What am I practicing in this moment?
So we talk about “my life” and say things like “life is treating me well” or “life is unfair” or “I have to change my life.” This approach sometimes works for a short period, but most likely it doesn’t last. Then we either blame the situation or we blame somebody. Or, if we are really sneaky, we say “life is teaching me a lesson, and if I learn the lesson, I will be happy.” But, life is not teaching a lesson to the me and the me is not having a life. We treat life like a piece of the puzzle is missing and we don’t notice that the puzzle is already complete. It always was. We don’t notice that there is just vibrant aliveness, 100% complete vibrant aliveness.
~Infinite Ocean – Rinzai Zen Talks by Ursula Jarand
I have a fond memory of coming home from my first-ever residential retreat.
As always, I slowly and carefully opened my front door, knowing Simon (the cat) would be standing guard on the other side, ever-curious about the outside world. Once I’d made my way in, I dropped my bag, picked him up, and stepped back out to enjoy the fresh air. As we stood there, Simon purring (and probably licking my hair), I stared at him and noticed that something was different. There was a deep, vast sense of connection unlike anything I’d felt before. Beyond just the usual affection, it was a profound non-separateness that came to the surface in the sudden recognition – ‘Oh, we’re the same.’
I paused to take it in, then looked around. I realized that this completeness permeated everything – the trees, the apartment building next door, the wind on my skin, the distant sound of traffic. They were all the same activity of everything, made of the same stuff—ethereal and transient, like a movie projected onto a translucent scrim. Only now, what was in the movie was less meaningful than the light of the projection itself, equally shining through everything.
Writing about it now makes it sound much more dramatic than it was at the time. It was special, but also so utterly ordinary. Life was just happening as always, only without all the extra noise—the stream of thoughts constantly objectifying experience into solid and separate things. The story of separateness. The narrative is so deeply embedded in the noise floor of our experience that we don’t even hear it anymore. Until it drops away.
Another way to think of separateness is as impedance in the sensory circuits—resistance to the natural flow of experience that then creates the impression of solidity. In that sense, the week of retreat practice had so greatly reduced the resistance in the sensory system that when the moment of connection with Simon arose, there was no habit of separateness to constrain it, and so it was allowed to expand freely in all directions, revealing a unified non-separateness and completeness of all experience that had always been there, out in the open, hidden in plain sight.
Completeness blossomed into feelings of lightness, effortlessness, and relief! Something else had also dropped away—loneliness. Like separateness, I hadn’t realized it was always there until suddenly it wasn’t. Without separateness, there was no me to feel lonely or incomplete. I even tried to test it, to see if I could intentionally evoke feelings of loneliness. I imagined myself living in a remote off-grid cabin in the woods somewhere (something I often fantasized about doing but feared the isolation), but the sense of deep equanimity and completeness remained unaffected. Loneliness, isolation, separateness—in that moment— seemed impossible.
What emerged was an understanding that feelings of isolation and loneliness aren’t a function of conditions, or what’s happening around us, but rather how much weight we give the story of separateness in any given moment. And in my case, I realized that I had been unwittingly practising separateness as the default for most of my life. A world of solid and separate was a way to find safety in the face of threats—physical, psychological, or emotional. I’m here, danger (a situation, person, memory, etc.) is over there. The separateness buffers me from discomfort and uncertainty. But it comes at a cost. One I didn’t realize I had been paying until that moment.
Over the years since my first retreat, the insight has continually unfolded, deepening, and integrating. I’ve learned to appreciate recognizing the sensory cues that indicate I’m caught up in the constraints of the story of separateness. Even right now, I noticed an underlying narrative of a separate me, arduously writing a separate this, that will be sent out into an external world, read by others. And the moment I recognize that story— a subtle movie running in the background of the mind— it dissolves, and writing becomes an effortless, spontaneous, now.
Other cues like loneliness, anger, sadness, impatience, over-efforting, fatigue, or disconnection can prompt me to check in and see if the story of separateness has taken over. I might get curious about how it’s appearing as a sensory experience in that moment, and welcome it with curiosity and openness. Sometimes, that can be enough for it to self-liberate. Other times, I might intentionally notice how the experience of separateness is completely inseparable from any other sensation, or from the perfect completeness in which it is being known!
Or I might simply ask myself, ‘If the story of separateness is happening right now, who is telling it? And who is listening?”
*****
p.s. Check out this wonderful article about Thich Nhat Hahn that includes an excerpt from a dharma talk about non-separateness. My favourite part starts at “When you look into tea, what do you see?”