Indefinable

Podcast Links and New Book

Hi Folks,

Over the past few years, I’ve gotten a number of requests to make the YouTube videos I post each week, available as an audio podcast that folks can listen to and/or download. I’ve now created such a podcast that I’m calling, This Extraordinary Moment: Meditative Inquiry w/ John Astin. It’s presently available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music.

My new book, In Every Wave, the Entirety of the Sea is now finished. I’m working on the cover and book design and (fingers crossed) hope to have all that finished up by the beginning of December at the latest. I’ll let you all know once the book is available on Amazon.

INDEFINABLE

The word “define” means “to state or describe exactly the nature, scope, or meaning of; to mark out the boundary or limits of.” This is what consciousness does. It takes something that fundamentally has no limits because of its infinite nature and places a limit around it, delineating what its boundary lines are, what it is, and what it isn’t. And yet, infinity has no limits.

It seems we can collapse experience into something that’s limited and definable. But through exploring experience, reality can reveal its ultimately indefinable nature. While experience is constantly revealing this indefinability, we’re so habitually oriented to the seeming reality of the descriptions and definitions that we tend to miss the indefinable nature of what is.

What frees us from the seeming prison of our definitions is the discovery that reality is ultimately unthinkable. I don’t mean that there’s anything wrong with thinking or that we should somehow do away with it altogether. None of that is necessary. But what we can discover is that regardless of how much thinking may or may not be going on, reality simply won’t be collapsed into any of our descriptive frameworks.

No matter how the moment is being described, there is always more information present than the descriptions could possibly capture. And then, you look at that “more,” and you find even more. And you look at that more, and you find more again!

As we explore experience, what’s revealed is that we never get to the end of it. We just look and look and feel and feel and never arrive at a final conclusion regarding what anything is.

The more we awaken to the indescribability of everything, the more we begin to taste the inherent freedom and open-endedness of every experience. We hear the word freedom being described by all these teachings and, not surprisingly, imagine there must be some sort of bondage we have to extricate ourselves from. But what can be discovered through exploring experience is that there is no bondage because what appears has never actually collapsed into anything finite or identifiable.

The belief that we’ve captured what’s here in a concept, word, or label can create the sense that we are bounded and identified. But what is astonishing to realize is that if you go to experience itself, to what is concretely present, you will find there only boundless, fathomless, limitless space, regardless of whatever lack or limitation the labels may suggest.

It can feel a bit like living in two worlds, even though there aren’t really two worlds. The described world is of course the one we’re most familiar with: “I’m a human being, living in a body, in an objective world.” That is the perspective we and others seem to inhabit. But there’s this other world which is the actual presence of whatever it is our descriptions are attempting to describe, an actuality that turns out to be utterly indescribable.

It’s a curious thing about this inquiry—that the unresolvable, insubstantial, space-like nature of experience is discovered by going to what is most concrete, what’s most palpably present. It’s quite clear that something is substantively here, that something is showing up. Go to that concreteness, and that’s where you will find the insubstantial, indefinable emptiness of everything.

It’s really only in the abstractions that we’re able (seemingly) to find something that can be pinned down, for when we go to what’s actually here, to what’s concretely present, and try to determine what that is, we always come up empty-handed. You reach for what it is but it moves away. Why? Because it’s endless and bottomless. And that’s pure freedom, right there. Freedom from everything we think to be true.

So, there’s always this opportunity—whenever something seems to be a certain way, whenever it feels like we’ve succeeded at putting a limit around something—to take a moment and really look or, better, feel what’s there, the felt sense of whatever is present. In that feeling, we can discover that there is no story, no narrative attached to what’s appearing.

As strange as it might sound, from this perspective there is no bondage, no liberation, no world, nor any person struggling with that world. There is just this inconceivable, unimaginably beautiful dance of sparkling radiance. Of course, such words don’t ultimately capture it either, but maybe they can convey something of what it’s like to touch the indefinable.

Mind you, there’s no need to try to push away the descriptions. They can just be here, like a canopy draped over whatever arises. Meanwhile, we can come to see that the moment doesn’t come with a name tag attached to it. It’s amazing, isn’t it, that there’s no label intrinsic to the moment, that the feeling of what’s here has no description, no knowledge attached to it. It simply is.

Right there we find the deepest rest, the deepest ease, because there aren’t things to correct. There aren’t things to sort out, to navigate or protect ourselves from, nor anyone to be protected. There is just this fullness that can never be resolved.

There’s simply the nakedness of what’s here, empty of findable identity yet bursting forth as all the descriptions and narratives and identities. Reality, giving rise to all this stuff we call knowledge and narrative, yet utterly beyond all such renderings owing to its infinite, indefinable nature.