Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are

by J. Jennifer Matthews

If we want to appreciate the mystery of life, it is essential to evade the compulsion of our desires by understanding that there does not need to be anything else in our current situations. There is no greater feeling, state, or condition that we have to achieve. There is no lesser or more limited feeling, state, or condition that we have to be liberated from. This is it. And this poignancy is always here. We can give ourselves permission to experience it; to be right here with it. To be available to it. To be available to the mystery of life is to be free.

When we create the desire for inner improvement and psychological states of peace, we sometimes notice, (if we are lucky), that we are causing our own dissatisfaction. We usually then create a psychology to eliminate it. We try to have more compassion and acceptance for ourselves and others. Well, what could possibly be wrong with this? Nothing, except that when problems persist, our standard solutions to these problems are often part of the problems themselves. Acceptance, compassion, and the various antidotes to our self-bothering and dissatisfaction definitely diminish it. But this is a lengthy process requiring enormous dedication. Like the problem of simple substances in physics – each particle of dissatisfaction turns out to be another compound. Dissatisfaction can be broken down into ever smaller particles. And infinitesimal dissatisfaction turns out to be as vexing a problem as infinite dissatisfaction was. We find that we end up scrubbing our hands all day like Lady Macbeth, trying to shed smaller and smaller particles of anger, jealousy and regret. The fact is, we don’t experience the mystery of life by ‘working through’ our perturbation. We just experience it. We simply decide to experience life, without judgment or expectation. A moment’s lapse is a moment’s lapse. The reason our occasional, alienating thoughts and feelings bother us is because we think we should be bothered by them.

Chances are we have adopted a rather grandiose identity as someone who “has peace” all the time. Do you see the irony here? When we try to overcome reactive emotions, there is always the infinitesimal remainder we can never be rid of. We are then like a rocket attempting to break the speed of light, which can never burn enough fuel to push the weight of its fuel to light speed. Wakefulness or enlightenment can be reasonably defined as appreciating the mystery of life in the present moment, while knowing it is the only 'thing' there is. Wakefulness’ opposite – the dissatisfaction brought about by reactive emotions and alienating desire – can be reasonably defined as the futile attempt to ‘get something out of life.’

We can not get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life, which would steal life’s provisions and squirre...

The other night, I dreamt a tick was burrowing himself into my thigh. I grabbed hold of him with my fingers. I was able to pull him out by his legs before he could burrow into my skin. I took a pair of tweezers out of my medicine cabinet and carefully and thoroughly removed all the stray tick parts. Then I cleaned the little wound site out with soap. When I woke up my thigh was perfectly fine, with no trace of tick insertion. Not because I’d pulled the tick out so carefully, but because he had never existed in the first place. Notice how ‘fixing’ fixed things in this example, but waking up revealed the original absence of any problem. It would be easy to assume that these two things are related somehow; “fixing” and “waking up.” I am not sure that they are.

How do we pull the illusion that there is some abiding and intractable “problem” with our lives, out of our lives? I would not be the first to suggest we do this by realizing that our sense of problem hangs on our sense of being a self who “has” a problem.

When we realize our true self is nothing other than present-moment experience, we are free to love whatever is happening, regardless of whether we like it!

we can grieve with the profound understanding that this moment of grieving is life here and now. This is it. This moment is what’s happening now. Must we give in to the hoodwinking desire that tells us to abandon this moment because it is not what we wanted?

And unfortunately, we seek happiness in the very heart of our dissatisfaction. We look for happiness in the heart of longing, and we just get more interesting longing. When we get the job we want, we find ourselves wanting to want something else again. To be able to feel this poignancy and not turn away from it; this would be the felt aspect of Wakefulness. To know true intimacy and not try to hide in the illusory redoubt of the self would be Wakefulness. To not go and find the little reeds and straws of additional excitement and status to build the nest of the self-enclosed self would be Wakefulness.

Wakefulness is the Alpha and the Omega. It is what we are running from. It is also what we are seeking. We are escaping from the very thing we’re trying to get to. We are aspiring to the very thing we’re trying to escape!

Fantasy is exciting. It is also insular. It consists of the impossible project of trying to take a break from the intimacy of reality. The major purpose of our fantasies is usually to delay or even prevent real intimacy! This is why I sometimes refer to this kind of fantasy as ‘alienating desire.’ Alienating desire is any desire which drains reality from life. In fact, is it really desire? Do we really want our desires to “come true?” Or is it just desire for desire; the desire to remain in desire, and separate from the object of our desire?

We experience dissatisfaction when we live our lives to further our ambitions, entertain fantasies, or at least avoid unpleasantness.

Experience is the only place where the self and others appear. “Experience” is another word for the way in which things appear. They appear in certain ways that are regulated by our senses of sight, hearing, smell, etc. Because we experience nothing outside of our own experience, experience is a pretty totalizing concept, isn’t it? Do we really need to call it anything? It’s like when you ask someone, “How’s life?” and they say, “Compared to what?” It’s like a fish trying to describe water, isn’t it?

Our experience of reality is all the reality we are going to get. There is no real life which is elsewhere.

‘Selving’ is at best not terribly necessary. And at worst we create a monster, as selving can become a futile attempt to abandon experience! We begin to prefer positing a self and her conditions, and “fixing” the one or the other, over actual experience, which does not consist of selves and their conditions, and which is the only ‘thing’ there is.

When we are ‘selving,’ we are abandoning what we actually see, hear, and feel (which is always dissolving, always falling apart) in favor of concepts, which hold together nicely, but which are mere conventions. When we just look at experience; when we observe it closely, we do not discover any selves. In fact, when we observe experience carefully and non-selectively, it does slowly dawn on us that no one is home.

When we start to lose our hard-and-fast sense of self, we may feel that we are losing touch with objective reality. But we need not worry. There is no such thing as objective reality! There is only experience. And the whole point of experience is to be intimate with us. It is us. Saying ‘hi’ to us is all it does. Experience is nothing other than a continual acknowledgment. My writing desk’s very existence is a kind of greeting. Hello!

You do not need to pursue experience. You are experience.