41. You Can't Get There From Here

There seems to be a fair amount of confusion and even frustration around the concept of the self being an illusion. And this is probably inevitable. It really does come with the territory. There are many claims about meditation that are not paradoxical, of course. The idea that meditation might make you feel better, that you can become less reactive or agitated or judgmental, that you might spend less time lost in thought, that you might gain some control over your negative emotions. None of these claims are paradoxical, and they all sound very positive. But the idea that you might recognize that there is no self, or that free will is an illusion, these things sound strange and even undesirable. Now, as it turns out, all of these things are true. Meditation can make you feel better, and it can give you more freedom in the conventional sense. It can allow you to let go of negative emotions, for instance. But it can also reveal that the self isn’t what it seems. The illusion of the self, the illusion of free will, the illusion of control, these all come down to the same misapprehension of what is happening in every present moment. So what is happening in every present moment? Well, everything is simply appearing, and it’s appearing in a context that is truly undefined, because any apparent definition is yet another appearance. The feeling of confinement, the feeling of being a self, the sense that there’s any structure at all to experience. This cannot be the context, it must be among the appearances, in some sense. Otherwise it could never be felt or known. You couldn’t feel like a self unless the feeling itself appeared. Now I generally refer to the context of experience as consciousness, or awareness, or the nature of mind. It’s merely the fact that things seem to be any way at all. Their sights, sounds, sensations, intentions, emotions, memories, plans, judgments, all ceaselessly arising. But they aren’t arising to anyone, and the sense that they are, the sense that there is a knower in the middle of the known, a seer of sights, a hearer of sounds, a cop directing traffic, a rider on the horse of consciousness surveying the landscape. That is the central illusion that meditation undercuts. This is where meditation ceases to be a practice and becomes a recognition of the way things always already are. But pointing people toward this recognition can seem paradoxical, and many people find this frustrating. There’s an old story that’s appeared in many traditional contexts. I’ll put it in slightly different terms. Imagine that you’re in a city. Let’s say you’re in New York, and you’ve been walking around all day and you decide you’d like to go to Central Park. Now you don’t know the city well, and you’ve gotten a little turned around, and let’s say the GPS on your phone isn’t working. So you stomp a fellow pedestrian, and you say, excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Central Park from here? Now imagine if the person responded, yeah, but unfortunately you can’t get to Central Park from here. Now take a moment to reflect on the strangeness of that answer. We immediately recognize it to be preposterous. What could it possibly mean for there to be a place one cannot get to, given where one currently happens to be? Yes, there would be some regions of space-time that might be inaccessible to us, but not a part of a city. Now, this is a decent analogy for the predicament that every meditator finds him or herself in. You can’t get there from here. That feeling of you, that feeling you call I, the homunculus in the head, the subject who is now strategically paying attention to objects and making a practice of it, the one who is being mindful, the one who’s trying not to be lost in thought, that self, the self that’s seeking to be free, the self who wants to suffer less, the one who thinks he’s making choices, the one who can decide to practice or not practice, the one who can be disciplined or not, the one who made a New Year’s resolution and kept it or didn’t keep it. That one can’t get there from here. Because there, the thing to be recognized, the goal of the practice, is how things are already, prior to the illusion of subject and object. There is already no center to consciousness. So you can’t bring the center with you. You can’t jump in a hole and pull the hole in after you. That feeling of you doesn’t realize anything. The one who is searching for something, the one who is motivated, that one doesn’t find anything. In the end, there’s just a recognition of the context of experience as the context of experience. And this is the recognition that everything is merely appearing in its own place. And everything is in some sense mysterious or defined only by a further act of conceptualization, which is yet another strand of appearance. Here there is nothing defined, but that is the finding. Nothing is missing. Nothing is lost, except for the sense that there’s some position from which to seek to improve experience. And this is why the recognition of no center serves the conventional purpose of mindfulness, because it’s synonymous with equanimity. Recognition amounts to the radical acceptance of experience in the present. And acceptance doesn’t mean you’re paralyzed. It’s not that one can’t act from this place. And in acting, one can change experience in ways that are conventionally desirable. Recognizing the nature of mind is compatible with brushing one’s teeth, for instance. But in each moment of recognition, there is simply the totality of appearances. And you are not in the middle of it, or on the edge, or outside looking in. There is no one looking, and yet everything appears. Can you see that?