Opening up and leaning in

Unconditioned awareness can sound like a concept or very abstract reality. But in fact it is what we seek from the depths of our heart. When we rest in pure awareness mind, everything arise effortlessly and is accepted and released. There’s no need to avoid anything because we are fulifilled. 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.

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 denying of physical dimension of our embodied existence. When people first engage with the nondual perspective it can add to their confusion about the nature of conditioned existence. The unconditioned arises as an absence. 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. 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.

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 pure awareness, there’s nothing to wait for, because nothing is happening. The only way to enter unconditioned awareness 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.

I invite us all to join the spiritual heroines and heros of the past, present and future who show us how to be fully present to the moment no matter what it’d delivering us.

Peter Fenner, Ph.D.