No Place to Rest
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A student describes the unsettling experience of familiar resting places falling away, along with anxiety about the future, and asks whether peace can coexist with normal human worry and planning.
No Place to Rest
A student describes the unsettling experience of familiar resting places falling away, along with anxiety about the future, and asks whether peace can coexist with normal human worry and planning.
I've been resonating with this sense of no landing spot. I'm experiencing that a lot in my life now, where it just never feels like there are solid resting places anymore. They keep getting taken away, day by day, it seems. I'm curious about the role of thought in relation to that, because I notice I still need thought to plan. I get concerned because the more things are just being created in the moment, the more I worry I'm going to forget to do things I need to get done. It feels unpredictable.
I also have this experience of thinking about the future a lot, planning, seeing what I have to do, and then getting anxious about it. That's where I notice a lot of thought lives: in the future. "What's that going to be like? How's that going to feel?" And then anxiety follows. Am I choosing that, or is it just happening?
Everything is happening on its own, and you're choosing it. Let's put it that way. And rest on either of those perspectives.
Right. It's like what you were saying about moving the body versus not. It's both at the same time.
Both perspectives at once
Otherwise, you are taking a side on a perspective. Either "it's all just happening and I can't do anything about it," or "it's all me creating" and then it becomes personal. Where everything is happening on its own, created by nothing, coming out of nowhere, and at the same time everything is chosen and loved absolutely by Self, capital S, source, or whatever you want to call it: where those two perspectives meet, where they are not contradictions or paradox, that is reality. But that is outside of mind. What those two point to is prior to thought. Then thought can be used either to obstruct it, to veil it by choosing one side, or to create these paradoxical expressions where the two meet. Like the sound of one hand clapping, which is really just this. Supposedly there is no solution.
So what's the role of thought? When I think about the future and I have anxiety about it, that seems at odds with this sense of groundlessness, of no resting spot, of just moving from moment to moment. Then there's this thinking about the future and what's going to happen, and those two things feel in conflict. Is that a veil? Am I veiling something for some reason?
The assumption that there was ever somewhere to rest
You started talking and it was very clear. You presented a view, a position: "The resting places I have had are falling away. There are fewer and fewer places to rest." And then there's this other thing happening around planning the future: "I still need to do that." But it is all coming from the assumption that there is somewhere to rest. When you say the places to rest are falling away, it assumes that there are places to rest.
Yes, it does, suddenly I see that.
Right now, at any moment, there is no place to rest. There isn't a sense of places to rest disappearing or collapsing. All of that is just a narrative. I understand that there is a process involving the body and the mind where, as beliefs dissolve, there are shifts and changes in the body, in energetics, in personality, in the way choices happen. But at the deepest level, there really never has been, nor will there ever be, any place to rest. There is only the illusion of thought systems where I can seem to be resting. And only in an illusory way, where when I'm there, I have a sense that I'm maybe holding something, resting in some sense of safety. But I really know it's not there, because I don't feel restful. It's unsettling. There's anxiety. It's restlessness.
In Buddhism, in the ten ox-herding pictures, there is a stage that has to do with the experience of restlessness. When you come to touch that place, it's literally this: the restlessness, the mind, this moment, this anxiety. And nothing can fix that. Nothing resolves it.
So even though the thinking about the future and planning feels like illusion, there's nothing that needs to be done about it.
So is the illusion the narrative around the planning? For example, the belief that if I were finally resting and free, I wouldn't have to plan or think about the future?
Planning is not the problem
Exactly. Why not plan? How would you even move if you couldn't have the vision of a coffee machine over there that you can move toward, so that coffee can be served? That's a plan for the future. No person who is truly free lacks that experience.
So is it the anxiety that's the issue? If there weren't any anxiety, if I were just planning to make a cup of coffee, that would be fine, and that does happen. But there's this planning accompanied by anxiety that feels at odds with what I know.
Even that is a very tricky one. When I'm talking about restlessness, I mean something deep, whereas anxiety comes and goes. The imagination is that what you're looking for (let me speak as if I'm in your shoes) is to finally get to this place of realization, this shift, where there is no longer anxiety or worry or planning, where finally you would be at peace. What I'm saying is: no. In the anxiety, in the worrying, in the planning, in all of that, there is peace right here.
It sounds like freedom in causes and conditions, not freedom from causes and conditions.
Yes. And when that is seen, it's a completely different perspective on the experience of anxiety, planning, and worry, which is normal human life. There is a deep restlessness and a deep fear that does disappear, but it's not the one you're contending with.
Right. That other one is a mind idea, the idea that "then I will have no pain, no worry about my family or finances."
The myth of the unshakable master
Exactly. If somebody comes at you and puts a gun to your head, you're going to freak out. There are all of these stories, which to some degree are helpful, about the master who is so at peace, so at rest, so realized that even in extreme circumstances nothing shakes. No body-mind reaction to getting a gun to the head. That pointing can be useful, but it's extremely misleading in terms of what I think is reality and truth. It points to something, but it can fill you with ideas like: only if I have no human experience am I free. Then the idea of what the work is about becomes centered on the absence of normal human experience.
