Broadening the river of life

If you expect your life to be up and down, your mind will be much more peaceful.

Lama Thubten Yeshe

We live most of our lives in constant reaction to the ever-changing realities of our conditioned existence. We speak about our problems as though they shouldn’t be happening and about our suffering as though we shouldn’t be experiencing it. “What’s wrong?” we wonder. “Why is this happening to me?”

How often do we think, “I’m not meant to be doing this,” in respect to our work and family obligations? I know an Indian doctor who works day and night, seven days a week, at a tiny clinic treating impoverished villagers for routine complaints and more serious conditions such as malnutrition and hepatitis. Yet he’s always joyful, passionate, and appreciative. Why? One of the major reasons is that he isn’t thinking that it isn’t fair, or that he should be doing something else. He fully accepts and owns his circumstances, and he doesn’t seem to be indulging thoughts or conversations such as, “This isn’t the right line of work for me. I’m meant to be doing something easier and less demanding. I should move on to a different calling.”

We habitually resist, object and deny the reality of our experience. It can be difficult to take a trip across town, or spend a day in our office, or an evening at home, without someone or something disturbing our peace and serenity. We reject the volume of music in a restaurant, the actions of our politicians, our own and other’s appearance, the quality of the produce in our supermarket, the way people speak to us, the time we have to wait in line.

This constant denial saps our energy and demoralizes us because we’re engaged in a losing battle with a reality that simply isn’t interested in our existence. Essentially, everyone participates in this denial. No one has ever won the battle against “what is.” And no one ever will. Yet we spend a good part of our lives denying our conditioned existence.
In the affluent West it’s easy to take pleasure and satisfaction to be our birthright and live with a profound denial and rejection of pain and discomfort. Often we seem to share the insane belief that we shouldn’t suffer at all! Yet, we all suffer and will probably continue to do so until we die. Problems and difficulties are a natural part of life. Only a fully enlightened person ceases to create problems.

Much of the time we’re trying to protect ourselves from our experience because we believe it would somehow overwhelm or destroy us. In fact, the only thing in danger of being overwhelmed or destroyed is our carefully constructed and maintained ego-identity, our comfort and our illusion of being in control of life. In an attempt to perpetuate the illusion of control and separation, we distort, fantasize, project, and otherwise avoid the reality of our experience—feelings, ideas, people, places, situations.

When we fixate on the belief that problems should be absent from our experience, we merely compound our problems. When a problem arises, we struggle to get rid of it. When a negative thought arises—for example, “I’m bored”—we try to remove or reject it. By pushing the problem away in an attempt to access or maintain an experience of nondual awareness, we actually undermine the experience of nondual awareness, which after all includes everything and rejects nothing.
Even though unpleasant experiences continue to manifest, independently of our refusal to accept them, we operate, year after year, as though our rejection would deenergize a negative experience. If this was how things worked surely we would be able to remove unpleasant experiences expeditiously and with ease. We try to avoid our pain, but year after year our suffering continues. The energy in denial or resistance is always wasted. Not one ounce of our energy makes a productive contribution to changing our experience. The source of our suffering lies not in the circumstances of our lives, but in our resistance.

When we resist reality, we tighten up. Our bodies become tense, we feel paralyzed or agitated. You might like to flash through some of the times you’ve powerfully resisted what’s happening to you, in order to connect with how resistance shows up in your body. Don’t try to interpret the experiences. Just scan your body for how denial manifests in your chest, belly, groin, shoulders, arms, hands, neck, throat, face, mouth, brow, and scalp. Where are the feelings located in your body? Is the energy stable or moving? Is it solid, like a constriction, or vacuous, like an absence or a gaping hole?

The solution to our predicament is to cultivate of a more expanded, inclusive and realistic relationship to life. I call this “broadening the river of life.” We have ups and downs; great times when life flows smoothly, and difficult times when things get heavy and intense and don’t necessarily work out well. That’s life. If we act as though life shouldn’t be like this, we deny a fundamental aspect of our existence.

By acknowledging that we do suffer we aren’t necessarily committing ourselves to suffering. We accept our circumstances without becoming resigned to our lot in life. Instead, we may think: “At this point in my evolution, I suffer from time to time because I’m still controlled by judgments and preferences. Even so, I don’t feel resigned. I’m definitely not committed to the inevitability of this situation. I’m working with my reactive emotions so that, over time, the situation will definitely change. I can even accept the fact that I get resigned from time to time.”

By broadening the river of life, we increase our capacity to be present to the whole range of human experience. We welcome what is, and this welcoming becomes a gateway into the nondual state. When we welcome what is, our suffering dissipates. We let what is happening happen, and don’t object to it. There may still be pain, but it no longer causes suffering.

