no other work is really satisfying. The work, so to speak, appears differently for each of us, but it is not different in any fundamental way. How shall we bring forth love? The answer is within us in the form of that which obstructs the free flow of love, and it is without us in the sense that the context of working out the bringing forth appears in the other, or, in approximately ACIM terms, our brothers and sisters.

So a religion – or spiritual tradition or practice, if you like – such as A Course in Miracles is helpful to the extent it redirects us away from mental quests for absolutes and towards the messy  and lovely collective of the world. If it organizes our thinking in ways that help us to bring forth love in communion with our brothers and sisters, broadly defined so as to include starfish, snowflakes, rivers and bears, each one of whom could be our own self, then great. Be religious. But if it leads us to double down on mental purity, on the lovelessness of “I’ve got it and you don’t,” then shuck religion. There’s a better way.

I don’t know what this means for you, of course. I know folks who bring forth love out of religious traditions that are at best confusing and sometimes frightening to me. And I know folks for whom ACIM becomes a kind of moral straitjacket that they try to make everyone else wear. We have to go deeply into our experience of love and that which obstructs love, and this means going deeply into the world our loving – and obstructing loving – brings forth. There is no other work, and nobody can do it for us.

Awakening in Relationship

I think we are moving perhaps in the direction of a space where it is possible to address questions of awakening and what-happens-after without so much judgment and confusion and drama. Perhaps we are getting clear on the simplicity. Perhaps we are focusing on the helpful work and the relationships which make that work light.

The other is a way of seeing, especially when we love them a great deal. Love is a way of seeing our own self in a lightened way. I mean this literally. The other is a lens and what we see through that lens is what we are, and when we are in love with this other, then we see ourselves as both beloved and loving, and if we are truly blessed then we see that there is only love, and both self and other dissolve utterly. There is only relationship; there was always only relationship.

Naturally this happens in bodies – in our apparent structure as human beings – which I experience always as deeply confusing. I want to make love and bake bread and walk hand-in-hand in the forest and wake early and boil water for tea. Naturally that is all lovely and important but it is only a shallow expression of love. I don’t mean “shallow” here in a negative sense. I just mean that it is local and temporal, and love is so much more than that. It is bigger than that – cosmically bigger, infinitely bigger.

The work, in part, is to see this: to see that the love brought forth in the structure for the structure is not created by the structure. If that is clear, it becomes possible to see beyond the structure, or sense beyond it, and thus be liberated from it in the sense of having to identify with it in toto.

The other that we love is the way that this cosmic vastness is shown to us. We see the other and then slowly – for me it took many years and many spilled words of strangled dialogue, many steps forward and back – we see the love itself. Imagine that you are reading by candle and then somebody turns on an overhead light. The dim glow of the candle is negligible. Where before you had to squint to read each word now the whole page is legible and bright. When we see love itself, the other becomes like the window through which the light streams. You are grateful for the window but my God the light. The lovelily life-giving light . . .

All things that God created timeless
are His gifts to me. The passing and the frail
are not part of my inheritance.
Such are His promises.

(Helen Schucman The Gifts of God)

Love is timeless and unchanging. Its guidance is sure. Its radiance is beyond trust and contingency as we understand those concepts.

With whom and with what are we in relationship? Can any other question matter? Unless our whole being is devoted to being in relationship with God – that is, with life and with love – than we are not in relationship at all. Everything else is a pale imitation, useful only for reminding us of the timeless love that is our real identity and the real foundation of our being.

When we give attention this way to the other, the other ceases to exist as an object. They are not apart from us, nor we from them. They are here: they are us. The body might be far away – in Alaska or Nepal. It might be buried somewhere in the earth. It doesn’t matter. The other is not a body! No more are we. The love that appears in bodies is a hint, a faint gesture at the love that brings the body forth.

Our salvation, so to speak, is to realize this about our love: that is not about the body, nor about personal relationship even, but about love that is unchanging and everpresent, forever flowing and infusing and inspiring. Nothing else calls to us; the other is simply the wind that blows the door open: a world appears, a universe, and all of it held in the luminous love that for a little while longer we might agree to call God.

Personalization as the Root of Conflict

It took me a long time to understand that the root of so many conflicts and problems in my living arose out of an insistence – a sort of mental habit – of personalizing everything. Things did not just happen; they happened to me. It was not life but my life.

