The edges of things are enticing.  Ground meeting air, ground meeting water.  

The lip of the sea, where ocean touches land, is comfortably ambiguous.  On the beach, your feet are subject to the push and pull of the tides, but you are able to negotiate them.  Able to get out before you are saturated, sucked in. 

What most seekers do is walk the edge where land meets water, enjoy the feel of their feet getting a little wet, but then skitter back. 

There might be another way to occupy a human life.  A way that is free.  Human and real, but free.

Consider the edge of a ship.  How does the edge of a ship differ from a beach? 

Consider the cliff.  Either you’re on land or you’re in the air.  The moment of transition doesn’t last, and you will not be skittering back.  Once the edge is stepped beyond, there is only the falling.  Only and ever the being bathed in air.  

You need not worry.  You won’t hit.  There is no land down there, either to collide with or to stand on.  There is neither security nor fear.  You are no longer a land creature. 

The seeker is one who senses there is more to life, more to reality, more to self, than the solid, familiar ground where life takes place.  There is the sense of something beyond, some potential.  Other.  That even the apparent self is other.  The playing field where ordinary life happens, where things like goals and history and identity and belief define reality — all of that is felt, by a seeker who is far along, to be suspect.  Subject to reconsideration.  

Maybe these things that hold up our feet, that seem to provide a foundation, are not going to ever set us free, deliver anything ultimate. 

The seeker is at least considering the idea that what appears to be solid ground is not.  Is limiting.  Illusory.  Maybe there is another direction to go in.  Another dimension of sorts. 

This must be why heaven, why God, is thought to be “up there” someplace, in the sky.  Not tethered to the earth.  Of some other “dimension.”

Mostly, seekers walk around in circles on familiar terrain, never really getting anywhere.  Move from one practice to another, one teacher to another, one set of beliefs or spiritual lingo to another, one sense of self to another sense of self.  Bounce back and forth between self-improvement and self-obliteration.  Just the impression of progress, or at least, of change.

Of course, the greater number of human beings never even think to wonder if there’s more to reality than the apparent, than what they’ve been handed for true, for important.  They don’t look up, or within, not sufficient to deeply question, in a way that has the power to change the nature of their consciousness. 

So seekers of the truth — even if they never quite “get there” — are surely better off, in some sense, than the vast numbers who never think to ask whether there’s something other than the solid-seeming ground.  Who wander, discontent mostly, but never asking if there might be something wrong with their way of looking.  Who never have the thought that there might be another way to occupy a human life.

A way that is free.  Human and real, but free. 

After a long time of thinking the world was flat, people came to consider another possibility.  The earth, it turned out, was round.  But this did not doom us to walking in circles.  It did not doom humanity to a pedestrian existence, feet held to the given condition. 

The earth may be round, but it still has its edges.  Consider the cliff. 

Consider, too, the beach.  The place where the land and the water each have an edge, and they touch.  The feet are comfortable there.  Seekers tell themselves (comfortably) that they mean to leave the dry land, the known terrain. 

But the water may get deep.  A person could drown.  Be consumed. 

Our stories of God could just as well have placed him at the bottom of the cold, black sea, as up in the clouds or the starry night. 

A lifelong seeker is an amphibious creature.  A person for whom seeking has ended is finned — or, if you prefer, winged. 

Pay no attention to your feet.

None of what you think matters actually does.

For it felt as though I had stepped three inches to one side of where I’d always been, just that, the merest little shift in location.  And all at once, paradise.  Like, how could I have missed something so obvious, so — well, familiar?  How could I have lived my whole life so close to this and not known it?

After that, I wanted to tell everyone, strangers included:  Guess what?  You have no idea, but heaven is three inches from where you are right now.  Like a thing hidden in plain sight.  I wanted to say that to people so they would know.  So they would look, so they would bother.  So they would stop caring about everything else.  Stop thinking they are who they think they are:  somebody with problems, and a history, and healing to do, and goals to accomplish.

Wait! Stop! I wanted to say.  Stop it all.  It doesn’t matter.  Honest.  None of what you think matters actually does.

