Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
Nonduality Highlights: Issue #3380, Saturday, December 13, 2008, Editor: Mark
The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.
- Li Po and Tu Fu, from Endless River:A Friendship in Poetry,
translated by Sam Hami and posted to DailyDharma
A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once
your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active,
so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light
of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and
work miracles without any effort on your part.
- Nisargadatta Maharaj, posted to ANetofJewels
The questions I am most frequently asked are related to the
emotions. Many people seek to be free from difficult emotions
such as anger, fear, and grief, and seek the more pleasant
emotions such as joy, happiness, and bliss. The usual strategies
for achieving happiness involve either repressing or expressing
negative emotions in the hope that they will be pushed from sight
or released. Unfortunately, neither way reflects the truth of
one's inherent self, which is an unmoving purity of being that
exists deeper than any emotion and remains unaffected by any
emotion.
There are certainly times when it is appropriate to repress or
express an emotion. But there is also another possibility: to
neither repress nor express. I call this "direct
experience."
To directly experience any emotion is to neither deny it nor to
wallow in it, and this means that there can be no story about it.
There can be no storyline about who it is happening to, why it is
happening, why it should not be happening, who s responsible, or
who is to blame.
In the midst of any emotion, so-called "negative" or
"positive", it is possible to discover what is at the
core. The truth is that when you really experience any negative
emotion, it disappears. And when you truly experience any
positive emotion, it grows and is endless. So relatively, there
are negative and positive emotions, but in inquiry, only positive
ones: that is the positivity that is absolute consciousness.
Because there is not much in our culture that confirms this
astounding revelation, we spend our lives chasing positive
emotions and running from negative emotions.
When you fully experience any negative emotion, with no story, it
instantaneously ceases to be. If you think you are fully
experiencing an emotion and it remains quite intense, then
recognize that there is still some story being told about it--how
big it is, how you will never be able to get rid of it, how it
will always come back, how dangerous it is to experience it.
Whatever the stor of the moment may be, the possibilities of
postponing direct experience are endless.
For instance, when you are irritated, the usual tendency is to do
something to get rid of the irritation or to place blame either
on yourself or someone or something else as the cause of the
irritation. Then the storylines around irritation begin to
develop. It is actually possible to do nothing with the
irritation, to not push it out of awareness or try to get rid of
it, but to directly experience it. In the moment that irritation
arises, it is possible to simply be completely, totally, and
freely irritated, without expressing it or repressing it.
In general, direct experience often reveals a deeper emotion.
Irritation is perhaps just a ripple on the surface. Deeper than
irritation, there may actually be rage or fear. Again, the goal
is neither to get rid of the rage or the fear, not to analyze it,
but to directly experience it. If rage or fear is revealed to be
beneath irritation, then let your awareness godeeper; let
yourself be absolutely, completely angry or fearful, without
acting out or repressing.
Fear is often the biggest challenge because it is what most
people habitually attempt to keep away. Of course as they try to
keep it away, it grows even larger, hovers even closer.
What I am suggesting is that you can actually open to fear; you
can experience being afraid without any need to say you are
afraid, and without following any thought of being afraid. You
can just simply experience fear itself.
When I speak of directly experiencing fear, I am not speaking
about physiologically appropriate fear. The response to physical
danger, fight or flight, is natural and appropriate to the human
organism. It is hardwired into the body for its survival. For
instance, it is appropriate to get out of the way of an
approaching bus. But the fears that I suggest be directly met,
all the way through, are the psychological fears, the fears that
keep our energy and attention bound unnecessarily in proection
and defense, such as the fear of emotional pain or the fears of
loss of death. When a psychological fear is met rather than
resisted and run from, it often reveals an even deeper emotion.