Thus, my investment in life grew large and precarious. The scale of what required defense and protection was vast. The point at which its unmanageability became clear was also the point at which it also became clear that escape was futile.

This personalization and its ruinous nature is actually not hard to see and thus talk about and think about. In fact, a nontrivial part of how it sustains itself is by remaining so accessible. We fall into the trap of asking “why do I always do this?” We repeat patterns of behavior and then analyze them, and the analysis becomes a pattern of behavior and so we analyze that. Round and round it goes, like a skein of yarn endlessly tangling itself.

And again, by the time we actually start to genuinely want a way out of that mess, it has become so densely knotted that there isn’t a way out. Every move we make doubles down on the chaos. Turn here and you’re facing a new ACIM teacher. Turn there and it’s a new yoga studio that just opened up. Behind you is a new relationship or a new take on an old relationship and in front of you an ever-so slightly-tweaked diet. And the whole thing is narrated by dozens of voices that take turns mesmerizing us, holding us fast to this uncreative keeling.

But there is a way out and the way out is simply to see that this narrow hellish maze is not real. We don’t have to escape because we’re not bound. It’s just a bunch of thoughts, no more real than wisps of cloud. But of course that’s a thought, too. You see how quickly we fall back into the familiar, even when it isn’t creative or nurturing . . .

It can help to give attention to things and inquire into the actual relationship that is present. Is it personal or is it impersonal? Does the distinction matter?

Sometimes when the moon is full and it’s late and I am finishing writing or reading but am not yet ready to sleep, I go outside and visit the horses. Near midnight they are very calm and quiet, often sitting together in the pasture. One, Jack, an Appaloosa cross, is white and appears luminescent in the moonlight. Sometimes they unfold from the earth and come to me, their enormous bodies floating through the light like secrets. In those moments, we are the only living beings in the universe. In those moments, love shucks the given form and simply gives itself in centerless radiation.

As I describe that moment, it is clear there is relationship inherent in it. But is the relationship between me and the horses? Or is the relationship one of life with itself? Or love with itself, say?

I think these are good questions! If the relationship is with me and the horses, then it is personal. This is my homestead and they are my animals. This beauty, this luminosity, this specialness is my experience; I am the one gaining wisdom and inner peace. I am the one writing poems about it. I am the one learning from it and I am the one who choose to be generous or miserly with what is learned.

I think most of us are in that space most of the time. If we are honest, I think we are, though often subtly. It’s not a sin or a crime. In fact, it’s natural. It’s how the human structure operates. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way the human structure operates, and that there isn’t a better way for it to operate, and that we aren’t here to learn that better way, and bring it forth, alone and together, for all of us.

I think that is why we end up enacting this project that we call spiritual seeking or pursuing happiness or whatever we call it. We intuitively grasp that something is not working in our living and we can’t figure out what it is and how to fix it. God comes into it then. Angels and psychologists and coaches come into it. And here we are.

What force or power brings the horses forth? Life does this. They are alive. They are living. And life is not ultimately reducible. We can’t reach its ultimate beginning; we can’t find the first cause beyond which there are no causes. We can go all the way down to the level of electrons where there is no differentiation, no space or matter, and still. We can understand a lot about life, we can become efficient at certain aspects of living, but the whole of it, the beyond-all-questions of it . . . that lies outside the range of our sensual and cognitive structure. All we can say is that life is wonderful and mysterious and utterly given. We literally have all of it. We aren’t a little alive and a little dead. It is all here always, so far as we can tell.

The same force or power that brings forth the horses brings forth us as well. Of course the forms are different but the force that infuses the forms is the same. There isn’t a kind of life there and a kind of life here. There is living. There is life. And so the question becomes, with respect to all the forms appearing and interacting: what is the relationship between them?

Because it’s clear that life, as such, is not about Sean. It doesn’t bring Sean forth any different than it brings for the horses. Or you. Or an ant or a sunflower or a star. It’s the same law, the same force, the same power. It can’t be personalized; it can only be misunderstood. When we personalize it, or try to, we aren’t seeing it clearly. We are confusing ourselves by not giving attention and being present to the simple fact of the shared nature of our being.