Ultimately, the only way to break our obsession with resistance, denial and suffering is by getting real and accepting the nature of our conditioned lives. In our nondual training, we acknowledge and accept that suffering still happens for us at this point on our path. We cut through the fantasy that something is wrong when we suffer, and we stop making a problem out of having problems! We accept the basic structure and patterning of our experience, our life circumstances, not in a defeatist way, but with dignity and grace, because we know that “welcoming what is” is the gateway to freedom and liberation.
First of all, we accept the truth of suffering, which is, of course, the first of the Buddha’s four noble truths. Yes, our conditioned existence is characterized by different forms of suffering, and we don’t have to make that into a problem. Instead, we can say, “Yes, I’ve got a problem, and I’ll work with it in the most mature and responsible way I can.” In fact, it’s immature and irresponsible to say that it shouldn’t be happening. A more responsible response would be, “Yes, I have a problem, now what can I do about it?” Or we could ask ourselves, “Do I need to do anything about it?”

In a teaching situation, getting real can take many forms. For example, it may involve saying to a student quite simply, that the difficulty they’re experiencing isn’t unusual. It’s the type of thing that often arises for people. Even though they don’t like the experience, it doesn’t mean that anything has gone wrong, with themselves or the way the world is designed! We explain that, “This is what happens.” When people fully accept their problems, they begin to relax and lighten up. At which point we can say, “Do you notice that suffering isn’t there any more, and there’s a new sense of lightness and relaxation? Interesting, isn’t it?” This can be an especially appropriate intervention when the person is starting to reconstruct a problem, or when they’re resigned or bitter about circumstances or events and unable to move into a more spacious experience. At this time, it can be appropriate to apprise them of the fact that they’re having a common human experience, such as loss, illness, or pain, which many other people also experience.

Another approach to getting real involves interacting within a student’s constructive conversation. These are the conversations in which people create and defend a particular interpretation, or point of view. This approach can be particularly useful when the teacher senses that the student is not ready to deconstruct the story completely. For example, when someone says: “I think I’ll be happy when I find someone who loves me,” we could say something like: “Well, it’s possible that you may not meet someone who will give you the love that you’re seeking. Most people aren’t completely fulfilled in terms of the love they receive. In fact, judging by the rest of the community, I think you would be a unique person if you were able to achieve such love.”
We’re inviting the person to accommodate the possibility that what they’re wanting to happen won’t happen in a way that meets their needs in full. We might then ask them to take that possibility on board by saying, “So how is that? Can you see yourself living your life in that way?” When they sit with the possibility for a moment, without resistance, they might say, “Yes, I can.”

We might then move the conversation into the here and now by saying, “It’s not happening now. You haven’t fulfilled your wish. So what’s it like for you?” Gradually, through the unperturbed responses of the teacher and the energy of the conversation, the student might begin to recognize that it’s possible to be whole and complete without achieving the particular circumstance they had predicated as necessary for their happiness. They can feel complete in the moment and in touch with reality without the fulfillment of certain conditions, and they can go beyond any need to adjust their circumstances. In other words, we’re pointing the client in the direction of unconditioned mind and validating the quality of that experience.

Living without resistance

When we rest in unconditioned mind, there’s nothing to resist; everything that arises is effortlessly accepted and released. There’s no need to avoid anything because there’s no desire for anything to be different from the way it is. We don’t hold ourselves back for fear of being confronted by something that’s unpleasant, uncomfortable, or overwhelming. Rather than closing down and trying to protect ourselves or driving ourselves forward through fear of missing out on some valued experience or opportunity, we face everything that arises in our experience and avoid nothing, without resisting it or believing it shouldn’t be happening.

However, it takes courage to accept “what is” when our emotional reactions have been triggered, because this runs counter to what we’ve done in the past, and nearly all of our education. It also requires confidence that our deeper unconditioned nature is a source of bliss and contentment. Our fear is that if we let go of our resistance, the feeling we’re fighting to avoid will gain power and influence, and perhaps completely consume us. So when we open up, we also accept our fear that things might get more intense and even much worse. We need to take full responsibility for our existence, including our potential and our deepest fears, and accept that we can’t know or control the future.

Opening up in this way—accepting what is without any resistance—is heroic because we risk losing everything we’re attached to. In order to open up to what’s happening we let go of our sense of self-control. “True fearlessness comes from the knowledge that we will never lie to ourselves, that we will never evade a single moment of our lives,” says Shyalpa Rinpoche. “We will be fully present for every moment and every consequence.” Rinpoche speaks of this “willingness to see things as they are, without having any motive or intention whatsoever to them.” (Shambhala Sun, May 2003) He calls this “real honesty” because we no longer deceive ourselves and others about what we know and don’t know!

One way to begin to accept our experience is simply to say “Yes” when we’re saying “No.” When we hear ourselves objecting to what’s happening, we say, “Okay, I will be present to this experience.” The nature of conditioned reality is such that when something is, it is. And when it isn’t, it isn’t. So when something is, I will experience it. I won’t try to push it away. And when something isn’t, I accept this. I won’t chase after it, or pine for it, or fantasize about it. And if I do do these things, I accept that.

A lot of our pain is caused by our denial of the physicality and facticity of our embodied existence. Moveover, the nondual perspective can add to people’s confusion about the nature of conditioned existence. When the unconditioned is, it isn’t. And when it isn’t, it is. But in the domain of forms, feelings, and thoughts, when something is present, it’s present. When it’s absent, it’s absent. This is what it means to have a physical body and live in the material world. The world of matter functions in very specific and precise ways. Relative to thoughts and feelings, our physical bodies are highly conditioned. If someone dies or leaves a relationship, it means that they will not be around for us to enjoy their physical presence and company. There’s no question about it. If we lose half our investments it means that we won’t be able to go on the vacations we’d dreamt about, or give our children the education we’d planned. So in accepting our conditioning we accept what it really means to be living in a body that’s conditioned by the past and present, and by other people and our physical environment.

