The Paradox of Wholeness – Deconstructing Yourself
Okay, welcome everybody. You can tell it’s late summer. Nice to see you all. So, I think most of you, maybe almost everyone has been here before, so you know the drill. We’re going to do an hour-long meditation, a guided meditation, and then after that I’ll say some stuff and then you guys will maybe have comments or reports or things you want to say, or maybe ask a question. And then after that we’ll meditate some more. So that’s how the next 90 minutes is set up.
So without further ado, let’s begin. We’ll begin by doing a little bit of embodiment, right? So just throw your brain out. You don’t need that damn thing. Just toss it. And let’s do some embodied stretching. And yeah, I do pretty much the same thing every time.
[stretching]
Good. And now I’d like you to just find your intention. Whatever it may be. Why are you even doing this? Just remind yourself, what’s the point? If you don’t know, then that’s a good thing to find out. But if you do know, just sort of remembering for yourself is helpful.
And then beyond that, step two, if you have any figures or principles that you are devoted to, what are you devoted to? Bring up those figures or principles now and feel your devotion. Oftentimes, there’s some resistance to that word. But this is incredibly important, foundational really. I’m just not telling you who to be or what to be devoted to. You have to decide. But you must be devoted to something. If you’re not doing it consciously, then you are unconsciously devoted to random things.
Now, speaking of emotion, let’s again set the mind. Nothing wrong with a thinking mind. I’m so glad we can all think. It’s very important to be able to do that and to honor that. But for right now, we’re going to set that aside and not engage with it. It still gets to think. We’re not trying to stop it from thinking. We’re not trying to suppress it or slow it down or anything. We’re just setting it aside and not engaging.
And when we do that, notice that we rest in spacious, simple, natural presence. If you find yourself continuously re-engaging, each time you notice, you just let go again and come back to just simple, natural, open presence—right there with our awareness—like the sky, boundless, not stuck on anything, not coming to anywhere in particular. Simply present the moment. We’re not engaged in the machinery of thinking.
And now, again, staying outside the thinking mind for the moment. We’re not against thinking. We’re—just for now—not engaging. Just for the moment, I’d like you to feel your embodied experience. Feel your body. Feel what your body feels like. Feel what it’s like to have or be, or somehow notice a body. And then what I want you to do is let it be exactly as it is. And you don’t have to think to do that. Just let go of judgment. Let go of thinking your body should be a different way, of imagining it’s too this or not enough that—I wish it were this, I wish it were that. Just drop all that—at least for the next hour—and allow it to be exactly the way it is, exactly the way it is.
Good. Notice if something relaxes when you let your body be the way it is. Also, notice any resistance to letting it be the way it is. Well, if I just let it be the way it is, I’ll end up as a fat slob, or I’ll end up not brushing my teeth, or, you know, you might have some story you told yourself of what you’d be like if you weren’t constantly trying to change your body. But we’re not doing that. We’re being super accepting, super gentle, very kind to our bodies, allowing it to be exactly the way it is right now. And see if you can take this little extra step, and actually generate a little bit of love and gratitude for your body. It’s certainly good to have one. Certainly good to be one. It’s certainly good to notice a body—all the many things it has done for us, with us, for all these many decades.
So it doesn’t have to be a big deal, and it doesn’t have to take a lot of thought. Just simply see if you can beam some gratitude toward your body. It works hard to keep you alive. Despite all the things you do to it.
Now let’s have a look at our emotional state. How your emotions are doing? Maybe you’re happy. Maybe you’re depressed. Maybe you’re panicking. Maybe who knows what’s going on. Maybe you feel a pervasive sense of doom. Who knows?
But what if we offer our emotions—which, after all, are simply our natural reactions? What if we offer them the same allowance? What if we just said that our emotions get to be whatever—the way they are right now? And just for a little while here, not trying to change them or control them, or make them do this or make them do that, but they just get to be the way they actually are right now.
And so really, all we’re doing is giving this up only temporarily. If you want to, you can bring it back at the end of the meditation. But temporarily, we’re suspending aggression towards ourselves, aggression towards our body, aggression towards our emotions, and just letting them be. For many people, maybe even most people, all a day is—between the moment they wake up, and the moment they’re asleep, and maybe even during parts of sleep—is just trying to feel different, trying to have a different emotion than the one they’re having.
And so just for once, even just for the break, the vacation, just for the duration of the sit, let your emotions be whatever they are. And don’t try to change them. Don’t try to control them. Don’t make them do this or do that or go away or be good or just let them be what they are, which might not be pleasant. It might be kind of hard or maybe even a lot harder. But this is the work. This is what we’re doing right now. We’re letting our body and our feelings be just the way they are.
