This double arrow to the heart can be especially acute if we’ve spent some time pursuing meditation. We may feel a lingering pang of embarrassment in moments of intense self-consciousness. After all, shouldn’t meditators be equanimous? Shouldn’t we feel secure in our own skin? Why do we even care at all what others think of us? How might we work with these experiences?

Kegan’s 3rd order

Continuing the work of Jean Piaget’s theory of child cognitive development (published half a century prior), Robert Kegan proposed a view of cognitive development that continues well past childhood. It is sometimes called subject-object theory because the suggested evolution of changes that take place in the mind are with respect to its meaning-making mechanism—specifically, how the mind constructs meaning from experience: What one is implicitly subject to in experience, and what one alternatively constructs as object. In short, the first orders of cognitive development might be greatly simplified and summarized as follows:

0. The order of mind starting at birth is characterized by being subject to one’s reflexes, movements, and sensations. Kegan suggests that the infant does “its thinking by moving and sensing,” as though the world were just an extension of its being.
   

1. The 1st order of mind, starting around age 2, transforms the subject of the previous order: reflexes, movements, and sensations now become object in a new complex. The ability to sense and move is now a capacity that the toddler has at its disposal, and is no longer the very definition of its being. What takes its place as the new subject are impulses (that is to say, she cannot yet think, “I want to do that, but I won’t”) as well as the way that the child sees the world (she cannot yet think, “this appears one way, but it might be otherwise.”).

It is worth pausing to clarify what is actually meant here by such a constructive-developmental view of psychological evolution. It is called “constructive”, in that the mind co-constructs, together with sensory input, a meaningful view (i.e. a pre-conscious understanding) of real-time experience. It is called “developmental” because the manner of this construction process changes dramatically with the evolving complexity of the mind’s underlying psychological structure. The meaning that is constructed by this process is fundamentally divided between subject and object. What we call “object” are the parts of constructed experience that one can look at, reflect on, manage, question, or take responsibility for. What we call “subject” is whatever one is embedded in, identified with, and unconsciously ruled by; it is invisible and makes up one’s subjective experience.

In this view, the preschooler having a tantrum isn’t simply unskilled at restraining her impulses. The way in which her mind constructs meaning in the world doesn’t construct her impulses as “things” at all (controllable or not). Instead, being entirely subject to them, they define her very sense of self. One’s subject (whatever it is) is the water that one’s swimming in: Invisible, and everywhere. She is her impulses. A tantrum might then be the expression of that self-subject being torn apart by contradictory impulses that have nothing outside of them – nothing bigger than them – that could possibly hold them as competing things to be worked with. The development of a new order of mind is finally an evolutionary leap in the complexity of meaning-making: The subject-object microcosm of the previous generation becomes relativized to a working part of the new order; now subject instead to a quite different, and much more complex sense of self.

2. The 2nd order of mind is a monumental achievement for the school-ready child in which she now has impulses (instead of being made up by them) and can take on different perspectives (though still only one at a time). Her management and awareness of her impulses and perceptions over time allows her to develop a self-concept: a sense of who she is. She is now subject to this sense; subject to her needs, interests, and wishes, one at a time, as they occur to her. So, in spite of the relatively impressive new ability to control her impulses, she is still quite limited: Since her continuing needs and interests are subject, she will tend to understand other people mostly as obstacles, or as means to her desired ends, or else as irrelevant. This “selfishness” isn’t a moral failing, but rather fundamental to this stage of cognitive development.
   

3. The 3rd order (the “relational self”), fully achieved (presumably, if not always actually) with the ending of the individual’s adolescence, has structured itself in reaction to the pressures to subsume her idiosyncratic but persistent desires into the implicit social contract of norms that surround her. The only way for her mind to effectively operate in social coexistence, without continuous friction, is for her personal needs and interests, that were previously subject, to graduate to being conceived of as object in a larger context. That larger context, her new subject, is none other than relationship: With other people, with ideologies, with society, with herself.