Often, when I am outdoors, there is a sense of being actually connected to what what appears. The other afternoon I watched half a dozen geese circle low overhead before gliding into a muddy cornfield a quarter mile south. In that moment of observation I did not experience distance between us. I did not experience separation marked by space. I experienced the openness as connecting us, like a braid or an outstretched hand. And this openness reached beyond us, encompassing the cornfield and the river, the hills and the cities, the highways and the clouds . . .

Often, in neo-advaita circles, the suggestion is that we are the pure awareness in which all phenomena arises. I understand that pointing, even as I experience it somewhat differently. Life assumes many structures and postures; I have the structure of a human being writing and homesteading in New England as an empire crumbles around me. I have the posture of studying holiness to undo patriarchy; I am joined to – indeed, I am saved by – other human beings who are wiser and more expert than I am at that particular project. I am learning to be humble and grateful and diligent in their presence.

The “I” in the preceding paragraph is a semantic convenience, of course. In your writing and in your speaking and in your living “I” comes forth in some other way. We share a form but it assumes other positions, other postures, the better to bring forth love.

There is a movement then in the direction of relationship with life, with love, and this relationship is not personal. It is already operative, already given. We don’t have to do anything to experience it; we have to simply see that what we are currently doing – our current relationships and modes of relating – are not helping but hurting. They are obstructing. And the real world – the real relationship – will slowly rise to meet us then. It is ever there awaiting us to grow tired of games and distractions.

When Our Teacher is Love

Love doesn’t talk about itself. It doesn’t brag or boast or chide. It just moves us a little, here and there. We get a sense that something is off and with it a sense of what would be corrective. That’s love, as I am using the word “love.” It’s natural; it’s inherent. We don’t have to do anything but give attention and there it is, operating, flowing, coming forth through us, being itself, extending itself.

Yet a lot of what we do obstructs the operation of love. Our activity, however well-intentioned, is like sand in the gears. Love is a clear trail through the forest and along come some drunken lumberjacks who think they’ll make it better and saw down a bunch of trees that then block the trail. We mean well but we don’t see that we don’t need to do anything. We don’t see that it’s all being done; us, too.

This happens because of an abiding confusion about what we are. We think we’re separate from the world; we think our living is “ours.” It’s not but we can see it that way. This confusion, too, is natural. Confusion isn’t criminal; it isn’t evil. If I’m teaching and my students are confused, I don’t punish them. I refine my teaching; I go on teaching. If I’m a parent and my kids are confused, I don’t trade them in for new kids. I refine my parenting; I go on parenting. I keep learning to teach better and I keep teaching.

We are confused about the fundamentals, but we can be un-confused. Love will unconfuse us, if we get out of its way. Will we take love as our teacher?

Again, when I use the word “love” I am not pointing at things like soul-mates or sex partners or husbands and wives or loyal dogs or inspiring poets. I am not pointing to a feeling that one has for a person, pet, place or practice. It is more like I am pointing to a law or a pattern. Love is what makes flowers grow; love is makes maple syrup sweet to our tongues. Love is what extends itself; love and life are not separate but conjoined. They are one movement, one flow.

Relating love to life – to the ongoing nature of life, the ongoing begetting of life – can drive a lot of folks around the bend. Botany follows natural laws like germination and photosynthesis. A seed does not be come a violet because of God’s will but because it evolved to respond a certain way to certain conditions. Violets are natural results of violet seeds set in soil and subject to requisite sunlight and rainfall. Stop trying to spiritualize everything.

Well, I agree. I do find it more helpful in some instances to refer to God’s will as photosynthesis. Or entropy. Or happiness. Language is malleable and constructive. There are lots of ways for love to make itself clear, and not all of them require use of the word “love.” After all, violets don’t talk about photosynthesis. Or violets.

But this does not relieve us of the obligation to use language carefully and consistently. The domain of botany has a language; it is a kind of violence, a kind of injustice, to demand it conform to the language of another domain. And it is also a kind of violence or injustice to rank domains – to say that the domain of biology is better or more important than the domain of theology or vice-versa. In my experience, science expands the experience of wonder and joy. Love includes it and is included in it. Love has its own order and my preferences have surprisingly little to do with it. Why not see this? Why not learn from it?