But you can’t say this to people without them thinking you crazy.  They will not believe you.  Only when they have accidentally shifted those three inches will they understand what you mean.  It’s only then.  So in the meantime, there’s not much point in your saying anything.  Mostly, that’s the way it is.  Though every so often somebody you say something to will start up a little smile and they’ll say, “I knew it.  I had a feeling about this.”  Sometimes they’ll tell you a story about how when they were a kid, maybe a teenager, they had a long stretch of a moment when they knew in a pure and certain way that the world and they themselves were magnificent and untarnished, and existing outside of time.  They knew it, they saw.  And they never forgot it.  They can tell you exactly where they were when the seeing happened, and they can say just what the feeling of it was, the absolute unshakable knowing of it.  And now that they’re hearing you say this thing they knew all along, they are just so glad they can barely contain themselves.  Almost always, there are tears in their eyes.  And they are more happy than sad:  not sad because it only lasted a few moments, but happy they finally encountered somebody who knows what happened to them.

For how much do you want this thing?  What do you think is the cost of liberation?  Where is the limit to what you are willing to do?

Feel the thing that is deepest in you.  That is the original response, the first response you have to something.  Do not protect yourself from it. 

Here it is.  Here is the thing you must do. 

When a moment comes, 

Wait, stop.  Before I go on, ask yourself this question:  How often does a moment come?  How fast and furious do moments come?  Where is there life that is not a moment?  When is life anything but momentary? 

Okay, proceed. 

When a moment comes, defend yourself against nothing.  Feel the thing that is deepest in you.  That is the original response, the first response you have to something.  Do not protect yourself from it.  Feel it. 

Then the next moment comes.  Now feel your response to it. 

Don’t take a break.  Don’t.  Just don’t. 

It’s the defending-against that keeps you from waking up.  Each moment, defending against.

If the feeling bites, let it bite. You don’t have to do anything with the feeling.  Explain it to yourself, decide to do better next time, put a label to it, tell yourself a story about its historical or short-term origins.  No, no, no.  Feel the primary thing.  The originating, instantaneous, deep-in response — the earliest response — to whatever is happening in the moment.  Don’t take that next step (the one that takes you up into your head).

Then the next moment comes.  Do it again.

This is how a moment takes place.  There is what’s happening, and there’s you “in” what’s happening.  You are an apprehending awareness, a sensory-sensitive, data-gathering intelligence.  You have a mind, a sense of yourself, an ego, and all that comes with that.  All of this equipment, the pulsing aliveness of you, feels itself in a momentary encounter with what is happening.  With reality, as it appears to you.  Every moment you live — your whole life, every single moment — you are inevitably, unavoidably, responding inside in some way to the immediate reality.  Somebody is saying something.  You are doing something or looking at something.  You are remembering something, anticipating something.  In response to that,  there is a feeling.  Some sort of responsive impulse is taking place inside your awareness. 

The feeling state is brand new every moment.  Because reality is not a static thing, ever.  And you are in it.  So you are not a static thing.  Your inner reality changes (if you’re willing to let it) as unceasingly as the outer reality changes.  If you aren’t constantly alert to your feelings, you will miss them.  You will be unconscious — not in touch with reality, with your engagement with it.  If you aren’t alert to your feelings, you will be at the mercy of them.  Whereas if you attend them, without resistance, then you will be able to move on, unburdened, as life continues to move.

Whatever is happening, you are feeling something.  Feel it.  Feel that momentary thing.  Live there.  Before the defending thing has time to start up.  Before the thought has time to formulate.  Before the emotion — the defending energy that expresses itself in some outward reaction — has time to start up.  The emotion, the thought, very likely exists in the first place to defend you against feeling some feeling. 