Triumph and limitation

Your partner makes a seemingly backhanded comment about you having forgotten something (again), and you feel a pang of unease, maybe followed by a defensive or otherwise rejecting posture. Soon you’re beating yourself up for these uncomfortable feelings: You’re embarrassed that you’ve “let” your partner’s comment “get to you” so much, while conversely being annoyed at your partner for “putting you” in this reactive posture. Maybe you lash out at your partner. Or maybe you chastise yourself, thinking that if you were more mature, or less insecure, or “enlightened” you’d be able to take such comments in stride. In relating with other people you sometimes get embarrassed about trivial things, or take light comments personally, or become self conscious about your imagined comparative inadequacy. You notice that other people seem not to be as easily perturbed as you are… Before being so quick to judge yourself as “too sensitive,” we should place these experiences into their proper context.

The triumph of the 3rd order of mind is manyfold. We see our neighbour suffering, and so we feel empathy and then sacrifice and compromise to help make life tolerable for them, since it would be intolerable for our reflected sense of self otherwise. We see ourselves through the eyes of others, and tweak our behaviour accordingly to fit in somehow. In short, we experience ourselves and the world via experiencing the reflection of ourselves in our ideal and actual relations. The result of this achievement is nothing short of true intimacy, mutuality, loyalty, belonging, community and all of civilized society. The triumph of the 3rd order of mind is that it effectively widens our sense of self from the narrow self-interest of adolescence, to the expanse of human fellowship.

Seeing this clearly, we might do better for ourselves to hesitate before trying to be “cooler” or to be less affected by others. Such a contrived coolness is usually a regression to a relatively impoverished 2nd order mode of constructing reality – a sort of dissociation from the richness (and corresponding experiential intensity) of our rightfully larger and much more complex way of making sense of the world. A new order of mind, once accomplished, does not erase the previous orders, as they are embedded within it and might be fallen back into in times of stress. And there are plenty of opportunities for stress for someone operating at the 3rd order! Since our sense of self now is defined by relationship, and we have multiple relationships with conflicting demands (ex as a partner, as a parent, as a coworker, as a community member, etc), we might feel impossibly pushed and pulled in multiple directions at once. This is not just a matter of prioritising and better setting of boundaries: Since we are subject to relationship, there is nothing outside of relationships that might bound them. We have gained true intimacy, but at the price of a constellation of mutually exclusive emotional fusions. Our very sense of self is therefore frequently at risk of being torn apart.

Meditation

While the subject and object of each order of mind change and evolve (predictably), what all the orders have in common is that they construct the inner and outer world into subject and object at all. That is, they are succeedingly more and more complex ways of constructing meaning out of sensory experience in the eye of the beholder. (Finally we might put into context the trope about the distinction between “having” feelings as opposed to “being” your feelings. All those self-help books somehow fail to mention that this is not something that you become skilled at but, rather, the fundamental way in which your mind makes sense of experience.) However, while the mind is quite persistent in its effort to construct meaning, this mechanism is not equivalent to conscious awareness itself. The fact that the mode of construction changes so fundamentally and repeatedly over the course of a lifetime is a clue in this direction.

Aside from a theoretical understanding of this, it is also possible to experience this nonequality directly. One way of describing the practice of Opening Awareness meditation is simply, “include everything in experiential embodied awareness while relaxing meaning making.” To be clear, that is not a particularly actionable or useful instruction, but it captures some of the flavor of the practice (see here for an actual instruction). The fruition of such a practice is to experience the temporary cessation of meaning making – of the construction of subject and object – altogether. One might expect that nothing is left in that case but, amazingly, conscious, inclusive awareness remains bright, vibrant, clear.