Now, even though we’ve set the thinking mind aside and we’re not engaging it, we can at least have the intention to not change that at all. As I said, we’re not trying to control it or stop it or make it think different thoughts—just not engaging with it. So in the same way, what if we just let our mind think whatever it wants to think? Just let it be what it is, the way it is right now, or just temporarily. It’s not a permanent thing we’re trying to do. We’re temporarily not engaging with thinking, but we’re letting the thinking mind be the way it is and do what it wants to do. We’re not fighting it at all. And you were never controlling it in the first place. So this is just see what’s going on.
Good. So, letting our body be exactly the way it is, and letting our emotions be exactly the way it is. Letting our mind be exactly what it is right now. Can you notice any sense of a little bit of relaxation? A tiny bit of letting go of resistance. When we let go of that resistance, there’s just a little bit less tension and difficulty in being. And this thing I was talking about earlier—our natural presence, our ability to be here in this experience—what’s actually happening right now—increases because we’re not engaging with what could be. We’re just what is. Just sitting in simple natural presence, letting the body, the emotions, the mind be the way they are.
Sitting in this openness, this natural presence, not focusing on anything particular. Can you notice the coming and going of the breath wave? Not trying to meditate on breathing, but simply noticing that the breath wave is coming and going, rising and falling.
I’m feeling how good that feels. And you know, letting things be the way they are is paradoxical. Or at least we must be prepared for things to present in a seemingly contradictory manner. You may notice that there are very pleasant feelings in the body, but you may also notice some real difficulties, some unpleasant feelings, or pain or discomfort, to go along with pleasant feelings. And they’re both there—you kind of can’t have one without the other.
In our thinking mind, we divide these things in two and say one of them’s good and one of them’s bad. What if you only have the good feelings? But that’s a fantasy. And so if you notice yourself trying to only get good body sensations, grabbing onto those and pushing away difficult unpleasant body sensations and imaging that you can find a way to win that game, noticing that is interesting because the more you notice yourself doing it, the more you recognize both are always going to be there, and you can just relax. It’s nondual. They’re both necessary. They’re never actually different. Or I should say, separate, they’re different but not separate.
So, what if you, just right now, as part of letting the body be the way it is, don’t grab on to the good feelings or push away from body sensations. Just let them be just the way they are. It can feel almost weirdly boring or nothing at first because there’s nothing to do. There’s nothing to do. You’re just sitting here. But then you’ll start to tune into, oh, this is called being. What if I gave myself a break from doing for a little while and just be?
The same thing with the emotions. For most of us, all day long is just trying to do things that we think are going to bring a good emotion, and not do things that we think are going to bring a bad emotion. And that’s normal and natural. Nothing wrong with that. But you notice the feelings are constantly changing. You cannot win that game. That’s pushing the rock up the hill forever. That’s trying to hold the wind in your fist. You can’t do it.
And recognition of this means that we can simply relax. And notice that bad feelings are going to come and go, and good feelings are going to come and go. You can’t have one without the other. They’re nondual. They are never actually separate. You must have both if you’re going to have either. It’s only the mind that divides them up and says they’re somehow separate. They’re never actually separate.
So that thing that’s trying to get one and push away the other, get the good stuff and push away the bad stuff. Just relax. Just relax. You don’t have to play that game right now.
And of course, same thing with the thinking. You want to have good thoughts, not have bad thoughts. I must not think bad thoughts. It’s not X. But you can’t have one without the other. They’re never actually separate. What if we simply let thoughts be thoughts—at least for now, at least in the meditation—we don’t try to push away some and get to others, but rather just let it do whatever it’s going to do.
Now, what about the so-called external world? It’s not separate in any way from the internal world. That’s another false dichotomy, false dualism. But just for the sake of speaking in a natural way, I’ll say, What about the external world? There’s plenty of good things happening, and plenty of bad things happening. And maybe it always feels like there’s more bad things happening than good things.
Just for the moment, while we’re seated in meditation—even though we would wish that only good and beautiful things happen—just for the moment, we allow whatever is actually happening to just happen. Just for a moment.
Recognize that it all is the way it is right now. Doesn’t mean it can’t change in a moment, but right now, it is the way it is. It’s not enough to simply accept that. Just like we have gratitude for the body, or we can feel gratitude for our emotions, or we can feel gratitude for our thinking mind, you can feel gratitude for the world. Even the way it is. Just the way it is right now.
Noticing how many things we really want to change, and how many outcomes we would like to be different, and yet recognizing how many things we actually can’t change. Can we just let go of at least the part we can’t change, and recognize, and feel it being just the way it is.
Now, often I ask you to notice the stillness and silence and spaciousness in experience. So notice that now in your experience. Notice the part that is still. Instead of part, we might even say the background of stillness, or this frame of stillness, or the saturation of stillness. The part that’s still the all-pervasive stillness. The part that’s silent, but saturated in silence that is surrounded by silence, that is coming from silence, and going to silence. That is never separate from silence.