There is a difference — a critical difference — between feeling and emotion (notwithstanding the popular assumption, pervasive in our culture of psychotherapy, that they are the same thing).*  A feeling occurs prior to an emotion.  It occurs immediately, first, in response to something.  The emotion, if there is one, comes about after.  (Probably so quickly and effortlessly that you haven’t been noticing the separation between the two.  All your life you haven’t been noticing.)  The emotion occurs in response to the feeling.  And if you look, you will be able to discover intervening thoughts, which are mental responses to the feeling.  The thoughts have resulted in the emotions.  Once the emotions are going, the thoughts are used to support, defend, justify, explain the resulting emotional response.  By this time, any possible awareness of the originating feeling is lost in the noise and commotion of the emotional ruckus.  The thought-laden emotion has come into existence so that you can defend yourself against feeling the feeling.  (These are, as you have guessed, unpleasant feelings.)

While a feeling is likely invisible to another person, an emotion is observable, detectable — all the way up the scale to being possibly loud and destructive. 

If I almost run into somebody who has pulled out in front of me, the first response, the very earliest one that can be discovered, is something like startled fear.  That is the feeling.  The quickly-following next thing, anger, gets generated so I can avoid staying in the nightmare of that visceral animal terror that seized me initially, whose physical manifestation is a racing heart.  The anger (you idiot, you should be more careful) – that is emotion.  A way to protect myself from the primary, primal terror that somebody (like me, say) could have been killed. 

(Meanwhile, of course, the body has been efficiently and unthinkingly — no time to think, nor need to) — responding to the perceived threat, slamming on the brakes, veering, whatever.  It has been behaving like the capable intelligent-animal, self-protective being that it is.)

If you want to wake up, and you don’t do this, in every living alive moment, you are neglecting the central thing.  If you say you want to wake up, no matter what else you are doing, if you aren’t doing this — faithfully, rigorously, courageously, living every moment in the condition of feeling, of staying there, in that primary state — then you are cutting yourself off from what it is to be alive.  To experience reality.  To know presence, as it manifests in a human being, moment to moment.

And by the way, as you are doing this, you discover A LOT about how hard the ego works to protect you from it all.  And (maybe, maybe) it becomes harder for the ego to win so much of the time.  It gets harder for the “real” you to believe the lies the ego hands you, all in the name of protecting you from reality. 

In order to feel, you must be alive to the moment.  Being alive to the moment is being awake.  When you are awake, that is how it will be.  The means to the end is the end.  The means and the end are the same.  Once you have seen this, once you are living it, you are done with seeking liberation. 

____

*I am indebted to Michael Walsh for his delineation of the distinction between feeling and emotion.

[Before you read on, pause to notice:  how is this sitting in your awareness, right now? This idea that the goal of self-love is somehow off the mark.  What is your mind doing with this idea?  What degree of dissonance has (perhaps) been stirred?

Now, without trying to settle the dissonance; without trying to "figure out" anything you've read so far; without trying to resolve anything . . . simply set aside whatever just happened in your head, and keep reading.] 

When you are free, when you have awakened, you neither love nor hate yourself.  You neither accept nor reject yourself.  You neither forgive nor blame yourself.  You just are what you are, moment to moment, as “what you are” shows up in actual life.  It doesn’t occur to you to love yourself or not love yourself.  You are love. 

Imagine that:  finding yourself no longer of interest. 

The question of how you feel about yourself has gone away.  Including the matter of there even being a “you,” a solid, sustained thing that moves through time.  A self that can be affected, that can have feelings or thoughts about itself.

The problem (notwithstanding all the hard work of therapists and self-help books and well-meaning friends to convince us otherwise) is not the inability to love yourself.  The problem is prior to that.  It’s that you seem substantial to yourself.  You seem real, separate.  Lovable or not-lovable.  You are aware of your self in a way that is excruciating.  In awakeness, though, you have lost interest in yourself.

Imagine that:  finding yourself no longer of interest. 

I used to find myself endlessly interesting.  I was my favorite subject.  The memoir, as a form, was invented for the likes of me.  Well, this is mostly true of people — not the memoir part maybe (not everyone is a writer), but the self as center of the moving universe.  Everywhere I went, I stayed the center of things.  The universe (as my head created and projected it) went with me.   

