2009 Afterword to AWAKE IN THE HEARTLAND

Are you breathing? Or are you being breathed? You need not answer. There is no essential difference. 

-- Steve Hagen

My mother Dorothy died at the end of 2004 at the age of 95. She died at home  surrounded by friends and family. I scattered her ashes in the woods at Springwater. The lady who played her radio all night in the apartment next door to mine died a few years later, and a young couple with a child moved in next door to me. My beloved trees out front were chopped down by the new owners of the building on the first anniversary of my mother’s death and a new view of the sky opened up. In the spring of 2008, I left Chicago and moved to Oregon. I turned sixty. George W. Bush was replaced by Barack Obama. What ends and what doesn’t end? This is a wonderful question to explore, not philosophically or speculatively, but directly, in this moment.

I returned to Springwater for retreats and visits many times after this book was published, and I remain closely in touch with Toni Packer and others in the Springwater community. I have never found anyplace so open and so genuine and unpretentious and unbound by dogma and ideology as Springwater Center. I had a warm reunion with Gangaji before moving to Chicago. Drawn by Steve Hagen’s books, I attended several Zen sesshins in Minneapolis with him after my mother died and did a number of his classes on CD. I’m not into formal Zen practice, but I have enormous appreciation for Steve, and he opened my eyes in new ways. I also enjoyed being with a number of nondual teachers who passed through Chicago while I was there, especially Sailor Bob Adamson and Wayne Liquorman.

I continue to meet with people individually and in groups and occasionally offer events elsewhere when I am invited. What are these meetings and events all about? Waking up now to the aliveness of what is; exploring the actuality of life with curiosity and openness; seeing through the thoughts, stories, ideas and concepts that can be so mesmerizing and so easily mistaken for actuality; waking up from the false sense of separation, solidity, encapsulation and individual agency; discovering the boundlessness that is never absent.

I continue to appreciate a broad spectrum of non-dual writers and teachers, many of whom seem to contradict each other, and my own expression can shift in emphasis from one day to the next. For a long time, it seemed as if I had to choose between Advaita and Zen, between Tony Parsons and Eckhart Tolle, been radical nonduality and meditative inquiry, between “Be Here Now” and “This Is It.” I struggled to figure out which “side” had the highest truth, the clearest expression. Back and forth I went. One day it would look one way, then it would flip and look the other way. What to do? Gradually, this struggle dissolved, not because I found the right answer, but because there is a deep letting go into the answer-less-ness that needs no answer.

The struggle and the apparent conflict was all about conceptual maps and identities. Reality is so much simpler and more immediate. It’s the territory itself -- this undeniable, inescapable Here and Now. Awakening is not about joining the winning team or being at the top of the spiritual food chain. It’s not about “you” or “me” waking up and then becoming “an awakened person.” It’s not about perfection or some final result. It’s not about crossing the finish line and being done. It’s not about being a seeker or a finder, or having the right answers. It’s about now. It’s about the groundlessness that belongs to no one and that includes everyone and everything. This groundlessness or boundlessness is not an achievement or a special state or an experience. This is all there is. What comes and goes is not boundlessness (or the present moment), but rather, the illusion of separation, the mirage of encapsulation.

There are many different ways of expressing this realization, and different maps are helpful at different moments. But the truth is not in any map. If we try to work all this out mentally by thinking and reasoning about it, we end up confused, trying to live in the map, which is never more than an abstraction. Discerning the difference between the map and the territory is at the heart of waking up, and this discernment gets subtler and subtler. It’s very easy to turn insights into beliefs, and then they close us down instead of opening us up. It can’t be stressed enough that nonduality isn’t an idea or a philosophy. It’s the aliveness of the present moment.

Some readers have wondered how I could have said that everything is God or talked about 9/11 in the way that I did. Was I sanctioning evil in some way or denying suffering? Other readers have wondered why I continue to talk about bringing awareness to the present moment. Haven’t I realized yet that there is no one to do this, that there is nothing other than the present moment, that “being in the now” is just another fleeting experience, that there is no way out of the Now, that there is only the Now?

Zen Master Dogen spoke of “leaping clear of the many and the One.”  Samsara and nirvana are “not one, not two.”  All words miss the mark. Saying that “Everything is God” was a way of inviting us to see things we don’t like in a new light. Everything is grace when we see it as grace. The grace is in the seeing, and clear seeing is synonymous with unconditional love. Such love sees perfection even in apparent imperfection. It recognizes everything as an aspect of one seamless whole that is endlessly revealing itself and that could not be otherwise than exactly how it is. In the words of Wayne Liquorman, "As you walk the spiritual path, it widens, not narrows, until one day it broadens to a point where there is no path left at all." Everything is included! Everything is the holy reality!