The part that is spacious. It’s boundless. It has no borders. That is coming from spaciousness, and surrounded by spaciousness, and saturated in spaciousness. Just notice the still, silent, spaciousness. It’s possible to just rest there without changing anything. Vast spacious stillness and silence. You’re not imagining it. You’re not conjuring it up. You’re not somehow constructing it. It’s always there if you simply notice it. Notice that and rest there. And feel the relief there, and the resource there, and the nurturing that’s available there.
And the way that that stillness, silence, and spaciousness is not something that you’re looking at. It’s something that you are. The thing that pretends it’s looking at that is actually also saturated with stillness, silence, and spaciousness, surrounded by stillness, silence, and spaciousness. Never separate from it.
Now, being spacious, silent, stillness, notice that the feelings of body are not separate from body sensations, the feeling of breathing, feeling in your muscles, feeling in your face, feeling your hands—all those feelings in your guts and everywhere else, your eyes, all those body sensations—are not separate from that stillness and silence. Both are simultaneously present. The one is saturated with the other. Our mind wants to make them separate.
There’s the stillness. There’s the body sensations. But really, they arise together, always together. Every body sensation, whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant, it’s just infused with stillness, silence, and spaciousness, is expressing itself in its movement.
Each emotion that we’re feeling, whether it’s a difficult, unpleasant emotion, a joyous, ecstatic emotion, or just kind of the normal blah blah blah of little emotions here and there. All of that is not separate from the stillness and silence and spaciousness. It’s not over there. It’s not only suffused and surrounded by this stillness and silence and spacious awareness, but it is expressing it. It’s the joyous creative outflow of that stillness. A gift of that spacious awakeness.
Every body sensation, every emotion is a playful, spontaneous, gift of awake space. This is the very same reason why I’m saying even though we’re talking about setting the thinking mind aside, we’re really not ever actually doing that, because it’s not separate.
The thinking mind is not separate from the still silent spaciousness – they co-arise. It’s only skillful means to temporarily pretend that we can separate them. But in a deeper way, we notice they are never separate. The still silent spacious mind gives rise to the thinking mind. The thinking mind is just the co-creative joy of the silent awakeness. They’re never separate. Notice that now.
In the same way, the sounds of the world around you, and the sights of the world around you, and all the activity of the entire world, is the expression of the still silent space. It’s the spontaneous, joyous, creative, playful silence, spacious stillness, and awakeness. Never separate.
Can you notice the spacious awakeness within every experience? The wide awake, wide openness, stillness and perfection of all body sensation, no matter how intense, no matter how kinetic, no matter how moving, it is simultaneously the expression of silence and stillness and spaciousness and awakeness. It’s nothing but that.
Can you notice that about each emotion? No matter how tiny, no matter how gigantic, no matter how difficult or pleasant, is expressing this fundamental openness at the core of all being. All experiences in the mind, all thought construction, is nothing other than the embroidered brocade of stillness and silence itself. And the entire world, bubbling up out of this deep pool of dark silent water, yet made of that water.
This is what we attempt to express when we use the seed syllable OM, which is a sound that expresses silence, and the vibration that expresses stillness, and a kind of exuberant expression of spacious awakeness.
So let’s chant that together for a little while, a few minutes. Straight from the void. Remembering that the expression itself is expressing this stillness and silence.
[chanting Om]
Good. Now just rest as the expression of this openness. In every moment,
Okay, good. Let’s end that here.
I remember when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I did a lot of tarot reading. In fact, I went around the world doing that, usually while drunk. People like readings in bars. It’s a great way to get free drinks. One of the symbols—actually the four symbols in tarot, you’ve got wands and cups and discs and swords, which in a normal deck of tarot cards turn into clubs and hearts and diamonds and spades. And those, of course, symbolize the elements, but they also symbolize things about our experience. For example, cups or hearts symbolizing our emotional experience; diamonds or discs symbolizing our bodies, our embodied experience—stuff like that. But what’s a symbol used for the mind, for the thinking mind? Intellect is the sword, right? It’s a sword, or, on a regular deck of cards, spades. Spade is an old word for a sword. But why is the thinking mind a sword? In one way, it emphasizes the really positive aspects of cognition—particularly intellectual cognition—of being very sharp, and very fine, and very precise. The whole idea of a super-sharp polished, clean, effortless sword is a really good image for a well-used intellect.
But the symbol is very appropriate because it also emphasizes that all intellectual cognition is inherently about cutting things in two. It’s inherently dualistic. It’s divisive. This is not that. This is the whole action of the thinking mind: This is not that. This is not that. [cutting motion] And that’s how it works. And that’s how it should work. And a good one of those is does it really well? Clean, sharp, precise, accurate. But you see that it can’t do anything else.
