No thing actually exists in the way we think it does. Reality is undivided—seamless and whole.
Emptiness is what remains when all our ideas, words, and beliefs about life drop away. It is not nothing in a nihilistic sense. It is everything, just as it is.
Words such as “enlightenment” or “awakening” point not to a one-time event that happened yesterday or that might happen tomorrow. Enlightenment is only Here/Now. And it is not really an event in the usual sense, nor is it a personal achievement. It is the falling away (or transparency) of all beliefs and ideas, the popping of the imaginary (conceptual) bubble of encapsulation and separation, the recognition of oneself as no-thing and everything.
What is meant by “Now”? Any answer is too late. Any experience you can remember or describe is too late. Any notion of “being in the Now” or “not being in the Now” is too late. All experiences and states come and go, and all coming and going (and all staying) is too late. “Now” points to an immediacy that does not come and go, a presence that is equally present in (and as) every experience, the seeing that can never see itself, the being here that is impossible to deny. Think about it, and you immediately fall into confusion. Try not to think, and you seemingly confirm the imaginary problem. There is no way not to be here now. This is what you are. This is what is. This is all there is.
This (one, eternal, timeless) present moment is ever-present. What changes are the forms or the appearances that this formlessness takes. What never comes and never goes is the immediacy of Here/Now—this—the alive presence, the awareness, the boundless unicity that has no beginning and no end.
There is no one apart from this ever-present boundlessness who can find it or lose it—that “me” character is nothing but thoughts, stories, sensations, and images appearing Here/Now.
Hinduism calls it maya, Buddhism calls it samsara, Christianity calls it sin (literally “missing the mark”). This smog is the dream-like drama centering around the imaginary “me” and “the story of my life”—the illusory sense of separation and encapsulation—and all of it a kind of mirage created by unexamined thoughts, concepts, ideas, stories, and beliefs, and also by neurochemistry, genetics, conditioning, and who knows what forces of nature and nurture. It is this conceptual smog that Zen and Advaita and nonduality aim to expose and clear away, revealing the jewel that has actually never been absent.
Nothing is actually separate from anything else. There is diversity and variation, but no separation. There are no independent parts and no individual owners.
Thought divides the present moment up into separate things, labels everything it has created, and then invents stories about how it all works. Thought tells us, “That is a bird cheeping out there. I am in here hearing it.” By describing what’s appearing in that way, thought creates the illusion that there is an “out there” and an “in here.” It suggests that “the bird” is some thing separate from “me,” that there’s an “I” separate from “the hearing” who is “doing” the hearing, that there’s “a bird” separate from “the cheep,” and “a sound” separate from “the hearing.” By the way that it describes and labels things, thought literally creates a mirage world of separate things, a world that comes to seem completely believable and real, just as a movie or a dream or a mirage seems real and believable. But this world created by thought is conceptual. It’s not what we actually perceive, but rather, it is what we’ve learned to think we are perceiving. Thought evaluates and judges everything, has all kinds of ideas about how things should be, how they could or should be different—how I should be different, how the others should be different, how the world should be different. Thought creates stories about where we think we’re going and where we think we’ve been.
The root thought is the “I” thought—the idea that there is “me” having all these thoughts and authoring them, “me” who is steering my ship down the waterway of life, “me” who hopes to one day “drop the self” and become an enlightened me.
Does this “me” really exist? Something is here, an undeniable presence that I identify as myself. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am here without having to look in a mirror, without having anyone tell me, without having to think about it, I know I am here. Being here is undeniable. But what is it that is undeniably here? Is it the image in the mirror, the character in the story? Or is it the awareness in which all the images and stories appear, the presence that has no boundaries and no limits?
The story that we have learned to believe is that we are encapsulated inside the bodymind looking out through the windows of our senses at an objective world that exists independently of awareness, “out there” somewhere, a world that is full of separate “things,” including millions of other people, each of them with free will, each freely choosing what to do and what not to do. But does any such objective, external, material world really exist? Are we actually encapsulated inside an object gazing out at a bunch of other objects?
We look for what is perceiving all of this, and we find nothing at all. And yet this absence is vibrantly alive. It is everything—this whole show. This aware presence, this aliveness, this beingness is the ground and substance of everything, but it isn’t really a substance in the usual sense, because no one can take hold of awareness or presence or being. It has no location, no boundaries, no color, no shape, no form. And yet, it is every location, every color, every shape, every form. It is the aliveness of this moment, that which distinguishes present reality from a memory or a fantasy. This boundless, seamless presence is the true “I” in “I am.”
The world that we think is “out there” is not really “out there” at all when we look closely at our actual present moment experience. Everything is appearing right here, isn’t it? No separation at all. No inside and outside. No boundary. The boundary is only an idea, a conceptual dividing line. The present moment appears as one seamless unicity. Only thought divides it up.
Words are tricky—they make something out of nothing and divide up what is actually indivisible. “Mind” and “matter” are two different words for whatever this is Here/Now. Look deeply into matter and you find nothing solid. No matter ever appears outside of consciousness. Where is the boundary between mind and matter? Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Whatever this is—Here/Now—it cannot be grasped by any word or any concept.
Is there an aspect of this urgency to “get a grip” and “make sense” of everything that comes from a false idea of separation and encapsulation? Once we have the idea that we are a fragment located inside a bodymind looking out at a hostile world, we live in fear. There is even a fear of awakening from this illusion, a fear of boundlessness, a fear of “being nobody.”
Does this separate me really exist or is it only a bunch of stories overlaid on top of certain sensations and perceptions—a habitual mistaking of a conceptual object, “the bodymind,” for the subject, the aware presence that is beyond doubt?
Words create the appearance of objective things. Words draw boundary lines where none really exist. They create the mirage of separation, the mirage of solid entities with continuity. So be aware that words are only pointers.
This “I” is a mirage. The True Self, or the true “I,” is the undeniable presence being and beholding the whole show that is appearing. The false “I” is the mistaken identification of this undeniable aware presence with a particular object—the bodymind—and the idea that “I” am encapsulated inside this bodymind. Thought (posing as “me”) claims it is running the show, when actually, thought is conditioned and powerless. It happens automatically out of ten million causes and conditions. There is no independent author deciding what to think. Thoughts happen, like secretions of the brain and the nervous system.
The central illusion is that there is a me in there who is in control of this, a me who decides what thoughts to think and which thoughts to act on.