This is how it is with a person.  Everywhere you ever go, the center of the universe has just moved to where you now are.  Where you are now, in this moment — that is the molten core of your planet, around which your satellite moons careen, the people and issues whose orbits are familiar, held to you by terrific gravitational force.  Moving as you move.  Always, at the center is you.

Some of myself I liked, or maybe loved, but most of me I did not love.  Most of me I wanted to improve, or conceal, or ditch altogether.  I wanted help with me.  I wanted more of a lot of things:  more love, more success, more security, more money.  I wanted more recognition, admiration.  Not (as I guiltily supposed was the case) because I needed bolstering, because my “self-esteem” was low.  But — the actual truth — because I thought I was real.  Substantial.  I thought the idea of me in my head (that molten core center of all) was a real thing.  That a me existed that was independent of the idea in my head.  I thought that the person I saw in the mirror was identical to the ideas I had of myself.  The ideas of who I am, including things like do I love myself.  Things like the collection of historical data (my beloved story, food for memoir).  The beliefs.  The roles.  The traits, including the traits I wanted other people to know me by.  Love me for.

I thought all those things about myself were independently real.  And certainly important!  (The person they constituted was, after all, the center of the universe.)

Everybody is the center of a universe:  their own.  When they move, the center of their universe moves.  An endless sea of universes.  The universes collide with one another all the time, each telling the other indignantly that it ought to pay more attention to what it’s doing.  What that really means is, how dare you think you are the center of the universe, when of course it’s clear that I am that.

It’s a wonder we can stand to be near one another at all.  Never mind have relationships that aren’t brimming with conflict.

Never mind wake up . . . from the whole thing.

When you stop trying to fix what can never be anything but broken (the person who is the subject of the self-help books); when you stop demanding love, stop demanding attention, and you just be it — be love, be attention — then the feeling of bottomless need goes away.

You aren’t the center, anymore, of your universe.  You can’t bump into any other universes either, because you aren’t at a distance from any of them.  You are them, and they are you.  The question of whether you love yourself has gone away.  The need to be loved — even by yourself — has dissolved into the sky.

To register, or for more information, visit www.aaawake.com, or contact Jim Dodds at (802) 496-2027.

Michael’s new book, Ego-Attachment: The Route of All Suffering, is available from him at mwalsh7782@yahoo.com.

I know what it is to pretend to be a self.  This is all any of us ever do:  pretend to be a self.  Except hardly any of us realize that is what is going on.  We enter the dream and believe it is real.  The dream sustains itself.  Then death comes, ending the dream (and taking the life with it). 

The person does not realize that most key of all facts about suffering:  that option is being exercised. 

My dream doesn’t sustain itself.  It knows it is dreaming itself up.  Or, more accurately, awareness is always aware of the ongoing dream.  Awareness does not sleep, so it does not manufacture dreaming.  This is why awareness is also sometimes called awakeness.  It doesn’t sleep.  It doesn’t need rest.  It doesn’t tire itself out from exertion.  It does not exert. 

This is why when awakeness comes to an apparent person, the experience is of ease, effortlessness.  Peace.  This is why people under stress want to awaken.  They would like life to stop being so hard.  The trouble is (of course), they keep trying to improve the dream as a way to end the stress.  Or, as some very funny person once put it, they keep rearranging the furniture in the prison cell, forgetting to notice the bars surrounding the lovely furniture. 

I know the cell has a door, and I know it is not locked.  I know how a person is holding the door closed, and I know how the person does not realize that most key of all facts about suffering:  that option is being exercised. 

What I don’t know is how to get a person to let go and let the door swing open.  Step out.  Be done with the bars, the furniture.  I know if I could get somebody to feel how their fingers curl around the bar of the door, how tightly the fingers hold to the cold steel, how much tension is in the hand (the forearm, the elbow, the shoulder, the neck) to keep the door pulled tight — I know if I could get somebody to feel the extreme effort being put into keeping themselves inside the miserable little cell, and the effort put into believing that there is an actual padlock there, and not their actual hand — I just know if I could manage to give them a visceral experience of that, their fingers would have to uncurl.  Then it would all be over.  Free, free, free. 

