Hi Folks,
Josh Putnam, who recently interviewed me on his So Awake podcast, has invited me and two other non-duality speakers to join him in a 2-hour long Q & A. The event will take place on January 6th, 10 am MDT. Click here to register in advance (space is limited; the time and the day in the link will automatically adjust to your time zone).
Below is a chapter from the new book I’m working on and a link to a talk that touches upon much of what I explore in this piece. Enjoy!
Happy Holidays,
John
THIS APPEARING THAT KEEPS DISAPPEARING
I invite you to tune into what we call, the present moment, that point in time that is not past, that's not future but is right now. Just feel that point. And as you do, notice how the point of now has no findable beginning; it's just here without anything leading up to it. The moment has no past, no before.
Now, what’s very interesting to see is that what we think of as the “present moment,” the now, actually has no duration. What appears disappears the very instant it arises. This ever-changing nature of experience is what we’re always feeling, the constant morphing of what we call now.
There really isn’t a fixed, bounded point in time that we can locate and call the present moment for what’s here doesn’t hold still for even a nanosecond. Contrary to what we typically think, it’s not actually possible to put a boundary around anything and identify its beginning or end. In other words, while we talk about there being a discrete and findable point called now, what we think of and describe as the present moment has no actual duration; its appearance is quite literally its disappearance.
Now, our ability to characterize the moments of our life rests upon this assumption that there are fixed things that are somehow holding still long enough to be recognized and named. If I were to ask you describe the current moment, you’d undoubtedly find at least some words to convey what’s happening. But really have a careful look at what you’re calling the moment and tell me: what exactly is it that you’re seeing or feeling right now? Notice that what you’re looking at that you’re calling the moment is literally changing into something else as you’re looking. Even what you might call “looking” is itself changing into something else as you look!
This is what we can discover through this kind of inquiry, the impossibility of pinning anything down definitionally. Feel this, the way in which the moment is beyond the reach of concepts and language owing to its ever-transforming nature.
Take what we call a flower. It seems that flowers open and then assume some particular fixed form or shape. But because of its dynamic nature, the flower’s opening doesn’t ever hold still long enough for us to determine its shape. What we call a flower is more like a constant flowering, isn’t it?
Feel this, the endless opening into something else, the ceaseless flow of life. Appreciate how there are no fixed forms but only this constant trans-forming. What appears is transfiguring itself in every instant.
To be sure, we imagine that we can define things. But that which we think we’ve succeeded at describing has vanished before the conceptual label can even be applied. Very much like my example of the ever-unfolding flower, what we think of as the moment doesn’t actually linger for any time at all and hence, assumes no particular, identifiable form. It’s like looking at a cloud in the sky. It can appear to take on a certain shape. But if we’re actually with it in real time, it becomes quite clear that the cloud is a complete shape-shifter. You can't say what the shape of the cloud is for it’s always on the move. Every momentary experience is just like this.
The implications of this are both profound and practical for the very things we’ve imagined to be problems turn out to not be things at all. Yes, what we think of as our experiences and circumstances can seem to be out of alignment, lacking, confusing, entrapping and so on. We can experience a sense of limitation, feelings of separation and incompleteness, the belief we are somehow not aware or awake enough. But all those things we imagine are happening and that we subsequently believe we have to free ourselves from or see through are not actually there. They're not findable, because when we go to identify what we’re calling limitation, lack, division or separation, we discover their cloud-like nature, the fact that it’s impossible to pin them down as being any particular way. In other words, phenomena lie beyond the reach of any and all definitions and descriptions. And that discovery is the discovery of freedom, freedom from language and all its seeming implications.
We tend to think of liberation as freeing ourselves from bondage. But real and lasting freedom is realized by coming to see that bondage cannot be found (nor can the one we imagine is bound be located). Not being able to find these phenomena that we have all these words for and imagine are the source of our suffering—confusion, frustration, lack… none of these can be found. And that un-findability turns out to be the finding. That's the discovery, that reality cannot be pinned down. And that's freedom, freedom from all of the ideas that seem to suggest lack and limitation and bondage.
To be sure, this fundamental indescribability can show up as anything including all these moments we describe as suffering and entrapment as well as those we characterize as freedom and openness and joy. But the thing to see is that what we call the moment never actually becomes something because this that is, by nature infinite, never collapses into anything finite. While reality definitely appears to take shape as these finite, fixed forms, it never really comes into form owing to its relentless dynamism.
Whatever form reality seems to have assumed has in the next instant, become something else. In the Zen tradition they speak about the unborn. What I’m pointing to in this inquiry is, I believe, precisely what that term is referring to, the fact that reality is fundamentally unborn in the sense of it never really coming into existence, the unformed never becoming anything resolvable or formed. Infinity forever being itself, appearing to become limited, but never actually assuming any fixed, identifiable, finite form.
Hello dear friend, so nice to get a dose of you here in the middle of my day : ) A couple of fun thoughts that occurred to me while listening/comtemplating: as well as the moment being a constant letting go/disappearing, it is also a constant arrival/appearing. A kind of dis-appearing, dis-appearing...at the same "time." The other thought/image that occurred: It's a kind of surfing reality. Ever present, constant movement...stillness that is ever-changing : ) LOVE YOU!