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• There’s no Zoom meeting this Sunday (March 10th) as I will be hosting a retreat that same day.

• For information about the retreat I’ll be facilitating in Colorado, July 17-20. Click here.

• I have two upcoming house concerts, Sunday, April 28th in North San Juan, CA and Saturday, May 11th in Sonoma, CA. For details, email me at: john@johnastin.com.

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Our tendency is to believe that in order to experience greater contentment, well-being, freedom and so on, we must take the moment and shape into something we imagine would be better than what’s presently here. However, consider for a moment that nothing whatsoever needs to change about what’s being experienced right now, that it’s not necessary to control or modify or alter the moment in any way.

Allow yourself to completely relax any effort to change what's happening. And as you do so, feel the way in which everything that's appearing is simply an expression of life. Whether we label them as thoughts, feelings, sensations or whatever, everything that arises is the particular way life is presenting itself in that instant. Every momentary perception, regardless of its flavor, is the shining forth of reality. From this perspective, there's no correct experience to have. Just let that sink in; there's no particular place to get to, no greener grass to discover.

Every little experiential rumbling, every little flicker of perception is this inexplicable miracle of life, the miracle that appears as each unique expression including each one of us with our distinctive bodies and minds, personalities, temperaments, loves and inclinations. This is the paradox, that while we appear as utterly distinct from one another, we do not actually have independent existence as we have never been plucked out of the whole. We’ve never existed as separate or apart from this that is everything any more than the wave could ever leave its basis as the sea.

We tend to think of “our” life as somehow bounded and separate from something else that's not our life. But tell me, can you can find any actual separation? Just feel experience and see if you find any division. What we call “our” experience is actually a limitless expanse with no borders, boundaries or edges anywhere to be found.

This is the Great Wholeness that can never be lost for all experiences are its shine, its luster. It's like the burning fire that gives off heat. Heat is not separate from the fire but is its expression. We are the heat of the fire of reality. We are reality’s expression, never separate from it. Feel that, how even as experience is constantly being lost, slipping away and becoming something else, we never lose this, never lose the presence of what is for there is nothing else.

Again, no experience brings us closer to the wholeness or could possibly take us away from it for every experience is the wholeness. And so, we can completely relax any effort to arrive somewhere else, relax any struggle to achieve some other, supposedly better state. It’s not necessary to find another, presumably better perception for the perception that’s arising right now is it, the very freedom we’ve been searching for, the undivided ground of being that always abides.

Even if we encounter moments where it feels as if we’re somehow not abiding as this ground, right there is the opportunity to see that what we might call “not recognizing” or “not abiding” is also it. For, no matter how we might describe what’s appearing, it is all the ground of being, the vastness of life itself, taking shape in all the distinctive ways and forms that it does.

I was a meditator for many years. And for much of that time, I practiced in that style where one brings their attention to some focal point, say the breath or some mantra, and then when the focus invariably drifts away from that object, attention is brought back to the original focus. The belief I’d taken on was that the drifting was some sort of error and so my task was to do my utmost to maintain focus on the chosen object.

While being able to maintain focus is of course a valuable skill to have in life, when it comes to realizing the undivided, singular nature of reality, there’s another way to approach it and that is to see that even if we try to intentionally keep attention in one place, some amount of drifting is not only what attention does naturally but it’s not actually a problem.  Why? Well, what we call “drifting away” from some focus is, from another vantage simply drifting into life for there is only life, being everything.

We may feel as if, “Oh, now I'm really feeling it, I’m really in touch with the ground of being.” And then, we may feel as if we’ve drifted off into some fantasy or thought, and as a result of that lost contact with the ground. But what we call thinking is also the ground of being, isn’t it? And so, as it turns out, it’s impossible to drift away from this ground for there is only the ground.

It’s paradoxical because when it’s seen that there is no drifting away from the only thing that there is, that discovery can give rise to profound feelings of freedom, relief, ease and contentment. And then, some moment can arise which leads us to believe that we’ve somehow lost touch with that understanding that everything is it and as a result, we may feel some degree of unease, discomfort, frustration and so on. But those feelings are also it for again, it’s not possible to ever lose the only thing that exists, even though it can sometimes seem as if it’s possible.

The thing to see is that it’s not necessary to get ourselves into any particular state because every apparent state is it. Reality remains reality, regardless of how it may be appearing. If we likened life to a motion picture, it's not like some parts of the picture are more the picture than other parts, right? It's all made of the same indescribable “light,” projecting everything that is seen, everything that is heard, everything that is felt and perceived.

Needless to say, this perspective that I'm sharing, which is just one perspective, runs very counter to our conventional notion that to realize what we're looking for, we have to find a way to transform the moment. If we’re searching for well-being, we believe it’s necessary to shape the moment into whatever we think well-being looks and feels like; if we're trying to find freedom, we imagine we have to shape the moment into a moment of freedom.

But what I'm inviting you to consider is the possibility that you don't have to reshape the moment into anythingfor the moment is already perfectly reality, just as it is. Each momentary perception is perfectly free, perfectly at ease, perfectly open, without it having to be transformed or modified in any way whatsoever.

That has a very different feel, doesn’t it? It’s the feeling of already being home because there is only home. We’ve never actually been cast out of the garden. Ever.