But seeing some atrocity as grace doesn’t mean not also recognizing it as a manifestation of delusion and entrancement in false ideas. It doesn’t mean not taking action to stop abuse or injustice. It doesn’t mean liking or approving of it. It simply means seeing it clearly. When a response comes from clear seeing, from love, it is very different from a reaction that arises out of hatred, blame, self-righteousness and ideas of separation and individual agency, all of which is more delusion, perpetuating a vicious cycle of suffering.

Yes, that cycle of suffering is also what is. But Oneness (or non-duality) doesn’t mean denying the ability to distinguish truth from illusion, or the ability to notice errors and move to correct them. Nor does it mean denying the natural impulse to wake up from entrancement (including perhaps learning to “be here now” and then eventually discovering that there is no way not to be here now). All of this is what is. Oneness includes everything! Enlightenment recognizes that the source of all our learning, all our discoveries, all our impulses, abilities, preferences, intentions and actions (from meditation to 9/11) is boundlessness, the whole universe, rather than imagining some kind of independent, individual agency at the controls freely choosing any of it.

If we turn that insight into a belief that “Everything is God’s will,” then it’s easy to begin imagining some kind of omniscient creator god off in the heavens designing the future and deliberately devising lesson plans for people. This is the danger with spiritual maps and pointers. As beliefs, they can easily become blinders. The truth is, life happens, and sometimes it hurts like hell, and this isn’t God’s will or anybody’s will because there is isn’t any such agent anywhere to be found. Everything is as it is for trillions of incalculable reasons.

When you realize the thorough-goingness of impermanence, you discover the deathless. This is what the Buddhists call “emptiness,” by which they don’t mean a blank void or an empty container, but rather, the indivisible and ungraspable boundlessness that is showing up as everything. Thinking divides and classifies, compares and contrasts, interprets and analyzes, strategizes and evaluates, and these are all useful functions as long as we don’t mistake the abstract maps that get created for the actuality they represent. The actuality is never really divided up.

Even thinking and mapping are activities of this same undivided boundlessness, which is like the water in every wave. Every activity and every form is a momentary shape that this boundlessness is taking. And actually, every so-called form is nothing but activity and flux. No thing really forms in the way we think it does as something separate and persisting. Impermanence is finally the realization that there is nothing to be impermanent! Nothing is born and nothing dies.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing! This vibrant aliveness of ever-changing color and shape, texture and smell, sound and sensation is undeniably appearing here right now. We can argue about how to interpret this whole appearance, whether it’s mind or matter, truth or illusion, dream or reality, but the IS-ness of it is undeniable. We can’t doubt being here. Here and Now is ever-present, ever-changing, wondrously varied and diverse but always appearing seamlessly altogether at once -- never arising, never ceasing, and never staying the same. This presence is so ungraspable and yet so undeniable. And every night in deep sleep, all sense of it vanishes completely. We vanish completely as anything perceivable or conceivable. The entire universe vanishes. What remains? Any answer you come up with is erased in deep sleep and in true awakening.

Right now, is there thinking about all of this, trying to grasp it mentally? Is the mind clinging to beliefs and ideas? Can that grasping movement of the mind relax? Is it possible to notice the actuality of simply being awake, alive, aware, open -- without knowing what anything really is, without knowing the answer to anything? Is this wakefulness, this presence, this awareness, this beingness actually encapsulated inside a bodymind, or is that encapsulation (and the “bodymind” itself) only an idea, a thought, a mental image that appears and disappears along with the entire universe?

My mother once told a nurse in the ER that my books were about “being who you are,” a statement that can be heard on many levels. I might say that my books are explorations, like a child exploring its toes or a lover exploring the beloved, these words are aspects of an endless unfolding, happening now. My mother often said in her last year, “It’s so freeing to realize that nothing really matters!”  She said it joyously, as if a burden had fallen away. She became lighter and lighter, more and more transparent. It all boiled down in the end to love. Love cannot be figured out with the thinking mind. It can only be revealed in the Heart -- this vast spacious presence here and now that includes and is absolutely everything and that holds on to nothing.

Joan Tollifson
Oregon, 2009

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