Of course that experience is temporary, and eventualy the meaning-making mechanism of mind reconfigures itself anew and takes over the operation once again. One might wonder, however, if the new configuration is quite the same as the previous, or if we have given the mind an opportunity to find a slightly modified arrangement. Off the cushion, we could continue to encourage this: Not by trying to be cooler, or less affected, or to avoid upsetting others, but by aligning ourselves with embodied awareness: opening fully to emotion and sensation, without interpretation, in relational context, even when it’s excruciating (see here for an intro). And, perhaps just for lone moments here and there at first, to notice in that same experiential intensity, that aspect of experience that is wholly unrelated to the meaning and interpretations that we unconsciously construct on top of it. In so seeing, we may just glimpse a far grander context as well.

Beyond the looking glass

Piaget’s theory suggested that childhood development is not just the acquisition of new knowledge nor is it just becoming better skilled at self-restraint and cooperation, but rather, it is a succession of new ways of making sense of the world that operate at the root level of unelaborated perception. If this is truly the case, then a logical question arises: what if a given “adult mind” is not the climax of such a process, but only another step in its continuing evolution? One of Kegan’s central contributions was to see that Piaget’s theory of child cognitive development had a cohesive pattern to it, and to see that this pattern didn’t end at the stage of the relational mind, but could continue again and again through adulthood.

Kegan invites us to imagine development less like climbing a ladder of knowledge and skill and more like repeatedly stepping outside the frame through which we had previously been perceiving the world and ourselves. What was once the lens becomes an object of our care. The child who was once made up of impulse becomes able to have impulses. The adolescent who was once identical with their point of view becomes able to take on points of view. At each step, the individual’s universe becomes bigger and new subtleties reveal themselves. The world becomes richer and more nuanced, the people in it become further differentiated and multifaceted, and new and open possibilities for participation in this life — previously unseen — become illuminated.

Now suppose many of the difficulties we call defensiveness, sensitivity, reactivity, insecurity, inadequacy, overwhelm, are sometimes something other than they seem. Suppose they are signs that a person is being pressured by the demands of their social context to live from a place of meaning-making that they have not yet fully grown into. What then might happen if we treat these unwelcome experiences as not inherently wrong or problematic, but simply as evidence that the self is pressing against the limits of its present structure? What might become possible when even the reflected self becomes something that we can hold with care, rather than something we definitively are?

References

• Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads

• Philip M Lewis, The Discerning Heart

• Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self

• David Chapman, Natural misunderstandings of adult stage theory

Most of us have had many analogous experiences during our childhoods and have adjusted by putting in place safeguards against such indignities; patterns of thought, behaviour, and modulation of attention aimed at avoiding a re-occurrence of those feelings. In my case, I learned (for one thing) to be generally skeptical of whatever arises, lest I be caught with my guard down. Fear of embarrassment at being thought stupid has led to a sort of subtle and habitual attempt to contrive how I appear to others. For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought of myself as honest and transparent, but in recent years it has become hard not to notice the continuous stream of baseline effort that goes into to being seen in a particular way: that is, the automatic and sometimes unconscious effort to avoid being seen just as I am, and to avoid being uncomfortably touched by experience just as it is.

We each have old, well-worn patterns that were set in place early in our development. The patterns actually worked well for us, inasmuch as they allowed us to more-or-less function and get by in the context of our youths, but now that we are adults they serve mainly to perpetuate themselves. All the while, their costs might have become more apparent: These habits of interaction gobble energy that could be used elsewhere. They mask vast, open-ended experience, just as they monopolize attention with our fears and our fantasies. They contract and contort body and mind, all in the name of avoiding contact with embodied sensations that have been long since disowned. In the name of security, these patterns steal our aliveness, and deliver mostly staleness.

Perhaps we’ve already come to see this. In this case we may have developed new patterns that live on top of these older ones. Now, to add insult to injury, when we notice the old pattern, maybe we’re annoyed at ourselves for “not being more open.” Maybe we stop trying to seem sharp and in control, and insidiously start trying to act soft and flexible as an attempted corrective, all the while still keeping our distance from what is.

