One of the things that begins to happen on the path is that you stop separating your spiritual life from the rest of your life. You can read a book and something opens. You can have a meditation that changes your perception of something you’ve thought about for years. You can go through a month of confusion and come out with an understanding you could never have gotten from a book. You can be dealing with work, relationships, family, some decision you don’t know how to make, and suddenly realize that the situation itself is teaching you. The circumstances keep changing, but the movement is recognizable. We’re all being given situations that ask something of us.
If you start approaching life that way, instead of always asking whether something is going to work out the way you want it to, you begin asking a different question: what is there to see here? What can I learn? What is this asking me to become? That’s a very different relationship to life. You can still want things. You can go for them completely. In fact, you should. But you begin learning this very interesting combination of being completely keyed and completely detached.
I think of it as holding something like a shiny diamond in the mind. You can feel its possibility and engage with the shininess of it without turning it into, “I’ll be happy when I get this.” You stay focused. You stay ready. You put your attention into the possibility, but you don’t demand the result. You don’t have to possess the diamond. You can hold it there, brightly, while remaining open to what actually happens.
That isn’t something you understand intellectually. Somebody can explain it to you and maybe you understand fifty percent. The other fifty percent comes from doing it. That’s true of so much on the path. You hear something and then life gives you the laboratory. You try it. You fail at it. You notice where attachment came in or where fear took over or where you began trying to control the outcome, and then life gives you another chance. Eventually what was once an idea becomes an ability, and then it becomes part of the way you move through life.
This is why teachings come from so many directions. They come through meditation and spiritual study, certainly, and there are things that can be awakened simply by exposing the mind to spiritual ideas it hasn’t encountered before. Sometimes you read about another tradition or another conception of reality and something in you recognizes it before you completely understand it. Something gets poked awake. But the teachings are also coming through ordinary life constantly. A confusing month can grow you. A disappointment can grow you. Something that exposes your fear can grow you. The path starts becoming multidirectional. Everything is talking to you because you’re becoming capable of listening.
What Do You Really Want?
One of the questions that came up in this conversation was very simple: what do I actually want? I think that’s a much more profound question than it appears to be, because most of us have spent an enormous amount of our lives wanting what we learned to want. We have an instruction manual, a rule book of how to live. We inherited it so early that we don’t recognize it as an instruction manual; it just seems like reality. This is what a good life looks like. This is what success looks like. This is what responsibility looks like. This is what happiness looks like. Some of it is useful, some of it is ridiculous, and some of it may have been necessary at one point. But for the most part, it’s a man-made definition of reality. It’s random and seemingly convenient. It keeps us unconscious if we follow the rules. And according to enlightened beings, this made up value-system is the source of all suffering when we live inside of it. We tend to navigate according to it without realizing how much of our life is being decided by definitions we never consciously chose.
So asking what you really want becomes a practice. You may actually be out of practice at it. You may be very good at knowing what makes sense, what looks good on paper, what is responsible, what other people will approve of, what is likely to produce the least amount of trouble. But none of those questions are the same as: what matters most to me? And that question is very close to the spiritual question of intent. Intent isn’t simply wanting something intensely. It’s coming to clarity about what you truly, truly, truly care about on the deepest levels of your being.
This is why we do writing exercises around what matters most. If you can become honest about what matters most to you, eventually you begin to see what you actually want. And when you really see that, something starts aligning. Every cell of your being can begin to rally behind that intent. It becomes the direction of your life. It becomes the light that’s beaming in on the decisions you make. And for a seeker, eventually the question goes very deep, because if what you ultimately want is truth, then truth begins reorganizing your life. The actual desire to know what is real becomes stronger than the desire to maintain all the identities and agendas you’ve accumulated.
This is also why meditation matters so much. What you think you want is highly dependent upon your state of mind. From one state of mind, something seems absolutely necessary. From another, it seems irrelevant. When you’re frightened, you want security. When you’re lonely, you may want somebody to remove the loneliness. When your ego has been hit, you may desperately want validation. Then you meditate, the mind becomes quiet, and suddenly what you want can become incredibly simple. Meditation doesn’t magically tell you what decision to make. It continually clarifies the instrument through which you’re seeing.
Eventually even a word like happiness starts changing meaning. Happiness may once have meant getting what you wanted, feeling good, having things go your way. Then you begin having these moments when you’re simply sitting there, completely present, and there is a deep satisfaction that doesn’t really resemble the old definition of happiness at all. Maybe there’s wonder in it. Maybe stillness. Maybe you can’t find a word for it, which is fine. Sometimes the inability to name something means you’re finally experiencing something larger than the definitions you inherited.
There Have Been Doors All Along
When you’re not present, there’s a constant movement of dissatisfaction. This made me happy. That made me unhappy. I want this. I don’t want that. Something gives you satisfaction for a minute and then it’s over, and the dissatisfaction is sitting there waiting for the next thing. That’s how most human beings are taught to navigate. We have endless possibilities for distraction and they’re not bad things. Go climbing. Go scuba diving. Make art. Build something. Have a career. Enjoy relationships. Travel. Have fun. It’s all here and it’s wonderful. But none of those things can give us a center because they aren’t a center. They’re transitory. They come and they go.
Then you experience what it is to simply be present, to inhabit this life in this body in this moment with your awareness, and there is something very satisfying about it. Nothing has to happen. You don’t have to get anywhere. You’re here. When you come to the path, you discover there are doors. Oh. There have been doors all along.
