Awake in This Life

Many teaching traditions speak of two kinds of truth: Absolute Truth, or what has been called the “Ultimate realm”; and the everyday truth, or what has been called the “circumstantial realm.” Our day-to-day lives are filled with lots of ordinary circumstances. We get up, brush our teeth, change some diapers, get the paper, shower, feed the dog, and kiss those we love good-bye before we set off to work. Yet at the same time, our day-to-day lives are also filled with unquantifiable aspects of what we might call “Being” or “Spirit.” This expansive aspect of our day-to-day living is totally beyond any human trapping of any kind, and yet Spirit is always already everywhere whether our minds recognize it or not.

But a conscious and continual recognition of Spirit doesn’t necessarily come easily. We can always expect the ego to resist any incorporation of the Ultimate into its circumstances since the Ultimate is something it can’t control, just like the clouds can’t control the radiance of the sun. The clouds can temporarily diffuse the sun’s light and some of its warmth, but they, like all circumstances, will eventually yield to what shines. So in the circumstantial sense we might say that it is cloudy, or that it is even raining, but in the Ultimate or expansive sense, we recognize that the sun is still shining.

Although both the rain and the sunshine are both “true,” we tend to work hard to avoid the rain. In our life circumstance, our minds may be distracted by storms of resistance, indulgence, pain, pleasure, horror, excitement, desire, glory, or fear, among other things, but there is also a vast spacious radiance within us that transcends all of our personal feelings and perceptions. Like the sun, this simple spiritual grace never stops radiating light, no matter what storms are brought by our situation. It is always beyond any mind bound by circumstance.

Living as this light takes lots of practice, and can take a while to open through us. And sometimes we don’t even see when the pointers are showing us the Path. After some years under the watchful eyes of my Zen teachers, I read an account of a teacher in another tradition who told his students that the presence we have in each of us that witnesses the mind is forever free of mind. This freedom from mind, he went on to say, is the realization of Truth. I remember being blown away by this, and I wondered why after all of the time in meditation, listening to Dharma talks, and conversing with fellow students, not one teacher had ever suggested this approach to me. When I asked one of my teachers about it, she smiled and then said, “Michael, while the words have been different, we’ve been saying this to you for some time.”

As we uncover the Ultimate within our experience, we begin to practice leaving behind the things that we recognize as no longer useful on our climb, and we do this by giving our total attention to everything that arises in our moment-to-moment awareness. This awareness always points us in the right direction up the Mountain. For instance, when we pay close attention to whatever mental chatter we hear in our consciousness, which we can do at any time during the day or night, we begin to realize that we are not the chatter but that which is actually hearing the chatter. We start to ask ourselves just what is that part of us that is aware of this chatter? What is it that is aware of past and future? What is it that is aware of these thoughts, and these feelings? What is it that is aware of absolutely everything that arises in our consciousness?

The answers to these questions open us to the recognition that our thoughts and feelings are always there in our conventional circumstance, and yet they don’t define the whole of who we truly are since there is always something there, watching the whole thing. No matter what we are paying attention to, there is a remainder of attention itself. Suddenly, all attachment to past and future, as well as everything with which we’ve ever identified, begins to be seen as little more than tiny ripples in a sea of freedom. In fact, we begin to see that the ego’s attachments to all of our rippling thoughts and feelings supply it with all it needs in order to build an identity. The simple awareness of this unfolding drama, and the inner presence that can effortlessly watch our circumstances, is exactly what points us in the direction that all of history’s sages have been pointing to for so long. Choosing this path offers us a radically different perspective—one that is sourced from and a conscious expression of Spirit.