Life

Do you know what I mean when I say that it is shocking, stunning, marvelous, mysterious, unspeakably amazing to be alive?

I suspect you do.

It's a realization too tremendous to be captured by something as puny as an intellect. When it hits you, there are no words for it. Fearing losing the epiphany, you struggle to commit it to memory. I must not forget this. Not this time.

But of course you never quite capture it. You're left with words, ideas. "Remember, being alive is great." A mere whisper of what once left you ravished, now confined to the narrows of the mind.

And you're left with questions. Where the hell did it come from? How could it come to be? And when? But having failed to capture the "it" in question, your questions point slightly -- and thus infinitely -- in the wrong direction. Not wrong by anyone else's standards, but ultimately, by your own heart's.

Perhaps you try to pin down "life" through biology:

The capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.

Is that what you were once gobsmacked by? Something growing from four feet to five? Splitting from one to two? Being able to lift a box? Graying hair? Not to take away from the wonder of those, but be honest: is that what you were after? Close, but still infinitely far.

Or maybe you try to answer the "where did it come from" question through physics. We're just stuff, and if we can figure out where all the stuff came from, we can regain the splendor. Getting ever-closer to the start time of the Big Bang; to the smallest stuff of existence. Almost there!

A more refined approach might be to notice that the splendor of being alive is really the splendor of experiencing -- i.e., of being conscious. And since, as we all know, consciousness is created by brains, we'll probably find the answer in neurotransmitters. Or, as the current thinking goes, it's just an algorithm, in which case it can be captured by a sufficiently complex lambda expression.

λn.λf.λx.n (λg.λh.h (g f)) (λu.x) (λu.u) 

Fig 1: Consciousness. Or close enough. Just need to add a few terms....

Or perhaps you've moved past the passé phase of believing that we'll explain it, and onto the hip new phase of hand waving it out of existence.

"Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen."

Oh, whew. For a second there I thought there was a profound mystery at the heart of existence. But... words on a page.

You desperately want the big answer to be something more grand than just "dead stuff randomly bouncing off each other" but you don't want to be naive. And so you quietly settle for an imitation, patiently waiting to be roused again.

Alas, the more I harp on it, the further I take you from it. So, as frequently as you can, return to the realization that sparked it all.

You cannot capture it. You will not explain it (i.e., find closure in words or formulas). But you can regain it. Which is a great relief, because it's the one thing you ever wanted.

The Fundamental Mystery aka The Original Miracle

We've all felt the sense of how wondrous, how marvelous, how miraculous it is to be alive. To exist!

The definition of "alive" is something we've outsourced to biologists. And "existence" is in the domain of the philosophers.

But whether I'm technically "alive" or "existent," the situation I'm marveling about doesn't change one whisker. I experience something! And even when "experience" is fully outsourced to the neuroscientists, the marvel remains untouched. (Actually for most people it seems to be redirected. It's why we are trying to unravel the Big Bang and the evolution of life. These are pointing to the Fundamental Mystery.)

Of course, over the years, the wonder can dim. I'm probably not as exuberant about it as when I was a kid. Where did it go? The obvious answer is that I simply became accustomed to it. I'm sure I could even find the neural circuits responsible for the wonder and its dimming. Then I might use evolutionary biology to explain why this is a common characteristic amongst humans. And then I can be content that there was no real mystery at all; it was just a trick of genes and neurotransmitters.

The thing is though, consciousness is stateless. That's a computer term, here referring to the fact that consciousness isn't carrying around baggage (history; a state) telling it how to be or what to be conscious of. If I had a freshly minted consciousness and I fed it all the details of your current experience, it too would experience exactly what you are. It would feel exactly as old as you are, experience the same lack of wonder, and exactly the same reasons why the wonder had disappeared.

It seems like the external world is responsible for the dimming of our wonder, but what if it isn't so? What if the Original Miracle just keeps on keepin' on, ever fresh, waiting patiently for you to rediscover it?

How to "do nothing":

First, enter a state of meditation in which you are simply aware, and not trying to bias your experience in any particular way. Things just enter and leave awareness exactly as they are, with no push or pull from you.

