Hi Folks,
Some of you may be familiar with my last book, This Extraordinary Moment. I’ve been tossing around an idea of possibly hosting a weekly Zoom meeting where I would work with a small group (maybe 15-20 folks) exploring the content/practices laid out in that book. I’m thinking the group would take place over the course of 3 months (a total of 12 meetings). If you think you might be interested in participating in this, please email me at: john@johnastin.com.
Below, you’ll find some writing from a new book I’ve started working on and a video clip titled, “The Cloud-Like Nature of This.”
FINDING FREEDOM IN THE FRESHNESS OF EVERY MOMENT
The largely consensus human view is that there's a kind of continuity or enduring nature to things and experiences, and that this stability essentially defines our lives. Like right now, conventionally speaking, one would say that I'm sitting in my living room, a place that I've sat in countless times before. But the experiential truth is that I've never actually been here before for every instant that I experience what I imagine to be a fixed, static thing (in this example, my living room) is distinct. Because our perceptions are constantly changing, we are never actually experiencing anything as static or unchanging. We imagine that things are more or less the same from moment to moment. But they are not. If we just look with a little sensitivity, we can see the truth of this, that things are not the same from moment to moment, despite what our thoughts so often imply.
It’s really a kind of trick of the interpreting consciousness that allows the world of experience and circumstance to appear as seemingly knowable and recognizable. Some mental-emotional state arises and we recognize what seems to be a pattern. It feels familiar to us. “Oh, yeah, I know what that is. It's fear, or joy, or sorrow, or ecstasy.”
Similarly, we see some familiar person, place or thing. “That's my car, or my house, or my friend or the neighborhood I live in,” and imagine that what we’re beholding is more or less the same unchanging phenomenon that we’ve experienced before. But the notion that what I’m seeing is essentially the same thing I’ve seen before is just that, a notion. Even if I might think that I’m sitting in the same room that I’ve sat in a thousand times before, the reality is that I’ve never actually sat in this room before.
While we believe that experiences and objects have a kind of persistence or continuity to them, i.e., that they are essentially what they were when we last encountered them, the fact is that they are not. At least not exactly. And this is a remarkable, really life-transforming thing to discover. Yes, my living room appears to be the same place I was sitting in last week, the day before or a second ago. But it only seems to be the same room because I’m essentially overlooking all the ways in which what I’m perceiving and that I’m calling my living room is not actually the same from moment-to-moment, at least not experientially.
Your friend or that difficult emotion you're being visited by may look, feel or behave in such a way that makes it seem recognizable and describable and knowable to you. But the fact is, wherever you think you are right now, whatever you believe you’re experiencing has never actually looked or felt or been perceived exactly the way in which it’s being perceived now.
Right now, I’m looking out my window. It's a scene I've witnessed countless times before. But true as that may be from one vantage, from this other perspective I’m pointing to (what I call the perspective of experience itself), I've never actually seen this scene before, at least not like this. The winds have never quite blown exactly the way they are blowing in this instant. The branches have never quite moved the way they are moving right now. The light has never shone exactly like this before. Contrary to what we often believe, there really are no fixed patterns of experience as nothing ever repeats. What appears is forever fresh and new.
To be sure, experiences appear and can seem to be more or less the same as what they were before (and hence recognizable). However, true as that sense of familiarity may be, the reality is that we've never actually felt reality in the way it’s being felt right now. No experience, no moment, no person, place or thing is ever are quite the same, owing to its radically dynamic, non-static, alive nature.
That’s the impermanence, the slipping away. And because of this radical instability, there really is no reference point to know what anything is. We can say and from one perspective, experience the world as repeating and knowable patterns. It certainly seems that way. But really, there are no fixed, solid, enduring patterns or forms.
For example, look at a cloud. We could say that it’s an identifiable form. But the shape of this thing we’re calling “a cloud” is in fact, a shape that is shifting and doing so every flash instant. The cloud isn’t actually a fixed, knowable, identifiable form. And so it is with every other perceived phenomenon, including us. Like the clouds, we have no fixed form either. Whatever we think of as our “selves,” has in the very next instant, become something else.
While we seem able to identify the myriad forms that life can take, if we look carefully, it becomes clear that we can’t actually determine what any of the forms are because whatever we’ve just identified has now become something else! And yet, this same identity-less, unknowable reality shows up as all the seemingly recognizable and identifiable forms that constitute what we call, our life.
That's the startling paradox. We seem to know what things are on the one hand, and yet if we actually look, what’s revealed is the ultimate impossibility of knowing or defining phenomena owing to their ever-morphing nature. This is no mere philosophy but our actual experience, as concrete as anything could possibly be.
In fact, it’s what we’re feeling and experiencing in every moment. Something appears and there's this sense that what’s appearing has some degree of persistence to it. And yet, what's here is so obviously slipping away, vanishing, faster than it appears. Emptiness, dancing as all these apparent forms…
As abstract and philosophical as all of this may sound, the discovery of the ever-dissolving nature of reality is of utmost pragmatic utility. How so? Well, not infrequently we humans experience this sense of being caught up, stuck in, troubled or victimized by various things. And yet, for something to exist as a “thing” we could be stuck or trapped in, there would have to be persistence both of that thing and the presumed person encountering it, something that direct investigation reveals is not actually the case.
Whether it’s a particular situation or circumstance, a thought stream or emotional state, it doesn't take 30 years sitting on a meditation cushion to discover that the phenomena we think of and in one very real sense, experience as problematic have zero endurance. Just look for one instant and see that the instant is no longer here. That's about how long it takes to discover impermanence! The dynamism of life is showing itself constantly. What we call the moment appears and then in a flash, boom, it’s gone. Just like that.
And so, while there is no denying that we can, and often do, experience certain moments of life as difficult or overwhelming or stressful, by exploring the way in which experiences and circumstances are not merely the fixed, seemingly enduring things we imagine them to be but this ever-changing, ever-morphing, fluid dynamism, a very different way of experiencing life is revealed.
It can certainly feel like certain moments have a kind of persistence to them that we can in turn find difficult to manage. There is no denying the reality of this perspective and how it can feel. But at the same time, there is another way to encounter reality and that is to see that all phenomena, including those we find ourselves struggling with, have no actual fixed form owing to their ever-changing nature.
This discovery frees us up to encounter both ourselves as the perceiver and whatever is it that’s being perceived more open-endedly, more flexibly and less rigidly. The feeling of being a person who is somehow stuck, trapped, or imprisoned by difficult circumstances or experiences starts to loosen up as we discover the ways in which the challenging states conventionally thought of as “things” that we can actually be stuck in or victimized by, are not actually “things” at all owing to their ever-changing, dynamic, ultimately indefinable nature.
By exploring the dynamic, ever-changing nature of experience, we discover a profound freedom, a freedom that is revealed in and as the ever-present freshness that is every moment.
Thank you for the way you bring us into the wondrousness of it all John! So beautiful! 💜 #verygrateful