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Awakening to the Miracle of Ordinary Life
(First given as a talk to 200
people at the Whole Life Expo in San Francisco and then later edited and published in The Empty
Vessel: A Journal of Contemporary Taoism)
We are faced with a profound mystery: the mystery of
ourselves here and now, on this earth. Whatever scientific
or religious beliefs we may have about this mystery, about
how and why we have come to be, most of us are "asleep" to
its unfathomable immediacy, its "now-ness." We move through
our lives in a state of waking sleep, a state of
psychological, cultural, and spiritual hypnosis. Instead of
experiencing ourselves consciously from moment to moment as
living, breathing beings, we lose ourselves unconsciously in
the various impulses and fragments of our self-images—our
likes and dislikes, our pleasures and pains, our theories,
our expectations, our dreams, our fears, and our beliefs.
Instead of asking and reflecting on the hard, deep questions
about the meaning of our lives, about who we are and where
we are going, we look for easy answers to questions that
don’t matter. We are often more interested in what happened
last week at the event that we missed or what’s going to
happen tonight on our favorite TV show than what is
happening right here and now in our own minds and bodies. If
we aren’t living in our memories, we’re off somewhere in the
future, worrying, planning, imagining, and so on. We take
the present moment for granted, forgetting that our time on
this earth is limited and that we and everyone we know is
going to die.
A New Way of Living
We need to discover a new way of living. We need to learn
how to engage with our lives in such a way that we begin to
wake up from our sleep, from our dreams and illusions, from
our narrow attitudes and prejudices. In discovering this new
way of living, I think it must be clear to all of us that
the first, most important, and last step is to remember that
we’re here and that the experience of this "hereness" is a
gift from the unknown. Can you try this as you continue
reading?
To support this effort, sit in a way you’ve never sat
before. Those of us who have studied ourselves, who have
observed ourselves over a period of years, have certainly
noticed that our postures are intimately related to our
thoughts, feelings, sensations, and perceptions. Through
years of conditioning and repetition each of us has
developed a repertoire of postures that is closely linked
with our repertoire of thoughts and feelings. By taking a
new posture, we throw a monkey wrench into this entire
mechanism. This allows the brain and nervous system to
become more sensitive, to utilize more of its capacity, and
thus to take in more-complete impressions of our inner and
outer lives. So experiment for a moment. Take a new sitting
position. As you sit, pay attention to your sensation. If
your sensation of yourself feels "normal," then you probably
haven’t found a new position.
Now that you’ve more or less taken a new sitting posture,
you’re going to experiment with your "attention," that
magical gateway into consciousness, to see if it’s possible
to be in touch simultaneously with your inner and outer
worlds. I hope as you read these words that you will also
listen inwardly to your own heartbeat and breath, and to the
subtle physical and emotional changes that are taking place
at every moment. Can you experience yourself at this moment
as a "breathing being"? Can you sense all the extraordinary
movements that are taking place with each inhalation and
exhalation? I hope that you understand that the real point
of your being here reading these words is the same as the
real point of your being anywhere doing anything at all. It
is to be completely open to yourself, and to the miracle of
your life as it is.
As human beings, we have many things in common. We breathe,
we eat. We talk. We move. We sense. We feel. We laugh. We
think. We imagine. We worry. We suffer. We hope. We work. We
love. Above all, we experience. But what do we experience?
And how? Do we experience the miraculous nature of "be-ing"
itself? Or do we experience an impoverished, mostly
imaginary life based on inner lying and fashioned out of the
conditions and pressures of our upbringing, education, and
culture? What would it mean to let go of everything we think
we know about ourselves—whether positive or negative—and
look at ourselves impartially, from an entirely new
perspective? What would it mean to stop lying to ourselves
about our powers, our motives, our identities? For we all
know, in our heart of hearts, that we understand almost
nothing about ourselves and our lives on this earth. To be
sure, we have amassed a lot of so-called knowledge about
ourselves, but this knowledge is based more on conjecture
and imagination than on direct impressions, and it is shaped
by our deep resistance to seeing ourselves as we are. We all
know, in our heart of hearts, that the stories we tell
ourselves and others about who we are and why we act the way
we do are interwoven with lies and half-truths to cover up
our own inner confusion and contradictions. It doesn’t
matter whether these lies are conscious or unconscious. What
does matter is that they keep us from experiencing the
question that needs to live in all of us, the question that
can call us homeward toward our own fundamental being: "Who
am I"? As the great Sufi poet Rumi once wrote: "I honor
those who try to rid themselves of any lying, who empty the
self and have only clear being there."
