I often sit on my back step looking at Who I am, traveling down the blue sky, the housetops, the garden, past my feet, legs, and chest to the Emptiness here, mysteriously awake and full of the whole scene.
The Headless Way is indeed a wide, visual highway to the I Am. So wide, in fact, that over the years I have tended to neglect the nonvisual parts of the journey, those paths that pass through the invisible terrain of physical sensations, thoughts, and feelings. I am not a total stranger to this country. I know my way around the Closed Eye experiment, and I have lain in bed many a night observing the absence of my body. But I have rarely created a special time during the day to be in the dark–until recently, that is, when I began doing regular closed-eye meditation.
A few months’ practice of trying to focus on my breathing finds me still very much in the dark. Monkey mind–the term Zen uses to describe distracting thoughts and feelings–is in control. I can spend ages never quite deciding where I should focus my attention. Should it be on the breathing in my nose or the breathing in my belly? Or else I forget all about the breath and dream my way through episode after episode of what I have done, what I might have done, and what I might still do. In sum, I am failing handsomely at being aware of my breathing.
Yet this failure turns out to have a great benefit. Frustrated with trying to attend to my breathing, I remember at last that the breathing is not my real goal. My real goal is to attend to Who is breathing. So I shift my attention to what is this side of the breathing, and I find here nothing! But it is an unusual nothing, a nothing which is awake to its nothingness and, at the same time, is aware of the world coming and going within it–breathing, monkey mind, and morning birdsong included. Mysterious, alert, this nothing is Who I am: infinte, effortless Awareness. And being awake to it now, I feel that I have come Home once again–by a different route than the one I take on my back step, but Home nevertheless.
I enjoy the fact that having given up on watching my breathing there, I find it again in the center of Awareness here, not in fact distinguishable from the Awareness. However, there are other sensations–pain in particular–which I wish were distant and distinguishable from me and which I do not intentionally try to focus on. They arrive uninvited and unwelcomed. I have, for example, had nerve pain in my face for several days. It comes and goes, but when it comes, it is a sharp, bony, intense pain along the length of my jaw and up into my ear. I do not try to become more aware of this sensation. I don’t court it like my breathing. I don’t want the pain. I have had enough of it. I wish it would go away.
But it doesn’t go away. It forces itself on my attention, wearing down my strategies, pretensions, and theories until I know too well that I can do nothing with it. So once again at a loss, I turn to look at Who is feelng the pain. And once again I find nothing this side of the pain. But this time there is no pay off, no sense of homecoming, no thrill at the mystery of Awareness. Nor does Awareness offer relief or refuge from the pain. Awake to the pain, it does nothing for me. I find only the bare fact that Awareness is.
Strangely, however, this bare fact turns out to be of value. Unconsoling as it is, Awareness does not abandon me in my suffering. Without conditions and qualifications, it is present–more than present–it is one with the flame tip of pain like a moth flying into and being utterly consumed by a burning candle. It stands with me. Isn’t this a kind of friendship, perhaps the ultimate kind, when nothing can be done to right a situation?
Physical pain, of course, is not the only kind of pain to intrude on my attention. Negative feelings–anger, anxiety, depression, for example–arise for all sorts of reasons as I sit with closed eyes. Each seems to have the power to consume my attention, throw me off center. Depression, for instance, heavy in my heart, grabs me and drags me down. I try to survive it, fight it, ignore it, replace it, analyze it, dive into it. But it can sit there, rejecting my strategies, hurting. And my inability to control it can add to its weight and make me feel like a failure.
Failure: the feeling is like a bell reminding me of my real goal. I do not sit here in order to manage my feelings. I sit here to see Who is feeling them. And what I find when I look is that the depression, heart-wrenching though it is, is not actually in my heart. In fact, it is not in anything. Hurting, it hurts nothing and no-one beyond itself, for beyond it is only Awareness. Just as I experience breathing in the awake but unbreathing Emptiness, and pain in the bare but present Awareness, so I experience depression sinking in the sensitive but unsinking I Am. Paradoxically, I–Awareness–am free of the depression at the same time as I am feeling it most directly.
When this realization first struck me, I felt elated. I could hardly believe the news that the solution to my depression, or sadness, or resentment, or whatever, didn’t require me to get rid of or manipulate my feelings. I saw that I could finally be present with them, unafraid and unhurt, just as they presented themselves. And my feelings in turn had space to be without being stamped on. There was a sense of liberation all around. Of course, the elation soon subsided and was replaced by something else. The sense of freedom came and went like any other feeling. Indeed, as with physical pain, the Awareness often had nothing positive to offer the negative feelings, nothing except its presence. But I began to realize again that this presence was more valuable than positive feelings, for it remained steadily at the heart of my unpredictable and uncontrollable emotional world.
With closed eyes I walk through difficult country. My attempts to navigate in that country lead, in one way or another, to failure. But this failure holds a promise. When I turn from my efforts to control the content of meditation and instead investigate who is meditating, I find that I am already at my desired destination. Nor does the destination change when I open my eyes and behold the world, full of pain and sorrow and joy and laughter. Here, as I sit on my back step again, the visible and invisible pathways join, framed in the one, wide open doorway of Home.