Then, notice that in this state, you are still trying to bias your experience: toward being aware and not zoned out; present and not distracted. Find the source of this intention -- the "thing" that is preferring experience to be this way and not that. Now let go of that intention completely. And as you notice other subtle intentions arising, other inclinations to adjust experience in any way, completely abandon those as well. Of course, you cannot maintain the intention to abandon intention (as this is just another intention).

The feeling of being someone doing something (meditation) should be abandoned. The feeling itself may not go away immediately, and that's okay. The process that's continually recreating that sense should be repeatedly interrupted.

Ultimate gratitude

Normally when we practice gratitude, it's gratitude for something in particular. But we often overlook the most amazing reason for gratitude: the very capacity to experience anything at all, gratitude included.

It's hard to communicate just how profoundly wondrous this is. I'm not going to bother trying. But I will suggest that when trying to recognize or rekindle that astonishment, we often end up settling for a mere intellectual imitation of it. Something along the lines of "oh yeah, brains are amazing." We end up missing the miracle itself.

I don't know if it's possible to communicate how to abandon that conceptual simulacrum in favor of the "real thing," but I think the "do nothing" practice may help.

Especially if one alternates it with the advice given by Wu Hsin:

What is that by which 

You know that you exist and by which 

You perceive the body in the world? 

Is this not really the only question 

Needing to be answered? 

Investigate this exclusively.

Declaring happiness by fiat

Notice whether these three things are true in your experience.

1. Happiness is ultimately all you really want. Everything you've ever wanted, you've wanted so that it makes you happy; reduces your discontentment; however you want to say it. Pick words that work for you, but realize what's being said. (No doubt you also want to be a kind person among many other things, but if being kind were distasteful to you -- as it is for psychopaths, for example -- then you wouldn't pursue it. The buck stops at happiness.)

2. You're willing to give up happiness now to ensure it later. When you get annoyed at your spouse, you're hoping that your annoyance will lead to change: you're trading in happiness now for possible happiness later. When you do work you don't like so that you can have it easy later, you're making the same tradeoff. You are endlessly willing to trade your now-happiness for potential later-happiness.

3. It is always now. It is never later.


To summarize:

• You want only one thing.
• That thing can only happen now.
• You are never willing to let it happen now.

If the word "never" is too strong, consider what happens when you're reasonably happy. You're sitting on the beach enjoying a sunset. Chances are, there's a process working in your mind trying to figure out how to "gild the lily". For example, if you had enough money to retire, then you could enjoy this kind of thing every day, and then you'd really be happy. Yeah, let's start working on that problem!

So what's the solution? There's only one as far as I can see. Be happy now.

When? Now.

When? Now.

When? Now.

I bet you're trying to figure out "okay, but how?" The short answer is: there is no "how." You simply do it.

Because that probably sounds remarkably unhelpful, here are some training wheels you might use to discover what those useless-sounding words could possibly mean.

Pick something that you can be appreciative of. Your health, your job, your family. If all those things suck immeasurably, then the mere fact that you're alive.

The reason these are just "training wheels" is that each one has the potential to disappear, so it would be unskillful to tie your appreciation to any particular thing (or set of things). You're trying to develop the generic skill of appreciation, and those things are just props.

Ultimately, the only one that cannot disappear before you die is "being alive."

But when we say "I'm happy to be alive," what we really mean is "I'm happy to be conscious." If you're alive and unconscious, it's meaningless to "be happy"; if you were technically dead (say, as a ghost or zombie) and still conscious, well f--- yeah! Being "alive" in some technical sense has nothing to do with it.

And so, when you remove the training wheels of the particulars, you still have this one ridiculously amazing thing to be endlessly happy about now: you're conscious.

Another way of looking at things: trying to solve your problems (or anybody else's) is an awful life strategy. Why? Because the moment you "have a problem," you've locked yourself into the conundrum posed above. Something is only "a problem" if its existence makes you less than perfectly happy. (Is a beautiful sunset "a problem?" If, and only if, it hurts you in some way.) At that point you'll have no option but to "do something now to be happy later." So trying to solve your problems is a losing strategy in life. Go figure.

Some say that when you decide to be happy -- when you impose it on the universe by fiat -- the universe is given no choice but to "fill in the details." That is, to rearrange its contents to be congruent with your state. Or put another way still, to give you "reasons" to be happy; to "solve your problems." Of course this is pure nonsense. So no point in seeing whether it's true or not. May as well settle for the losing strategy above.

