The Peace That Passeth Understanding

Hi Folks,

A few event updates…

• I will be holding an in-person retreat at my home here in Santa Cruz, California. The dates are March 8-10, 2024 (Friday evening through Sunday mid-day). Cost is $100 for the weekend. Space will be limited to 20 people so do let me know - john@johnastin.com - if you might be interested in attending or would like to reserve a spot.

• As some of you know, a significant influence in my own explorations into the nature of reality has been Peter Brown. Beginning in March, I will be starting up another Tuesday book group, this time exploring Peter’s remarkable book, The Yoga of Radiant Presence. I’ll be co-facilitating the group with my dear friend and close student of Peter’s, Dena Evans. Details will be forthcoming in my next Substack post.

• 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).

THE PEACE THAT PASSETH UNDERSTANDING

I spent a couple of decades as a meditator, attempting to keep attention focused, trying to get my mind to become stabilized. However, the more I investigated the reality of my experience, the more apparent it became that there was no stability. The closer I looked, the clearer it became that experience (which of course includes attention) is changing from one flash instant to the next. Experience drifts, it undulates. After all, it’s alive! Life doesn’t hold still; it dances around. The flow of experiencing is just that, a flow; it never actually becomes anything solid or fixed. Reality is forever on the move, here for less than a nanosecond. And then gone. Swept away. 

Now, because of the non-durational nature of things, I not surprisingly kept failing miserably at my meditative efforts to find stability. I longed for things to settle down and become still. But reality would have no part of it for any apparent stability, any seeming arrival at something substantial or fixed would be swept away no sooner than it arrived. There is no stability. That is what was revealed. 

And yet this relentless instability, this ceaseless dance of transformation, this radically unstable dynamism turns out to be its own kind of stability. How so? Well, it is what’s real. The inherent instability is what we can count on. We can rely on the fact that experience does not endure but is forever on the move. We could call it the “stability of instability.”

The deepest truth, however, is that how this is cannot actually be said. We can’t really say whether reality is ultimately stable or unstable, restless or calm, still or moving. What this is cannot be said for any description implies that experience actually resolves as being some “thing” definite and definable. But it doesn’t. And so the only true thing we can ever really say about what this is, is that it is simply un-sayable. 

Seeing this reveals the peace that passeth understanding, the peace that lies beyond all conceptual frames of reference.