I said earlier that love is akin to a law or a pattern that brings forth life. That is, love begets love. It brings itself forth. And that bringing forth can be noticed: it can be attended. It is intelligent and responsive. When I say it is “intelligent,” I don’t mean in the sense of quantitative abilities (like those purportedly measured by IQ tests) but rather in the sense of qualitative potentials that we all possess equally. We don’t have to go to school to learn how to hug and comfort someone who is sad or hurt. We don’t need to a teacher to know that holding hands is a sweetness. When we make space for this free flow of love, we are happier, and love expands accordingly. It becomes vaster than the cosmos. It allows us to function fully and creatively. There is nothing it can’t do if we let it.

So here I am like (though hardly precisely like) John Lennon and Yoko Ono singing “all we are saying is give peace a chance.” Just give attention to love, the domains in which it appears, the language it yearns for as its own expression. What happens when we do this? What kind of teacher is love? What are its lessons? What classroom is given to its students? Find out!

Beyond Spiritual Ideals

We have ideas about what life should feel like and look like and these ideas guide our behavior.  These ideas are not our own; we acquire them from the culture in which we find ourselves. We think that spiritual people are peaceful vegans or celibate monks or scholarly ascetics. And we act accordingly, and our acting never manages to meet the ideal, and so we have to keep going.

In this way, dissatisfaction perpetuates itself. We never get beyond spiritual ideals and concepts. Our living remains haunted – sometimes intensely, sometimes dimly – but always there is a sense that something is missing and that when we find it or reach it then at last we will know the peace that surpasses understanding.

Ideals are like rainbows. They are beautiful and alluring. But we can never reach them. We can walk for miles and never reach the rainbow in the distance. We can hone our behavior for years and never reach the spiritual ideal.

But there is a way out, and that way is simply to see that the spiritual ideal is not the problem but rather a symptom of the problem. And the problem is the belief that we are discrete entities responsible for our survival living in a hostile world. That is, our spiritual quest arises as a response to the belief that we are separate and responsible for our own living. So long as we don’t address the underlying belief, the spiritual search will go on without ever being satisfied.

So what is interesting is to give attention to the underlying belief – the sense that we are separated and individual and personally responsible for what happens. Does this belief hold up to questioning? To scrutiny?

Looking into this belief system – giving attention to it – is an exercise of common sense. It is inherent in us. It is innate to our structure as sentient human beings. Giving attention is natural; we can’t not do it. So we just do it intentionally. We noticing noticing, direct it this way or that, and see what happens as we do.

What is missing? What nags at us, implying that we’d be better off if we acquired this or felt that? Followed this diet or that exercise regimen? Slept with somebody new? Prayed a different prayer? Our natural intelligence and wisdom allows us to notice what is missing and then to keep looking into it. Will being a vegetarian really fulfill us? Will A Course in Miracles really bring to pass what all those other spiritual practices have not? Have those sorts of changes helped in the past?

At some point we might see that because these external changes don’t help, and have never helped except temporarily, that the problem isn’t finding the right external shift in behavior but rather asking a new question. That is, rather than ask what will fill the apparent interior gap or hole, we can ask if that gap or hole is actually there. What is we’re wrong altogether about that? What if we’re not separate?

In other words, what if the problem is the way we are looking at our living, rather than something in the actual living itself? And what if the way to correct this “wrong” seeing is already inherent in us in the form of common sense and natural intelligence?

Saint Teresa of Avila said that every bird knows what God’s will for a wing is. Her wisdom and clarity are breath-taking. God’s will is what comes forth naturally, effortlessly. It’s what is. For example, we don’t have to will a flower into existence in order to admire its beauty or succor bees. We don’t have to will beauty into existence. Or bees. The next breath comes of an accord other than our own.

The deeper we go into this, the more we see that peace and joy and love are brought forth naturally, like bees and birds’ wings and beauty. The less the apparently discrete self does, the more peace and joy and love appear. We can trust that because that is God’s will. And soon enough, we see that we, too, are brought forth in this way. We, too, in the simple essence of our being, our living, are God’s will. Life sustains life; we are the sustained, not the sustainer.

Thus, the problem is not to solve the many apparent problems that arise, but to see the fundamental belief system out of which they arise, and then to question the integrity and coherence of that system. The way we look and question will vary; it might appear scholarly or meditative tone or therapeutic according to the peculiarities of our structure but the basic premise is the same: look and question, look and question. Give attention.