On your sense of identity

This post may sound like philosophy. Maybe in some sense it is, but it's not meant to convince you of an idea, or to posit some ultimate truth. It's meant to point something out about your experience. At first, seeing what it's pointing to may elicit little more than a "yeah, so what?" But if you really manage to fully penetrate it, it can do a lot more than that.

Okay, let's begin.

Examine your field of experience -- the set of all things you're conscious of right now. You'll discover that it's made of (approximately) six distinct non-overlapping fields: your five basic sensory field plus your mental field. Let's unpack that a bit.

You see the world. The eyes may bring in the photons, but the seeing ultimately takes place in the mind. The "place" you see the world is precisely the same "place" you see a dream world at night. That's your visual "screen" or field.

You hear the world on an auditory "screen" or field, and under normal circumstances, it doesn't overlap with the visual field at all.

The same goes for the other four primary senses.

Now the "mental screen" is a little harder to describe. It's the "place" where thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories, etc. are happening. It may be a little strange to call it a "screen," so you can call it a "space" (or anything else) if you like. The point is that all the aforementioned phenomena occur in a "place" distinct from the five senses, and that together, these six fields comprise the entirety of your experience of the world (the real world, a dream world, or anything else).

Take a moment and see whether this is true in your experience. See if there's anything you experience outside these six fields. Some kinds of experiences (such as mental images) may be hard to categorize as specifically one or another field. You can feel free to pick a field to categorize them in, or even create a seventh category if you like. It won't change the argument.

Okay, now notice that everything you think of as "you," the person, is contained within these six sense fields. For example, right now you can see your body in your visual field, and feel it in the touch field. You also have a mental idea of what your body is like. You have memories of your younger self (which are a big component of what you think of as "you").

If that's a little abstract, consider what it feels like to be in a dream where you're a dog. The visual field has nothing in common with what you normally call "you". Neither do any of the other four sense fields. And it's completely possible that (at any given moment in the dream), nothing on the mental screen is in common with your normal one. In brief, there's nothing on those six experiential fields that could meaningfully be called [insert your name here]. And as we saw earlier, that's the entirety of your experience.

You could imagine something similar while you're awake. Someone scrambles your brain so that your body is visually replaced with someone else's, then the sound of your voice, then your personality, your memory, etc., until there's nothing of "you" left. Yet, what did this experience feel like? It probably felt something like this:

"Wow, my body is different. Now my voice is! And now I have someone else's personality and memories!" And maybe these thoughts are happening in someone else's voice. But the interesting thing here is that the sense of "I" continued throughout the whole process. Similarly, the "I" you had while being a dream dog is the same "I" you have now, even if all the details of experience differ.

Re-read the previous thee paragraphs until you grok this point: the sense of being "I" continues even while all the details of being [insert your name] disappear. To put this more bluntly: "I" is not [your name]. Say that out loud. To use better English, this would be "I am not [name]." Go ahead, say that out loud, and understand that it is experientially accurate.

Now you may be thinking that this is some trick of neurology. Some neurons that define "you" continued firing throughout the dream and the brain scramble above, and that explains the whole thing.

But return to your direct experience. All you need to see is that we could scramble all the details of your experience, and all the while, the sense that this is happening to "I" is unbroken. That this "I" is independent of any details. Can you see that?

This "I" is (experientially) your fundamental sense of identity, beingness, existence, and it is completely independent of your personality. Experientially speaking, fundamentally you are the sheer capacity for experience. All the other "stuff" (your personality) comes later, as an extrinsic layer.

To summarize a lot of Eastern philosophy: all problems stem from this weird thing we do where we confuse some of the details of our experience (e.g., the personality) to be our identity. In other words, from this conviction that "I am [name]" *.

You're not.

Traditionally, it's said that directly realizing this can be challenging. It's not a conceptual thing. But if you can follow the logic above, you'll see that there's really no other possibility, and that conceptual certainty can convince you to look very clearly until you see it for yourself.


* In truth it's a lot more subtle -- some people get beyond the "I am my personality" phase and still confuse some more subtle aspect of their experience (such as willing or witnessing) with their personality. But we don't have space to get into that here.

