Awake in This Life

Another important realization as we climb occurs when we see that meditation won’t necessarily keep us happy. Meditation, done correctly, merely affords us direct and continual exposure to the deep silence underneath whatever is happening right now. Exposure to deep silence reminds us that all things are temporary, including anything we think might make us happy in a permanent way. Any object that the mind seeks in order to gain happiness, such as a new car, a new job, a new relationship, a new religion, or anything else, might put the mind in a state of happiness for a while, but neither our mood nor the thing that fueled the mood will last forever. At some point there will be decay, boredom, exhaustion, or pain, and when this happens the mind snaps like a rubber band back to its position prior to acquiring the thing it thought would make it happy.

The good news, however, is that a stillness practice can, so to speak, change the position of the rubber band. Imagine your right hand plucking a rubber band stretched between your left thumb and index finger. Each pull of the rubber band is like a new distraction that the mind thinks will offer it lasting happiness. In very little time, however, the tension builds as the rubber band stretches, eventually snapping back to its original position. This process can continue in some of us for our whole lives, as if we existed solely for each snap of the rubber band. Stillness, though, mysteriously moves the left hand toward the right as it stretches the rubber band. The snaps are no longer as extreme, and the tension diminishes to the point of a peaceful equilibrium where our happiness is no longer dependent on any object at all. This is how our consciousness evolves: the more still we become, the more we begin to relax the tension of constant seeking and simply allow ourselves to live, consciously, as an expression of a deeper wholeness.

It’s important for us to recognize that there isn’t any practice that will allow for an Awakening into and through this wholeness unless it involves complete stillness of body and mind. Without stilling the mind, we can’t gain access to the perspective from beyond the mind that total quietude shows. As long as we identify with thoughts, feelings, and the things we think will bring us lasting happiness, the rubber band will keep snapping us back into unconscious behavior. Any practice we might choose that doesn’t support total stillness will only be a hindrance, and such practices are never able to help us get beyond the constriction of ego in an authentic way.

Truly transformative practices focus on the release of the ego into a profound blending of subject and object where, as we say in Zen, “Form is Emptiness, and Emptiness is form.” Loosely translated, this can mean that all things are essentially Infinite in nature, and that Infinity is essentially the fundamental quality of all things. Once we begin to live from a place of stillness, we recognize this Infinity of space in ourselves and everything else. In this still, Infinite space, the rubber band falls away into total insignificance, since from this vastly open perspective, there is no subject and no object—nothing to seek, nothing sought, nothing to avoid, and nothing to fear. All boundaries fall away in this conscious meeting of Infinity. There is neither this nor that, we might say. All is once and forever the One and the many, all at the same moment. Without separation, there can be neither boundary nor separation. There can only be unity. Realizing this, we Awaken.