The Unfolding Now

by A.H. Almaas ©2008 all rights reserved

Loving the Real
Without heart, we are not really human. And the possibility of having an authentic and deeply satisfying human life is only a pipe dream when our love is not directed to what truly fulfills the heart. To find true fulfillment, many of us at some point in life turn to the spiritual search. But what is it in spirituality that gives this fulfillment? Where does this deep satisfaction come from?

First we need to find out why we become involved in the spiritual search in the first place. What are we looking for when we begin the journey? To experience new and remarkable states of consciousness? To travel to extraordinary realms beyond our everyday world? To be liberated from the difficulties and constraints of the world? Or are we looking to enrich and deepen the meaning of the lives we are living here on Earth? If our aim is to engage in our spiritual work so that it can impact and transform the way we live, we have to begin by seeing what we are actually doing in our lives. What are we up to? What do we really want?

We live in a big, noisy, distracting world. And when we look deeply into our hearts most of us find that one of the primary things we want is something quite simple: We want peace. We want rest, ease, and quiet. We want to stop our constant doing. We want space from all the struggle, conflict, desire, fear, and hatred. We are drawn to people that are peaceful, to situations where we can have peace and quiet. Simplicity without stress. Being at ease. In some very deep sense, this desire leads to greater fulfillment than our urges for pleasure, happiness, and freedom, for without this ease of simply being, none of the other things we pursue will truly satisfy us.
Most of us tend to look for quiet by changing our physical surroundings. We look outside of ourselves for this peace and ease of being. But much of the constant activity is actually inside our head. Even if we go away from the highways, from the supermarkets, from the TVs and telephones to sit and meditate—even in the quiet of our own room—it doesn't mean that we are getting away from the noise inside. And why is there so much noise, so much activity? The answer, of course, comes to us as more noise—more activity in our mind. To explain, analyze, work with, or discuss why our minds are so busy can only increase the busyness inside. You have probably already noticed that yourself.

So our mind tends to be noisy and busy, just like the world we live in. We are hearing so much noise, that after a while we don’t know what we are doing here. There isn't enough quiet space to feel ourselves in a simple, immediate way; we don’t have enough space to just be ourselves. All this extra stuff is competing for our attention. And if we do make the space to feel ourselves, what we find inside is mostly busyness, so the possibility of peace seems like a pipe dream. That is how our world is, how our life is, and how our mind is, too. Most of the time, we don’t even question it; we think that is just how it is. It is a noisy world, so we learn to live with it.

No wonder that for some people, getting ready to leave this world is what it takes to quiet down. If the dying process is slow, by the time they finally leave, it has usually quieted down inside. You might have seen this in someone you know. Often it requires something that radical for us to be quiet, something like death. In this book, we want to learn how to let death quiet us while we live—how to be quiet in the midst of the noise before we reach the end of life.

So much is going on in the world and in our minds that it reminds me of being in a movie theater nowadays. You go there to relax and enjoy a film, and more often than not, you are assaulted by loud noises. You can't even feel anything about what you are watching because of all the clanging and explosions, all the yelling and screaming, all the loud action and intense suspense. It is like entering a war zone. Everything is turned up to the maximum.

Living in our minds is actually like that. Have you noticed how busy your mind is just reading these words? The mind is always occupied with reactions, judgments, questions, associations, desires, and attitudes. And we have become like teenagers who are used to all that noise. We think the noise is what reality is and no longer recognize what is truly real. We are not feeling ourselves in that intimate, simple, relaxed way that we like but may have forgotten exists—the feeling we would like to have when we go to a movie to relax and watch something interesting.

In contrast to our modern multiplex cinemas with their Hollywood blockbusters, what many of us would love is to go to an old-time movie theater where the sound is rather tame and quiet and the story evolves slowly, so we can actually follow what we feel about it. And we would love to be able to do the same thing with ourselves in our own experience, to be with ourselves in such a way that we can see where we are, notice what is happening, and know how we feel about it. This would let us feel more real.

What we miss when we don’t feel that kind of simple quiet is an awareness of ourselves in our experience in its immediacy, in its fullness. Instead, we are hearing echoes, reverberations, and reflections. All of our ideals, our ideas, our projects, our worries, and our fears become noise that overwhelms our immediate experience and the subtle sense of what we are. The preciousness of just simply being here in the moment is forgotten, lost in the shuffle, lost in the noise.
The spiritual journey is not about having experiences, interesting insights, or unusual perceptions, although those will often arise as part of it. I am not saying they don’t have their place and value, but they are not the point of the inner journey. Inner practice is basically a matter of settling and quieting. It is about settling into the simplicity of just being ourselves and feeling our realness—being in reality instead of in the echoes of reality.