Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are

by J. Jennifer Matthews

You have already read dozens of books which are capable of reorienting you toward the mystery and poignancy of present-moment experience. It is easy to see this mystery, but tricky to stay with it.

I know there’s no way to “do” it, this letting go. Because that would be another project for my heavy, self-enclosed, self-deluded self.

It is possible to experience the mystery of our dissatisfaction itself - to be intimate with it - and to refuse to abandon it. We are not very good at this. Instead we follow this feeling like a Pied Piper. We allow it to hoodwink us with the illusory promise that if we give it what it wants, it will go away.

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.

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!

If I were to hold on to a fantasy indefinitely, it would become more and more empty, repetitive, and stagnant. But despite its obvious shortcomings, I could hold on to it.

As the Buddha stated in his sutra on the three marks of existence, living experience is precarious, deeply unsatisfying when viewed from the perspective of our projects and desires, and without essence, offering nothing to hold on to. We may think we are bound by our lives' experiences. But as soon as we touch them, they dissolve. We think we have to search for freedom. Really there is nothing else.

The ‘self’ as a metaphysical concept, or a concept that would set itself up to be a great, absolute truth, is much too high-maintenance. It simply cannot be made to exist beyond our everyday attempts at self-definition and self-description.

Our image of this self-enclosed self is not just a blank. We project all of our preferred identities onto it. When these preferred identities do not manifest in this present instant, we believe we must chase them down, as if our very lives depend on this chase. But they don't. Only our fragile and ultimately illusory identities depend on our strange and heated pursuits.