Here But Not Here

Book Group Reminder

Hi Folks,

There is still room in the book group, Exploring the Nature of Reality my friend Dena Evans and I will be offering starting next week. We will be using Peter Brown’s wonderful book, Liberation Beyond Imagination as a focal point for our explorations. Meetings will take place Tuesdays, 10 to 11:30 am Pacific time, and will run from April 8th to May 27th. (For those who cannot make all the meetings, each session will be recorded.)

If you’d like to take part in the group (there’s no charge, donations are welcome), just email me at: john@johnastin.com.

HERE BUT NOT HERE

The whole world of experience, the world of our lives, of everything that seems to be happening, all of it looks to be something, is experienced as being something that has a kind of enduring nature to it. In fact, if it didn’t have this seemingly enduring nature, well, it's fair to say that nothing would be perceived.

It certainly seems as if we’re encountering discrete, recognizable phenomena. It looks that way, for sure, and in one sense is that way for here lies before us, the whole world of form, this manifest world that certainly appears to be something.

But really look at what's appearing and the way that it's appearing. Yes, it seems that there are identifiable, fixed forms. But feel your experience, the presence of what's here, the presence of whatever is showing up experientially right now. And now notice something that’s really irrefutable and that is the absolute dynamism of what's here, the fluid, ever-changing nature of everything that appears.

As you feel this dynamism, notice that it never actually stabilizes as anything. It’s so profound to see this because it just flies in the face of virtually everything we think about reality. See how our ability to think about what's here rests upon there being something that can even be thought about. And yet, it’s impossible to think about whatever’s appearing because what appears is gone, before it can even be thought or imagined.

Look for yourself; do you find any stability? Do you find that what’s appearing ever stabilizes as something identifiable? Essentially, we overlook the ever-changing nature of this which allows for the seeming concretization of phenomena, the belief that what’s here is in fact a “thing” that can even be resolved.

We think we know what this is, that we can get a conceptual handle on it. But, in order to accomplish that, we would essentially need to get the flowing of reality to cease, long enough at least to resolve what it is. But there appears to be no pause button when it comes to reality’s ceaseless flow.

This is why we can't actually pin this down. We can't actually resolve what’s appearing. It’s simply not possible to grasp hold of this with anything—our hands, our minds, our concepts, our words, our consciousness. Reality is simply ungraspable, like a fish that slips right from your fingers, the second you try to grab hold of it.

Really, it’s even faster than that. We hear this notion of the ever-changing nature of this, that there is some “thing” that appears and then that phenomenon transforms into something else and then that transformed version transforms again. But that way of viewing impermanence, subtly or not so subtly reinforces the idea that there are in fact things that have some degree of permanence. We think some person, place or thing comes into existence and then over time, whether very rapidly or more slowly, its form changes. But actually, by feeling the way that what’s appearing has zero duration, what’s revealed is that things never actually come into existence, even though they appear to. Feel that, that what’s being experienced is not the transformation of identifiable forms but simply transformation itself.

We imagine that phenomena have enough stability that we can identify, conceive and name them. But look for yourself. Can you really pull it off? Is it actually possible to determine what the apparent forms are, their shape, their qualities, their nature? Or is what’s appearing simply too slippery and unstable to ever resolve what it is, empty, as the Buddhists would say of identity?

Even all of the ideas and interpretations consciousness generates, all the frames of reference that try to render and describe what's here are themselves not findable as anything fixed or formed. The bottom line is that because of the ever-fluid, shapeshifting nature of this, it truly is impossible to say anything accurate about what’s here. Reality is simply not renderable. Feel that, the way in which every momentary perception is free of all conceptual, linguistic frames of reference and their seeming implications.

The belief that reality is somehow lacking, limited or otherwise problematic is literally being defined into existence for what’s here is simply not collapsible into any frame of reference, no matter how seemingly elegant, sophisticated or true. That’s its explosive freedom, how open-ended it is. In fact, the moment isn't really a moment that can be called a moment because in one very real sense, what appears never actually becomes anything that can even be identified as a “moment.”

And yet, this no-thing-ness appears as all this stuff, the seemingly structured world of form and complexity and detail from the micro to the macro. All the details that we seem able at some level to observe, to notice, to identify, to describe, to talk about with one another, to investigate… that world is certainly here, at least in one sense. The empty, identity-less world shows up as something. It never shows up naked, paradoxically here and yet spacelike in its ever-transforming, indeterminate nature.

Reality presents as all this diversity, the myriad flavors of life showing up as what we call experience. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, all of it. And yet, when we feel what's here, it will show us its fundamentally ungraspable, unresolvable nature.

There's the presence of reality but nothing ever separates itself out from the whole and becomes something other than the whole. There's just this presence, appearing as all the seemingly autonomous parts and pieces but never actually becoming anything other than this single, indescribable presence.