That’s one way I think about what a path actually gives us. You begin discovering doorways into other ways of perceiving existence, and they are endless. A teacher doesn’t manufacture those doorways and can’t walk through them for you. A teacher says, hey, there’s something over here. Look. Try this. Meditate this way. Look at this situation differently. Don’t automatically follow what your ego is telling you to do. See what happens if you don’t run from this feeling. But then it’s up to you. You have to find out what is real for you, what opens you.
The experimentation is where the wonder is. And there will be crashes and failures because eternity is big and we’re human beings and we’re curious. The path may give us stepping stones toward greater truth, but we’re still going to wander off and investigate something else and occasionally go flying down a road without noticing the cliff. I’ve had plenty of crash and burns. When I look back, I really don’t know how I made it through everything I went through except that underneath it all there was so much love. Love of light, love of truth, my connection to my teacher, my connection to the teachings, my connection to those extraordinary moments in meditation. At the time I didn’t understand that as clearly as I do now. I was just in the middle of everything. Looking back, I can see what was holding the thread.
Maybe that’s part of why we go through what we go through. You develop compassion because you’ve been somewhere yourself. You stop standing outside of other people’s experiences judging them because you’ve stopped judging yourself. You know how circuitous the path to truth can be. And over time something else happens: you begin opening to your own innate wisdom. I never thought of myself as wise. Even now, it’s not like I walk around thinking of myself as a wise being. But I can feel wisdom streaming through in spontaneous, surprising, sometimes funny ways, and I recognize that this is what happens on the path.
Understanding accumulates. You recapitulate your life from a different level of awareness. Things you couldn’t understand while you were inside them become visible later. Experience deepens into understanding, and eventually understanding begins to translate into wisdom. But you have to be present for it. That’s the whole thing. In presence there is so much seeing, so much learning, so much growth that, of course, there is going to be a deep satisfaction in being alive.
Outside the Instruction Manual
One of the most interesting things to watch is what happens when you begin questioning the identity that came with the instruction manual. Maybe you’ve always thought of yourself as somebody who can’t offend anyone, who has to keep everybody comfortable, who needs to be liked, who has to be responsible, who can’t make the wrong choice. Whatever it is, you start experimenting around the edges and asking: am I actually that? We’re everything, but we get pushed into such a limited view of what life is and who we are. It’s flat. Not because human beings themselves are flat. We’re strange and complicated and beautiful and horrible and boring and exciting and everything else. But the definition is flat.
When you unconsciously navigate from that definition, you don’t really discover who you are outside of it. So when you begin playing around with it, there’s tremendous freedom in that. Wait. Maybe I’m not going to accept that something was handed to me and therefore that’s who I am. Maybe I can actually see what happens when I don’t unconsciously buy into it. This requires self-honesty, and that’s another thing that isn’t really in the instruction manual.
Self-judgment is in there. I know that one very well. I spent so much of the path being hard on myself, thinking I wasn’t measuring up, thinking I should be this way or that way, and it was such a waste. I thought I was examining myself, but a lot of the time it was simply my ego being unhappy because I wasn’t matching some idea of who I thought I should be. Real self-honesty feels completely different. You aren’t looking because you dislike yourself. You’re looking because you love truth. You’re looking because you love life and you actually want to become capable of living it more beautifully.
You begin to understand that discernment isn’t condemnation. You can ask, is this helping me? Is this how I want to spend my time? Is this reaction coming from something real or from an old piece of conditioning? What is actually happening here? That kind of honesty may initially feel brutal, but it’s brutal mostly to the ego. The ego hates being exposed. Once you get the hang of it, you start liking being really honest with yourself because that’s where the transformations come from. You see something and instead of making it into a terrible indictment of yourself, you think, oh, there’s that. Okay. Let me look into that. Let me see it for what it is. You become curious.
Through the years, things stop sticking in the same way. That doesn’t mean you become indifferent or stop having reactions. You’re in a body. Emotions will move through. Things will hit you. Parts of yourself will appear. But you can stay with something without going anywhere with it, and then it becomes momentary and transitory instead of another definition of who you are. You don’t have to build a house around every emotion. You experience it, see it, learn whatever there is to learn, and it moves. And meanwhile, you’ve becoming friendly and compassionate towards yourself. You’re getting to know yourself in the present, as you are.
Little by little the old definitions loosen, and you begin learning how to let the truth of life guide you instead. You don’t throw the entire instruction manual out the window overnight because, frankly, it’s probably holding you together more than you realize. But gradually you don’t need it in the same way. You become more capable of meeting what is actually here. Life is spontaneous in this moment. Nobody has defined this moment because nobody can. So how do you bring yourself to the moment instead of bringing all your ideas about how you’re supposed to be?
You stay present. And then the whole thing becomes the teaching. Meditation is teaching you. Your work is teaching you. Your relationships are teaching you. Your mistakes are teaching you. Your reactions are teaching you. A book is teaching you. A random person you happen to encounter says one sentence about their state and suddenly something you’ve never understood about your someone you love dearly becomes clear. The teachings start arriving from all directions because the division between “the path” and “my life” is disappearing. You’re learning how to fly with truth instead of being held down by all the expectations that were set up for you.
You still have things to do. There are missions and demands and possibilities in every phase of life, and you put your attention into whatever is correct and right for you now. But underneath it is something much quieter. You’re here. You’re paying attention. You’re finding the doors. And you’re beginning to discover that they were everywhere all along.