Changing how I look at happiness

If "happiness" isn't a useful word to you, try another one (fulfillment, bliss, joy, ...).

I feel it's important that I change my perspective on it.

I usually think of it as something I'll get, by doing or achieving the right things. I may not think of it this way consciously, but that's fundamentally how I treat it. I think most people do.

If I'm feeling spiritual, then maybe I'll get it by achieving the right meditation states. But it amounts to the same thing.

But what if joy is something that you do, not something that you get? When you achieve the right things (according to whatever standard you've set up for yourself), you do joy. It doesn't come from some magic fairy, or some part of your brain that's outside your control.

If you find the word "do" too striving, perhaps the word "allow" is sufficiently soft. But either way, it's not some outside force that lets it in.

But this doesn't go far enough. Okay, so joy is something that I can "allow." What if I don't feel worthy of it? Then I may not allow it. If I look closely, it's because I feel that I don't deserve it. So then maybe meditation subtly becomes the process of earning joy.

Now another twist: joy isn't something that I deserve or earn. It's a responsibility. A sacred duty.

Perhaps for some, turning it into a "duty" makes it feel oppressive, like a chore. For me, I link it to the Bodhisattva Vow I took some years ago. That was one of the most emotional moments of my life. It was the feeling that I'm devoting my life to the most meaningful purpose, with witnesses. In the same way that parenthood may be a duty but is also (I'm told) the most sublime of joys, the duty of being happy can be viewed as the greatest gift I could bestow myself and the world.

How could it be a gift to the world? One simple reason is that I get more done when I'm joyful, and I'm also kinder. True joy is never selfish. An even more direct reason is that everyone wants to be joyful, so why not be a role model?

I intend to really internalize that.

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. -- Marianne Williamson 

Another explanation of nonduality

First, a definition: when I use the word "sound," I'm referring to a particular kind of experience. Snap your fingers and listen. What you hear is a sound. Now, imagine that a tree once fell in a forest when nobody was around. Whether or not it actually produced a sound is a matter for philosophers. But unless you actually heard something just now (which okay maybe you did if you have a good imagination...), I'm not calling that a "sound" for our purposes. Maybe you want to call it an "abstract sound" or a "theoretical sound" or something, but make a clear distinction between that and things you actually hear. So here "sound" refers to a particular kind of experience, not some abstraction.

We say that we "hear a sound." There are two things: hearing and the sound. More generally, we say that we "experience an experience." The word "experience" is both a verb and a noun, reflecting how we think of perception.

But notice that there's no such thing as "hearing" in the abstract -- that is, hearing without a sound. Whenever you hear, you hear a sound. Similarly, there's no such thing as a "sound" in the abstract (recalling our definition above). The category of experience we call "sound" requires hearing for its very definition. Spend some time with this in your own experience. Try to find an instance of sound that isn't heard, or an instance of hearing that doesn't involve a sound. You can't.

This may seem mundane, but it's not. According to the nondual traditions (which exist both in the east and in Abrahamic mystical traditions), the very reason we suffer (i.e., feel anything less than completely satisfied with and fulfilled by existence) is that we mentally split an intrinsically undivided and indivisible reality into two parts: the subject (I, doing the experiencing) and the object (the world being experienced). As a result, we believe ourselves to be fundamentally isolated, like a man on an island whose communication with the outside world is limited to bottles floating back and forth. You may think "I don't feel isolated!", but if you have a sense of being "in here" while the world is "out there," then indeed you do feel that way, whether it consciously bothers you or not.

When we're really engaged, like in the state of flow, that imagined isolation can drop away. But even in flow, unless we have a remarkably high degree of awareness, we can subtly miss out on the wonder of what's occurring. That's why hours pass like seconds in that state. If you lived your life in that kind of state, maybe the next five decades would pass in minutes.

The second difficulty is that we conceive of flow as a particular kind of state, which by definition we can enter but must inevitably leave. Sometimes people describe Zen in this way.

But Zen isn't a particular experience or state. It's a realization: that the world wasn't actually divided until we inserted that woeful division ourselves. In fact, it could never actually be divided at all. That was all just a funny dream we invented, a little game we played with ourselves so that we could have the joy of rediscovering the astonishing and ravishing truth of existence.