A deep sadness or hurt may be revealed under fear. This, too, can
be directly and completely experienced with no need to a
storyline. If you are willing to experience these emotional
layers all the way trough, you will finally approach what appears
to be a deep abyss. This abyss is what the mind perceives as
nothingness, emptiness, nobody-ness. This is an important moment,
because the willingness to be absolutely nothing, to be nobody,
is the willingness to be free. All of these other emotional
states are layers of defense against this experience of "no
- thingness"--the death of who you think you are. Once the
defenses are down, once the door is open, then this nothingness
that has been feared can be met fully. This meeting is the
revelation of true self-inquiry, revealing the secret gem of
truth that has ben hidden in the core of your own heart all
along. The diamond discovered is you.
This is an immense discovery, but you have to discover it for
yourself. If you are willing to deeply, completely experience any
emotional state, you will discover at its core the same pristine
awareness meeting itself as both the experiencer and the
experienced. If you can discover this truth first hand, you will
be freed from running away from so-called negative states and
running toward so-called positive ones. You will be freed from
either rejection or clinging to what is inherently impermanent.
You will be freed to truly meet yourself and rejoice in this
meeting.
Whatever emotion arises in consciousness can be fully met by
consciousness, with no need to hide in stories or analysis. In
your willingness to not follow the workings of the mind, but just
to be still and completely experience whatever emotion is
arising, you will see that it is nothing. Emotions are only held
together by thought, whether that though is conscious or
subconscious.
You have the power to simply stop and say, "Fear, anger,
grief, despair--okay, come." When you say, "Okay,
come," and you really mean it, and you are truly open, the
emotion cannot come because in that moment because you are not
telling a story about it. I invite you to check this out for
yourself. Fear, anger, grief, or despair only exists when linked
to a story! Yes, this is an amazing, simple, yet profound
discovery. It is huge! You can actually recognize that what you
are running away from does not, in truth, finally exist, and what
you are running toward is already always here.
When Columbus and other explorers discovered the "New
World," they all came back and said, "There is more out
there than we know about, the earth is not flat." But many
people responded, "Oh no, I am not going there." It is
with this same primitivism that we view our emotions. If you are
willing to fall off the edge of the earth, you will see that you
yourself hold the earth, and you annot "fall off" from
yourself; you can only go deeper into yourself.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, in the Western spiritual
subculture in particular, people are fairly open to experiencing
their emotions because it gives them a sense of depth and a sense
of freedom. But this can become a cover for the fear of
experiencing no emotion whatsoever. Defining yourself as an
emotional being is perhaps a step deeper than defining yourself
as a purely mental being, but it is not all the way home. What
you avoid in defining yourself as an emotional being is
emotion-less-ness, nothingness, emptiness. Once you have
experienced pure emptiness, you know directly that who you are
cannot be defined by any mental or emotional state, and this
knowledge is freedom.
When you do not define yourself by emotional states, then the
emotions are free to arise because they don't mean anything about
who you are. You know directly that all states are simply passing
through the pure space that is your true nature.
I invite you all the way in to the heart of pure being, not to
get rid of any emotion, not to dramatize or glorify any emotion,
but to discover what every emotion is calling for, to die to whom
you think you are before who you think you are dies.
- Gangaji, from A Diamond In Your Pocket, posted to
The_Now2
Happy is the moment, when we sit together,
With two forms, two faces, yet one soul,
you and I.
The flowers will bloom forever,
The birds will sing their eternal song,
The moment we enter the garden,
you and I.
The stars of heaven will come out to watch us,
And we will show them
the light of a full moon -
you and I.
No more thought of "you" and "I."
Just the bliss of union -
Joyous, alive, free of care, you and I.
All the bright-winged birds of heaven
Will swoop down to drink of our sweet water
The tears of our laughter, you and I.
What a miracle of fate, us sitting here.
Even at the opposite ends of the earth
We would still be together, you and I
. We have one form in this world,
another in the next.
To us belongs an eternal heaven,
the endless delight of you and I.
Rumi - Ghazal 2214-- Version by Jonathan Star, posted to Sunlight