But mostly, all I seem able to do is get them to entertain the idea that there is life outside of the cell.  They spend their days looking through the bars, looking wistfully out, and complaining about the weariness in their hand (arm, neck, back, head, knees, belly, teeth, eyes, partner, bank account, job, mother, child, stepfather, former spouse, political party, cocktail party). 

I know what it is to be alive without believing the dream is real.  I know what it is to have stopped believing the dream of self is real, and yet to still be alive.  To have a body, a life, without believing it is substantial.  Then, when it comes time to die, I will know what it is like to not feel I am losing something.

She came to a talk I was giving.  She didn’t come because she thought she would learn something.  What she wanted was to have the company of someone who would understand.  She wanted to be in the presence of her own interior.  She wanted to see out there, to feel out there, what she experiences as her entire reality, inside herself.

She is trying to figure out how to be in her life, now that her sense of herself has been blown to smithereens.  She is a mother and a wife, and she has a job.  Pretty constantly she struggles to behave as though what others think matters actually does.  When she knows better.  (Hence the relief to be with somebody, however briefly, who understands.)

This woman didn’t experience me as special.  She doesn’t experience herself as special.  She thinks existence is special.  She sees.  She knows that she sees.  That’s all.

That’s everything.

I put my arms around her and cradled her.  The tears came freely, for us both.

The vast part of humankind lives as though what’s real is the contents of the mind.  As a result, what’s in fact real — what is actual, immediate, undeniable — is missed, as if it were not even there. 

When somebody wakes up, they do have to figure out how to be in the world.  A person looking at awakening from the outside of it might hear that idea and think it points to a kind of preciousness, as if an awake person were delicate or might breathe rarefied air.  But no. 

Awakened awareness isn’t at a distance from reality.  It’s unafraid of reality.  Awakeness engages with reality.  It is reality.  The very opposite of rarefied.  Yet the vast part of humankind lives as though what’s real is the contents of the mind.  As a result, what’s in fact real — what is actual, immediate, undeniable — is missed, as if it were not even there. 

The pain that everyone swims in is largely not even seen for what it is.  People are in it, and feel it, yet they do not see it is optional.  An awake person sees that it is optional.  And yet the others do not know, or they might say they know and yet cannot get out of the mess.  So for an awake person to continue to live in the world means that everywhere you look, what you see is unnecessary suffering, optional suffering, accepted by all the participants as if it were unavoidable. 

An awake person, because so at home with reality, sees clear through how the whole thing is functioning, and feels (unless the choice is made to do otherwise) the suffering of people.  Furthermore, is called upon to behave as though colluding in the whole thing.  Out of love, is brought to listen to the outpouring of “problems” as if they really were problems.  And if this clearly-seeing one attempts to describe to a trusted friend the truth of things, the ever-alive option to do it otherwise, well, the friend is likely to become impatient, or at least incredulous.  And if the awake one makes an effort to portray what the inner life is like, what awareness feels like, how freedom is viscerally felt, the response is likely to be bewilderment.  Certainly the person trying for connection will not be understood, and will be left to fold in on themselves, to settle on a preferable silence.

If the opportunity presents to share with one who knows, there will likely be tears — of relief, of joy maybe.

When somebody wakes up, they just got sane.  But the world they live in keeps on being crazy.

You just have to (as they say) be there.

I believed that was what I was.  I believed it so absolutely, so without question, that I didn’t even know it was something I believed.

The reason I know something about who a person is not, is that I went from thinking I knew who I was to realizing I’d been wrong.  Who I was went away.  But I didn’t die.  This not-dying forced me to recognize the truth that when I used to think I knew who I was, I was missing something.  Something substantial was left to continue living life, even without all the stuff that had gone away.

This made me into an expert on this:  that nobody is who they think they are.

What a surprise this would be to most people, to discover this about themselves.

Who I thought I was was my memories, my longing, my loves, my abilities, my fears.  My beliefs.  The prime belief being that one about who I was — that I was all that stuff.  I believed that was what I was.  I believed it so absolutely, so without question, that I didn’t even know it was something I believed.  As far as I knew, it was simply true. 