Many of us have had experiences of this emptying of the
self, of "clear being," in moments of great shock—of intense
suffering, creativity, or joy. In such moments, or sometimes
during deep meditation, we suddenly awaken to the underlying
miracle of life and see through the "self" that we have
manufactured over the years. For a moment we are able to
give up our inner explanations and lies; we are free from
the tyranny of our self-image and the beliefs that support
it, however narrow or grandiose they may be. Thankfully, we
find ourselves in the world of the unknown. We experience,
with the great Taoist sage Lao Tzu, the real meaning of the
statement that "the Tao that can be told is not the eternal
Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name."
Most of us have had this experience—what could be called an
experience of "inner freedom." And most of us have seen how
for a time this experience energizes us and gives us a new,
more-vital sense of meaning. But then we return to the
demands and momentums of our everyday life. And these, in
turn, bring into play the habitual structure of mental,
emotional, and physical attitudes that we have built up over
the years to give us the illusion of unity and shield us
from the confusions and contradictions of living on this
earth. Many of these attitudes, however, have no in-born
connection with us. Rather they are "suggested" to us
throughout our lives both from the outside and the inside.
From the outside by parents, books, teachers, television,
newspapers, and our friends and associates; from the inside
by the unconscious, undigested material of our own psyches.
No matter where these attitudes—these stances toward
ourselves and the world—originate, however, they most often
function as a psycho-physical prison that inhibits the free
movement of our energy and cuts us off from our own being.
It is clear that we cannot rely solely on the big shocks of
life to open the prison door and allow us to escape into the
so-called real world. For as long as we continue to comfort
ourselves with beliefs, expectations, and habits of living
based on inner lying, no transformation, no miracle, will be
possible. What we need is to undertake an "inner work" that
can help us cut through these attitudes, these limits to our
perception, to see what is actually in front of us, no
matter how "ordinary" it might seem to be. For the true
mystery of the universe is not someplace other than where we
are; it is not to be found in UFOs, or angels, or our
teacher’s words; it is not to be found in our imagination or
speculations. No. It is to be found right here and now in
the living temple of our own awakened minds, bodies, and
senses. It is to be found right here and now in the field of
our consciousness. It is through an exploration of
consciousness, of the "witness" that can stand behind and
embrace every perception and impression of our lives, that
we can intentionally discover the miracle of the ordinary.
But this is not so easy. As George Orwell once wrote: "To
see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant
struggle."
The struggle that we need to undertake is the struggle to
see the way in which I constantly lie to myself. It is the
struggle to be inwardly sincere. It is this seeing, a
process that also requires the support of my body and
feelings (for my sensations and feelings can also lie), that
can free me from my habitual preoccupations, expectations,
and beliefs—those powerful psychological states that keep me
from experiencing myself and the world in the fullness of
the present moment. But as anyone who has tried knows, the
effort to be inwardly sincere brings with it suffering, real
suffering, the immediate, painful experience of the many
ways in which I cut myself off from the truth. This
experience, as difficult as it is, also brings with it a
great sense of freedom and joy, a sense of returning home
from exile.
The ordinary events of our everyday lives, whether they are
personal or professional, give us extraordinary
opportunities to awaken from our psychological and cultural
sleep. As mundane as these events often seem to be, they
are, when we look closer, filled with the unexpected, with
surprises, contradictions, and other small shocks that can
put us into question. If we can receive these shocks without
trying to smooth them over, without lying to ourselves or
others about them, they can help generate the energy to
search not for new solutions to the problems of living but
rather for a new, more global quality of consciousness, a
consciousness that can embrace the whole of life. It is this
consciousness that will not only help us live more
intelligently, but, more importantly, will also help us, as
Gurdjieff puts it, "to revalue our values," to come to a
deeper perception of what is truly important in our lives.
To revalue our values is not an easy thing to do. We need
the help of other serious seekers. As our field of
consciousness begins to expand we will see much that we do
not like in ourselves. If we’re going to grow, however, if
we’re going to experience the miraculous nature of being
alive, we have to welcome whatever we see—pain, pleasure,
boredom, wonder, joy, depression, shame, meanness, and so
on—whether it’s something we like or don’t like.
There is a story that touches on this truth, a story
involving the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin. The Mulla had put
a lot of effort into starting a beautiful flower garden and
was eagerly awaiting the results. One morning he woke up and
the garden was in full bloom. But it was filled not just
with the flowers he had planted but also with a yellow
blanket of dandelions, which he didn’t like. After pondering
his problem, he sought out the advice of famous gardeners
everywhere about how to get rid of these dandelions, which
were overrunning his garden. Try as he might, none of the
advice worked; in fact the dandelions seemed to feed on
these efforts to get rid of them. Finally, in apparent
desperation, he sought out the advice of the royal gardener
at the sheik’s palace, a man reputed to be very wise. The
royal gardener made many suggestions, but the Mulla had
already tried them all. Finally, after sitting in silence
for many hours, the gardener looked at the Mulla and said,
"Well, since you can’t get rid of the dandelions, perhaps
you’d better learn to love them." "That’s just it," said the
Mulla, "I already do."
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