The Mystery of Being

and upcoming events

Hi Folks,

Some event updates…

• The in-person retreat I’ll be hosting at my home here in Santa Cruz, California still has a few spots left. The dates are March 8-10, 2024 (Friday evening through Sunday mid-day). Cost is $100 for the weekend. For further information or to register, please email: john@johnastin.com.

• I will be starting up another Tuesday book group, this time exploring Peter Brown’s remarkable book, The Yoga of Radiant Presence. Peter has been a very important influence on my own explorations into the nature of reality. I’ll be co-facilitating the group with my dear friend and close student of Peter’s, Dena Evans. The 8-week group will meet Tuesdays, 10-11:30 am Pacific time from March 5th to April 23rd. The cost is $100 (no one will be turned away for lack of funds). Email: john@johnastin.com to reserve a spot.

• There is still space available for the retreat I’ll be facilitating in Colorado, July 17-20. Click here for details.

THE MYSTERY OF BEING

Many meditation practices focus on cultivating a stance of being the witness or observer of thought. As a way of finding greater freedom and less entanglement with the flow of thinking, such practices can no doubt be helpful. That said, I’d like to invite you into another, quite different approach to finding freedom from thinking and that is rather than trying to position yourself as the aware observer of thought, just see thinking as an inseparable expression of you. In this approach, we’re no longer viewing thought (or any other experience) as happening to us but rather seeing it as an aspect of us, an expression of life itself.

For a moment, just tune into the sense of your own existence, the simple feeling of being. Of course, this is what we’re always feeling but just notice this, the feeling of being, the feeling of life itself.

Now, as you feel this sense of being, even if you may be thinking of it as somehow localized, separate or cut-off from whatever is presumably other than being, feel the way in which the sense of existing is absolutely wide open, unbounded. See how it has no end point, no finality or edge to it.

Feel how in being, there are no walls, no defenses, no bracing against anything but just this wide-open expanse, a continuum of experiencing without border or boundary, inclusive of everything. Feel yourself as this wide-open expanse, and now sense the way in which this expanse of being is inseparable from everything that’s appearing. See how all of it, every thought, every feeling, every perception, is an expression of being, an expression of you.

Notice how the feeling of being you is, in one very real sense, indistinguishable from the feeling of everything else, every sight, every sound, every person, place and thing, all of it, the feeling of being.

Of course, from one vantage, it seems as if phenomena are happening to us. “I am the subject of my experiences, I'm having these thoughts, these feelings, these sensations.” But from the perspective I'm inviting you to explore here, thoughts (and every other phenomenon) are not occurring to anyone but are simply expressions of life, appearances of being. In other words, experience is not happening to you, it is you!

Feel the deep rest of this, the felt sense that there is only being, only life and all the many and diverse forms and flavors it can take. It's restful because there are not separate phenomena, not one thing struggling with or pushing against or trying to make sense of another thing. There's simply the vast expanse of being, appearing as everything, including of course, you.

Notice that whether we sense it as wide-open and un-contracted, or more localized and contracted, it's the same being, isn’t it? Feel that. If my fist was being, it would be the same fist whether open or closed, right?  In other words, it's the same being regardless of how it appears. Contracted? Open? Different flavors, to be sure but equal in what they are most fundamentally. Pure being...

We can think of the wave that rises up out of the sea as a kind of contraction of the ocean as it takes form. But at the same time, the ocean remains itself, un-contracted, localized as the wave-like forms it assumes at the same time completely un-locatable, spread everywhere. Wild, isn't it? Life dances as both the unbound and seemingly bound, even as it is ultimately beyond any way that we might try to characterize it.

Now, while I can say, as I am here, that everything is being, that begs the question, what exactly is being? Feel into whatever the word “being” is referring to and let yourself sink into that, the endless, fathomless nature of this thing we call being. See that the question of what being is has no final conclusion.

Much as it may seem like we live in a world made of words and concepts, we also live in and as this complete indescribability, the wordless world of being…