And so when we come to our experience of life, if we’re using that function all the time, we can do nothing but cut—cut things in two. If that’s the only function we’re using—and most of us are only trained to use that one—we are limited. We can’t bring anything together. We can’t grow anything. We can’t heal anything. We can just divide things. It’s, of course, the essence of dualistic separation. We’re separating things. This is not that.
And so it has its good side, but it also has an inherent limitation, that it can’t see nonseparation, and it can’t see how things are joined. And so it’s part of why at the beginning we set that particular function aside even though, notice, that’s an act of separation. So in the long run we’re going to bring it back together, but—just temporarily—we set that aside so we can set aside division, and set aside separation, and set aside cutting everything and start to get a sense of the underlying wholeness and unity. And, as I said, non-separation of experience, because it’s only in the thinking mind that things are separate.
They’re never actually separate. You can never have this without that. It just doesn’t work that way. And the more that we think we can have this without that, the more Sisyphean the whole grand tragedy comedy is, right? It’s just inherently impossible to have this without that. But because our mind thinks like that, oh, this is this and that is that. I could have one and not the other. We’re just rolling a boulder uphill forever.
But it’s not static. You’re working hard to roll that boulder, and you get your toes bruised all the time, and scraped up and tired. And sometimes it rolls down the hill—a long way to go back and get it again. It’s hard work trying to separate this from that and to do it all the time forever and never recognizing the obvious impossibility of that.
Of course, lots of things are worth doing, and keeping yourself alive rather than dead at least for you know seven or eight decades or something. That’s worth doing. It’s not that nothing’s worth doing. It’s just recognizing that you can’t have this without that. And resisting that fact continuously is just continuous pain for nothing. It’s really simple. And letting go and resisting that fact is relief from that pain immediately.
The regular pain will still be there. Your joints will still hurt as you get older and so on. But the friction and heat and scraping pain of the resistance, the resistance, the resistance just can vanish immediately just by letting go of resistance. We just think that everything will fall apart if we stop resisting. And you know what? It might temporarily, but it will find its own much more stable, much more grounded, much more fundamentally integrated whole new way—not based on holding up a house of cards continuously.
And not only is it just relief from that particular pain, just that which most people would give anything for. Not only is it just that, but it’s intensely beautiful. Because all of this is an exquisite expression of that wholeness and purity and completion and perfection—right there, right there—just on the other side of that division. But of course, including that division because nothing’s actually separate.
Okay. If you have something you’d like to say or ask, please recall that it’s nice to be mindful of our speech, and also that this is being broadcast live to the Internet.
Q: Thanks. Right at the beginning, you talked about devotion, which I haven’t really thought about before in my meditation practice. I wondered if you could say a few words about the role that devotion plays.
MT: Well, as I hinted at, everyone’s devoted to something. You can’t get away without devotion. And so, if you think you’re not devoted, or that you don’t have one, that means you’re just unconsciously devoted to something—or many things, right? Human beings are devotional creatures, and we’re always devoted to something. So, it’s a worthy question to ask yourself, what are you devoted to? What are you devoted to?
And if, once you see what you’re devoted to, is that what you actually want to be devoted to? Am I really devoted to, you know, watching Murderbot? Is that what I want my life to be about or what? You know, maybe I am. It’s just about the shows, our weekly shows, is the devotion? Who knows? But at least you get to ask yourself the question.
And again, when I use that word, at least some percentage of people have an anaphylactic reaction. You know, they go into some kind of deep start quivering and stuff. And I’m not saying you have to be devoted to like, you know, the love of Jesus or something. You can be devoted to whatever you want or whoever you want or some principle, you know, love something. But I would suggest that devoting yourself to something more beautiful or truer or better is a good way to go. Keeping that in your mind is important.
And so something I really notice is the resistance to devotion. And I’m like, that just means you’re not paying attention to what you’re actually devoting to. And so please find out and then decide if that’s what you want to be devoted to, right? It’s important. And just in terms of our practice, especially meditation practice, you can’t get anywhere without it.
You know, just to use the language of getting somewhere and then realize all the problematic craziness blah blah blah, so what. You can’t get anywhere without it. Otherwise, you’re just using your mind and that’s not enough. You can’t think your way there. Your heart must be involved, and devotions all about your heart. Nothing sadder than a room full of intellectual meditators. It’s sad—what actually makes your heart go? What makes your heartbeat? Find it. Devote yourself to it. It makes all the difference.
Anybody else? The one question kind of night?
All right, then we’ll do just a five minute quiet non-guided sitting. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. But given that we have a little extra time, I’m going to do a 90 minute quiet sit. So if you don’t feel like meditating more, run now.
As usual, it would be nice to just keep going, but we’ll end it there for tonight. Come on back next week. I’ll be here. We’ll meditate some more together. Okay. Thanks everybody.
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