Ch.12 - There's Nothing Lacking
As We Let Go our Fixation on Ourselves An Experience of Unconditional Love Emerges
The Experience Becomes Complete when We Leave it Alone
The Universe is Not in Conflict
Awakening is an Experience, it is an Experiential Process
[This deep chapter further clarifies the nature of the awakened experience and transmits a flavour of the ground we come to land on as we start to let go.]
As We Let Go our Fixation on Ourselves An Experience of Unconditional Love Emerges
As we start to turn up more completely within our experience, as our sense of self fades from the foreground and as our sense of separation from what is going on around us likewise fades, so the deeper, more meaningful and moving feeling and textures to our experience begin to emerge. The things that we may have started to feel were lacking gradually cease to be, and gratitude, appreciative joy, compassion and love for life, and eventually a total, unconditional, accepting love for it, come to maturity within us.
Before this point, while we remained so distracted by ourselves, our efforts to experience these things were limited by our personal need for the universe to fit my idea of myself. In short we were unable to unconditionally allow our experience to enter into our awareness without filtering it.
But as we let go our fixation upon ourselves our experience of love for ourselves transforms from one of vanity to a deep experience of gratitude and deep appreciation for the fact that we are even alive. Unconditioned by our idea of ourselves, with all its attachments, with all its clinging, with all that it rejects, with all that it clings to, our experience of love, compassion and appreciation become boundless.
The Experience Becomes Complete when We Leave it Alone
And this process works itself through not at a level of ideas. It does not come about because I understand the idea of needing to be out of the way. It happens at a deeply embodied, energetic, felt level. The felt, experienced quality of our life, moment to moment, becomes complete when we leave our experience alone. Because at that moment the impedance that this ‘I-making’ extravaganza has packed into my system is gone. And the conflict that we experienced on account of this impedance has gone with it.
And it has not gone because things turned out the way I wanted them to. The conflict has gone because we are now completely and utterly able to be with what is happening to us. And we realise that the universe was never in conflict. The conflict was all an illusion that I created, which was just part of this ‘I-making’ extravaganza that went on in my mind, as a figment of my imagination.
And that is a deep, lived experience that comes about in stages at an energetic level. It is a transformation in the way in which life is expressed through us. There will not be much of a change in how it looks, in the same way that there is not much of a change between when you are alive and when you are dead in how you look. But at a hidden level, at that subtle level, in that software side of things that is going on in the background that we had not previously noticed, everything has changed so profoundly. We are not even running the same programme any more.
That limited intelligence of mine that I imposed upon my experience, that did nothing but impinge upon it and create impedance, has gone and that boundless pure intelligence that always was desperately trying to support my life and all life, all the time and everywhere, is now expressed within me. That is a very, very profound change, and brings with it an enormous sense of relief.
The Universe is Not in Conflict
And when you are living the experience of that, you will know that the universe is not in conflict. You will know that it is pure intelligence and the only reason that it did not feel like that was because I put myself in the way.
So something very profound starts to happen to us that is very difficult to fathom when we start. When we start letting go our conditioning and start creating within ourselves a willingness to be with life, as that willingness to be with it matures, the conflict that we have been experiencing fades in stages.
That is what happens to us when we do what the Buddha did, what every other being that has freed themselves from suffering has done. That is how mechanically and energetically the process of transformation comes about, and brings on the lived experience of the freedom from suffering. And it is an expression of life. It is life, lived and expressed. And it is worked through at that level and it is not worked through in your mind as an idea or a resolution that you are going to come to, that is suddenly going to make the universe that you have been fighting with make sense.
Before this point we might sit on our cushion and do our meditation, our meditation starts to mature, almost every day new ideas appear in our mind, we rewrite our world view, we put a bit into our 'how I think it is' spreadsheet here, and we take another bit out there, we move this bit around trying to crystallise our ideas into a coherent vision of awakening. But the process of awakening is not something that is resolved in your mind. Rather it comes upon us within our experience itself when our mind stops long enough to leave the experience alone, and the such-ness of it, of what was always there, reveals itself.
Love is not an experience that goes on in your mind, is it? It is a much deeper, it is a far deeper experience. So is compassion. It is not an idea that we grapple with, it is a deeply embodied, deeply felt flavour of our experience. And it is expressed, to a greater or lesser degree, dependent on how smothered that experience is by our idea of ourself.
Awakening is an Experience, it is an Experiential Process
Awakening likewise is an experience, it is an experiential process. Life is an experiential process. Within it, mind is a part of what we are experiencing, but do not get lost in it, it is just a rabbit hole. Whatever we are capable of dreaming up, between us we have probably dreamed up. And it adds to the texture of what we are all experiencing as a group, but life will not reveal itself in its nakedness, as it actually is, until we remove that, or until we allow that to fade. Maybe in stages, not suddenly but gradually, as the I-making and storytelling stops impinging upon the experience that we are having, we see it for what it is.
I am trying to express this in terms of the principles that you can resonate with as being at work within you in your life. This is why I am not trying to teach Dharma as Dharma by the book. I am trying to convey it with a wetness that you can relate directly to, as a living principle or living Dharma at work within your life at an experiential level. This is the only way that real wisdom can mature in us, not through mere understanding but through experience. Wisdom is that insight that lands within us and opens our mind in a way that helps us move forward. But it is very difficult to express.
I am just trying to point out the signposts that we are looking for within our practice that are going to reveal this process to us experientially, in stages. Because that is the bit that will actually transform us. The idea will not transform us, even if you subscribe to everything that I have said just now, but seeing it and experiencing it for yourself will.