Commit to what is

We can’t relax the existential insecurity that fuels our spinning by applying any particular corrective action in real-time, as any such action will be a contrivance whose appropriateness will be more-or-less out of sync with the situation at hand, and will result in yet more patterns of reactive avoidance; albeit new and therefore less immediately recognizable ones. For example, if we are aware that we are avoiding experience by compulsively making jokes at uncomfortable moments, we might try to catch ourselves and not make jokes at those moments. This could actually be an interesting and useful experiment, but as a “solution” to the “problem” it is a dead end. Very soon we find that we are just avoiding that other experience, not to mention that it’s fun and appropriate and even skillful to make jokes sometimes.

We may also look for correctives in perspective, in the form discovered insights into the historical and psychological underpinnings of given compulsive thoughts or feelings. These may provide relative relief, but since the insecurity is fundamentally existential in nature, and not especially bound to any specific context, it will eventually emerge elsewhere, in new form. We might spend our entire lives uncovering new perspectives on more and more sublte historical patterns, like an unending game of whack-a-mole.

If just feeling relatively better is not sufficiently satisfactory, a different attitude is required: A commitment to experience, just as it is right now. This is a simple practice, there is nothing particularly complicated about it, but it may go against half a lifetime of momentum, so it can take some time to become familiar with and for the practice to gain its own life and express its own motion.1

Let your body lead

Triggering our compulsive patterns, before thoughts or ideas arise, are raw sensations in our bodies. These sensations usually come along with habitually applied labels (ex. “anxiety”) and/or interpretations (ex. “I’m worried it’s going to happen”), but before these elaborations, are just the raw sensations themselves. We jump from sensation, to implicit interpretation, to well worn reactive patterns of thought and action in a flash.

The sensations in our body may seem to mean what we habitually interpret them to mean, but since we immediately jump away from these sensations and straight into the stories and supposed meanings that revolve around them, we never really get a chance to find out if those sensations might have alternate possible meanings, or maybe even no fixed meanings at all. To give ourselves an opportunity to discover the actuality of any new moment, we must first commit to staying with our raw embodied sensations, without conceptual elaboration. Only in this way can we discover for ourselves whether they truly call for anything resembling one of the old patterns that has become attached to them, or if something new might be better.

Since escaping into conceptuality has been our default in the past, staying with raw sensations can be uncomfortable at first. So, while the practice is not complicated, it is not necessarily easy either. Nevertheless, with sufficient dedication to the body a shift may occur at some point. As we practice dedication to embodied sensation in real-time, throughout our day-to-day lives, we might notice two things happen in tandem (over the course of seconds, minutes, days, or years): As we continue to pay attention, the complexity and peak intensity of sensation continues to increase and change. At the same time, our tolerance to such experiential intensity continues to increase and we may find that our interpretations of said sensations become relaxed and more fluid. What we once might have called “extreme anxiety,” may simply feel like being alive and awake and may even reveal a surprising sufficiency.2

Let everything touch you

The practice is to notice, in real-time, where you automatically contract around uncomfortable sensations in your body and to spontaneously relax that contraction and open to fully experiencing these embodied feelings, without concept, on their own terms. (Note: For the purpose of this essay, “sensations in your body” include also all possibly diffuse, location-ambiguous and physicality-ambiguous sensations.) This may occur in the sting before an interpretation (ex. “embarrassment”, “frustration”, “impatience”, “anger”) arises. Or, if that has already happened, it may occur some time later in the elaboration (ex. “annoyance with myself that I got impatient just before”). It can be practised at any moment, but it is always applied to what is current, rather than winding back to try to feel what has already past (even if only an instant ago). Some examples:

Stay with the desire. Perhaps you are walking down the street and you see a beautiful person walking your way, about to walk past you. Maybe you would typically fantasize about them satisfying your desire. Or maybe you’re someone who has learned not to go there and you automatically put up a mental guard, or just don’t even look or make eye contact. Either of these strategies serve to avoid the presumed discomfort of the experience of the desire. Both are jumpings away from intimate experience with what is. Instead, open to the kernel of desire just as it appears. Allow desire. Stand open in its fire while you walk past. Let it burn as it lingers and let it smoulder until it leaves.