That is what we do with belief.  We skip over seeing a thing is a belief and just call it true.  We like to do that, because it makes the thing reliable.  Something we can stand on, move from.  A source of security.

All of this is why when somebody has that big spiritual ka-pow, they feel somewhat adrift.  A bit blown to smithereens.

But they are still here, they can’t help but notice. 

In the aftermath of discovering I’m not who I thought I was, I’ve learned some things (looking back, and looking around me) about how hard it is for the mind caught up in life seeming to be about all this stuff — how hard it is for the mind and gut and heart and body to entertain the possibility that something else is also going on.  It’s hard to sense that the something else is still and quietly content and doesn’t age or die.  Doesn’t need things to go a certain way.  Actually doesn’t care how things go.  It doesn’t have the machinery to complain or resist, and it doesn’t need to drop things or experiences into slots of meaning.  It just sees what is.  It bes.  It bes with whatever is.  It has a good time.  It loves people.  Oh how it loves people, and the world.  It loves all the messes even.

I’ve observed how uphill it is for most people to sense the reality of that other way of being.  The person all caught up in time, in memory, in cause and effect, and fear — the person believing in all of that cannot get out of her own way, his own way.  So much gets missed.  Then the hearse comes.

It can be very sad, if you let it.  If you are no longer caught up, I mean.  You do have to try not to get very sad, seeing how much gets missed.  But you can do that.  You can decide not to spend a lot of time there, not to invest a lot of awareness.  You can go empty.  Pour yourself out.  Pour yourself out into the grass, the snow, the leaves, the feet of chickadees, the dark dark dark sky.  You can do that.  But you have to remember to come back.  Reconfigure into person.  Oh, you don’t have to.  But you might.  You might decide to do that.  It’s fun pretending to be a person.

This morning, the experience of this was especially clear — the stages of it, the delineation.  The quality of delight at each phase, consciousness experiencing itself as ever more particular:  first, its undifferentiated self; then, a person; finally, this person.

All of this is long before the rest begins to take shape:  today is a certain day, I am here in this place, it is a particular time just now, certain things will be happening today, it is possible to think, to move.  To do, to say.

The ordering mind, the emoting body, so intent on its own reality.  As if there were nothing else.

Before today can have an anticipated content, or even a name for itself among the seven possibilities, it is first necessary to remember there is such a thing as a day.

It used to be when I woke up in a morning (any morning, every morning), the rush to what’s happening today? (and what happened yesterday, last night?) was so hurried that I couldn’t have told you if these prior awarenesses took place.  I couldn’t have noticed them.  So quickly did the narrowing of focus begin:  the planning, the anticipation.  Deliberateness, organizing.  The ordering mind, the emoting body, so intent on its own reality.  As if there were nothing else.

That was the experience, all my life:  every day, all day, starting first thing on waking.  As if it couldn’t wait to start itself up.  Never taking a break.  Not even, it seemed, during sleep.  It was already running when I first woke up each morning, or so it felt.  It was already running, an engine idling, just waiting for directions, for orders.

If the other was there — formless, feeling itself, delighting in itself — I could not notice it.  The thinking-feeling machine made too much of an uproar.

And now I remember (as if discovering it all over again, for the first time) that this is what it is like for humanity, every waking.  No wonder a lot of people have trouble sleeping.

Every night, in falling asleep, my self disassembles.  In the morning, it takes its sweet time reassembling.  It doesn’t rush to it.  It seems to enjoy itself, its formless self, too much to be in a hurry to recall particularity.  Personhood.

Not that it’s a bummer being a person.  In fact, it’s rather a gas (now that being a person isn’t a chore).  It’s just that it’s particular.  It’s narrow.  Defined:  person, not book, not blanket.  Then, it’s this person:  not that person.

The person of it, the this-person of consciousness, is layers down into particularity, into increasing density.  Before that, it is undifferentiated.  Before that, it is utterly free, like a child playing naked in the long grass.

Formless, it nevertheless feels itself.  Senses its presence.  Rejoices over itself.