Can you say something about how it's different, the freedom within the anxiety? What is that like? I'm just curious, if you can say more about that.
I could talk about that quite a bit. It's hard. Basically, I can describe it as a kind of before and after. Before, there was this sense of "I'm not okay, things are not okay as they are," very fundamentally. Sometimes subtly, sometimes really intensely. And then whenever there was an extra life circumstance, a challenge (which is pretty often, and it's pretty easy to make anything a challenging life circumstance, like even dropping something or kicking the table), it could come as a really unfortunate circumstance. Everyone is in deep suffering.
But the "before" was prior to life experience, something deeper. There was a very subtle, deep sense of not-okayness. Something is missing. And that was known as suffering and restlessness. Restlessness is the word.
The shift
And then, after, that was gone. Absolutely, radically gone. Pretty much from one day to the next. Really shocking. The shift was so dramatic that I could not understand it. It took me many months to even grasp and put words to it. I was just shocked. And then life circumstances kept happening, and I realized: here's fear, here's worry, still happening. But I also became more able to go into really extreme situations. I'm in one right now where things are very challenging. I would have been a mess before. I would not have been able to handle it. But the circumstances are extreme by the standards of my normal life, and it's fine.
I want to communicate humanly: it's really extremely challenging. But the depth of it is that there's just well-being. And that contrast grows even greater, where circumstances can be very challenging, which I am choosing, and I'm free to step out. So it's experienced like a game. I'm choosing to stay in the game, wondering when to choose to step away, but it's savored. "Wow, what a crazy, unexpected flavor." Even at times that have been extremely painful, physically and emotionally, it's like, "Wow, this is really intense," and at the same time, simultaneously, if I put words to it, it will sound strange, but there's simultaneously the experience of God creating and loving this as it's being created, because of the intensity, because of the extreme wildness. And it's very human, and it's very vulnerable in person.
I feel that subtly. What you're saying resonates. I feel it, but for me it's very subtle. And it's shaky; it can be disturbed. But it's there. There's more of a sense of well-being, even in the midst of things that used to really bother me. But I notice it's not stable. It feels like it moves. It can be disrupted.
Peace is already here
Part of what seems like a realization for me is something that's always been hard to put into words, because I had never heard it or read it anywhere. So it seemed like it might be madness. But then I read it in a book that has been what I've called my Bible for fifteen years. I had probably read it many times before, but it hadn't made any sense. Then I read it and thought, "Oh, it's right there, exactly described."
It has to do with the knowing that what I'm talking about, your experience, that which I'm describing as this absolute total love and acceptance where there is really no suffering, only peace: that is your experience right now. Completely, totally, all the time. Always was, always will be.
It's really tricky to say this, because I don't know what you're experiencing. But this is where I can see why, if this has been realized (which I think it has, by many), it's not said nor put in books. It's extremely tricky. I just did it, and maybe it helps. But it could also become a mind thing, a mental belief, something that can be turned into a thought. The mind can do a lot of things with what I just said.
It's resonating more on the heart level for me. There's a sense of heart connection with that, an expansion of the heart. That's how I can describe it best. It's not something to attain. It's something the heart knows.
That goes against most spiritual traditions, including Buddhism, which is considered very clean, non-religious spiritual teaching. One of the greatest teachings in spirituality is the vow of the Bodhisattva: to renounce absolute total freedom until all sentient beings are cleared of suffering. My experience is really at odds with that, because all I can say is the total knowing that freedom is already the case.
It's a knowing that I cannot defend, I cannot explain, and I don't know that anybody can convince me otherwise. It's such a deep experience, such a deep truth for me. It could be madness. But I never said it until I read it in this book.
My teacher had two teachers. The first was the person who, as he described it, "lit the lamp." He had no spiritual practice and was miserable. He was told to go to India, and he simply obeyed. He was a very wealthy businessman who flew to India and went to the ashram, and on the second day the teacher stepped out and he had a full awakening: an energetic explosion. Then he left. Later he met his second teacher, and that second teacher's teacher was a man called Franklin Merrell-Wolff. Both of them considered him one of the greatest Western teachers. He wrote two, arguably three books, but they are extremely dense and complicated because he was a mathematician and philosophy professor at Stanford. Then he became a hermit, went into the mountains, built a house with a community, never left, and died in his nineties having lived there since his thirties.
This book describes pretty much what I was saying. When I found it, I thought, "That's the only other place I've seen this." I'm lingering on it because I feel very passionate about it. If it can at least create the doubt that this is true and possible, that opens the door. The possibility that peace is already here. The mind is so resistant to it. We're so attached to "No, no, no, that is not possible. That cannot be, because of X, Y, Z. I need this and that in order for this to be okay. Only when this and that will I really be okay."