Relax around contraction. Perhaps you are having a conversion with a friend and they mention something about their lives that you might typically feel jealous of. Notice contraction in your body as it clamps itself about uncomfortable feelings. Underneath the jealousy is a deep longing for something you may never get, expressed in these constricted sensations. Right there, just where you are most vulnerable, open up completely. Relax to allow and feel those very sensitive embodied sensations. Physical relaxation (ex. relaxing some muscle tension) will frequently be part of this opening, but not always. Fundamentally, this is not an exercise in relaxing the body, but in exposing oneself to the elements of experience. Doing so may be uncomfortable, or may trigger weeping without obvious origin. Allow yourself to be touched and experience that touch without concept. Your friend is still there. So are you.

Let yourself be seen. Perhaps you are at a party, surrounded by smart and beautiful people, and you catch yourself trying to look cool, or to sound clever; to appear a certain way, or to not show something of your state. What are you protecting, and what do you gain by protecting it? What do you lose? Notice the room you’re in. Let the details catch your eye as they do. What do you hear? Notice the people around you: their clothes, their postures, their facial expressions; feel their energies. Find yourself in your body. Stay with the non-conceptual buzz that is ostensibly about your fear of alienation, but is more deeply rooted in your wish to connect, to belong, even to be esteemed. Feel your vulnerability and let open right there. Allow yourself to be seen just as you are. Discover what comes next.

Discover what comes next

One might hope that openness could make things easier; that feeling more now will somehow mean suffering less later. There is a way in which this is surely true, but not as first imagined. There’s an old fantasy for many who have walked a spiritual path; a belief that if one could see through self-centred delusion, it might smooth out the edges of experience, or quiet anxiety, or maybe transcend suffering entirely. But opening only promises intimacy; simply more contact with what is. More of the feelings you like, but maybe more of the feelings you don’t like too. The intense rawness of experience that once seemed like a problem may still be there, but without the story that it shouldn’t be. The field of experience widens, not because discomfort disappears, but because it is opened to as valid, just as pleasure and new satisfaction are opened to as well; a satisfaction unrelated to likes and dislikes.

Once we become more familiar with our own vulnerability and dedicated to its inclusion in our lived experience, our motivations may change. We may choose to do some activities that we would otherwise have avoided for fear of discomfort. This may lead to infinitely more opportunities to be vulnerable, exponentially propelling our intimacy with such experience. Conversely, we might realize that certain “good” activities we’ve done in the past served mainly to let us see ourselves in a particular light and were another sort of avoidance; we may no longer feel compelled to do them anymore. At some point we may discover that much of our motivation for most of what we choose (or avoid choosing) has had something to do with our avoidance of intimacy with experience as it is. How then to choose?

The practice of being vulnerable is just a preliminary practice. It’s just radical honesty. This honesty begins with allowing experience to be exactly as it is, without justification, explanation or correction. It means letting the world touch us as it finds us, and opening to that embodied experience without flinching away. When we stay with what’s plain and undeniable to our experience, the insecurity that once seemed to drive everything loses its footing. The metaphysical clench that sought safety through control is cut through by immediate, lived experience. What remains is not certainty, but a growing trust that we can stay, or we can go, and that either will be workable. From this place of allowing ourselves to be seen as we are, letting ourselves be moved by life as it find us, and with the flood of care, desire, and deep longing dancing through our senses, all that’s left is to discover what we do next.

Ever since I’ve been interested in such things I’ve regularly seen this and similar patterns play themselves out for me. It’s a subtle and easy mistake to make. I’ve even found myself getting high off of reading warnings about the trap itself. How can one wrap one’s head around a goal that cannot be personally attained, whilst its fringes continue to flaunt and tease themselves into one’s experience. The recognition can sometimes feel giddy: Kaleidoscopic viewing, inside and outside. All of a sudden, perhaps there’s a rush, and the dream self-elaborates: Without intending or realizing, one is now clinging to a chanced glimpse of what has already passed.