Opening up

It’s easy to think that in order to let go of our resistance, we need to change. We need to be a different type of person. But when we let go of our resistance, nothing needs to change. In fact, that’s exactly what we’re doing in letting go of our resistance. We’re letting go of the need for anything to be different. We accept that things may change, and they may not. We allow our circumstances and our responses (our thoughts and feelings) to be exactly as they are. We let go of what we think is happening, and we let go of what should be happening, in order to allow ourselves to be present to what is actually happening.

We stop waiting for anything more to be happening than what is. In unconditioned mind, there’s nothing to wait for, because nothing is happening. The only way to enter unconditioned mind is to stop waiting. When we stop waiting—for our circumstances to change or continue—there is only the here and now, we can’t wait for the future, since the future never comes, it never arrives, it never has and never will. All there ever is, is the moment that is saturated with a level of conditioning that spans infinity and yet which is totally ephemeral at the same time.

Bliss

The moment we accept what’s happening to us, without any resistance, pain transforms into bliss. Bliss is available to us simply by letting things be as they are. This is why Tantric Buddhism talks about the indivisible union of bliss and emptiness (sukha-shunyata). In other words, the experience of emptiness, which is the same as the experience of unconditioned mind, is always and naturally experienced as a state of supernal bliss. This is a bliss that goes beyond the experience of both pain and pleasure. It’s the experience of unconditional bliss that cannot be characterized as the removal of pain, or even as an experience of somatic pleasure or emotional ecstasy. It’s the bliss that arises when we stop seeking and relinquish all demands for things to be different than they are. It’s the bliss we experience when we rest in the certain knowledge that what we’re experiencing cannot be enhanced or degraded, and cannot be taken away from us, by any change in our conditioned circumstances.

The word “bliss” may not be the best term to translate the Sanskrit word that’s used in Tantric Buddhism. In fact, in Indian nondual spirituality, there are many words for bliss. The two most common terms are sukha (which is mainly used by Buddhists) and ananda (which is mainly used in Hinduism). The reason there are many words for “bliss” is because in cultures that practices yoga and meditation there is a lot of bliss around! You might have noticed that most Indian swamis have the word bliss (ananda) in their names: Yogananda, Satchitananda, Jnanananda, and so on. The reason why some yogis and contemplatives live in a state of nearly constant bliss is because they have minimal needs and make minimal demands on the world and their bodies. Consequently, they’re easily, and normally, complete and satisfied.

In English the word “bliss” has several negative associations that can block resting in unconditioned mind. For a start, the concept of “spiritual bliss” has been degraded in the world of commerce and advertising, which speaks about the bliss of driving the latest model car, or the taste of a chocolate bar! In our own conversations we talk about how the chocolate mousse was pure bliss, that our vacation in Bali was pure bliss, that we are ecstatic about getting a promotion, or that it was sheer bliss not having to go to work in the morning! At the very least, these usages show that bliss is important to us.
But many of our associations are negative in some way. In particular we’re reluctant to acknowledge that our lives are driven by the search for unending bliss and contentment. Spiritual seekers can be embarrassed to acknowledge that they seek a state of permanent and transcendent bliss. We judge ourselves, or fear being judged by others, as being selfish, narcissistic or hedonistic. We place limits on the amount of pleasure we feel safe to enjoy. If we have too little we feel starved and cheated. If we have too much we worry that we’ll become addicted to pleasure and lose perspective on the rest of our lives.

The healing power of sensate bliss

The experience of unconditioned bliss is different from the experiences of sensate bliss that arise as a function of changes in our thoughts, feelings and body chemistry. Nondual work produces experiences of both sensate and unconditioned bliss.
Experiences of sensate bliss arise in the slipstream of unconditioned mind. They occur like clockwork when our thinking slows down and we move into more subtle states of consciousness. In the context of nondual work, these experiences can be profoundly healing, especially for people who deprive themselves of pleasure. They are medicine for the mind and the soul. They sooth our minds and repair the damage done to our nervous system by pain and trauma. We recognized their healing power and let people rest in these experiences for as long as they arise.

Energy and consciousness disciplines such as tai chi, yoga and meditation produce experiences of sensate bliss—the bliss that can be felt as ecstatic joy or as the somatic bliss that arises when our nervous system is perfectly integrated with our mind. The most powerful practices are those that are based on knowledge of the energy movements (prana) in our subtle physiology of energy pathways (nadi). Experiences of bliss, rapture, deep contentment, serenity and imperturbable peace arise like clockwork when people practice deep contemplation.

However, like all conditioned experiences, sensate bliss comes and goes. When people rest in healing-bliss, nondual teachers know that there is still further to go. We let these experiences do their work, and then gently ease people forward into the ultimate experience of unconditioned mind.

Peter Fenner