“Getting high” is not just hyperbole. My experience of getting high on various intoxicants matches my experience of the high of this variety of grandiose ideation in many key ways. One might posit, “well, getting high on drugs is artificial and bad for you, but if you’re feeling high due to something like meditation and contemplation, at least that’s much healthier.” I’m not so sure this is always right. For chemical intoxicants, at least there’s a clear cultural recognition of one’s faculties being impaired while under the influence. “Oh, that was embarrassing but, hey, I was drunk.” One can readily admit that one was momentarily delusional due to chemical impairment. Whereas, in life practice, one has an idea that they are doing (or at least wish to be doing) something good for themselves and even for others: Something to help see more clearly, not less. Then, if one has moments of seeing some tantalizing results, attaching to and identifying with the associated pattern of states, and then experiencing the inevitable eventual dissolution of such pattern, one might not so easily recognize that, “oh, I was just high on the Dharma.”

In some ways getting high on an idea is no different from many other forms of neurotic stuckness. A prolonged depressive state might also have its origin in an uncomfortable idea that is attached to, stretching its tentative validity well past its natural lifetime: distorting a temporary feeling and its associated beliefs into a seemingly timeless well of hopeless truth. Then again, depressive states usually possess so little energy that their dying embers can remain subtly glowing in near stillness for tortured eons. In contrast, being high on a lofty idea has the roaring energy of a brightly burning torch, and at least has the virtue that it will burn itself to completion soon enough. Reality stands at the ready to slap you into sobriety, no matter that you’re buck naked and everyone is watching.

What is that supernatural slap so effortlessly slapping away? What delusions sneak along with my natural high? The delusion that I might embody only my preferred ways of showing up in the world. That I have independent control: over myself, my feelings, my relationships, my environment. That it can all be explained; that there’s some absolute sense that can wrap around life like a bow; that I can have that wisdom. That feeling good is a sure sign of being good, and that it might hardly end. That my vitality and thriving have anything at all to do with my preferences. That something inside of me can be fundamentally validated by something outside of me. That inner is separable from outer. That care is separable from heartbreak. That any life can be lived substantially free of whatever disturbance.

That dreaded slap: Embarrassing, awkward, angry, jealous, resentful, fearful, hopeless… anxious. That slap is interesting. It’s intense. It’s not what you want. But empires will rise and crumble, loved ones will pass away, and babies will spring into being. The only thing one can count on is that something will fade and something will arise, and so it’s well worth lingering right there where the discomfort that reflects such change finds one standing. If there is vastness to be discovered, it must be in that slapping (and in the preceding highness for that matter) as much as it is in anything else. Ironically, perhaps the clinging that fuels the slap is itself a reaction to the unconscious recognition that the state of bliss will end sooner or later: a sort of preemptive protest against the foreshadowed anxiety.

What if the appearance of anxiety was no longer feared as a problem to be avoided, but experienced instead as a window, opening our bodies into the unbounded potential inherent in this new moment? What then would highness and lowness be like without clinging; if there was nothing to avoid; if all delusions were seen through? Or is the question itself just another misframing? Another wishful attempt at sidestepping uncertainty… Nevertheless cradled with wonder in the continuing expanse of awareness.

We don’t need any particular belief or theory in order to practice Opening Awareness meditation. We can just entertain the instructions, do the practice with unprejudiced rigour and diligence, and discover the result for ourselves. We can acknowledge that any theories that we have are, at best, only relatively true, and only with respect to their proper domain of application. We can commit to staying with the contingent nature of conceptual thought in general, and our ideas about what we think we know specifically. We can remain skeptical of conclusions, while we rest in open curiosity.

Theory

While we don’t need a theory in order to practice, it could be helpful. Trying on a theory might allow us to view our own experience from a different perspective, and perhaps discover something previously unseen. One of the traditional theories around Opening Awareness goes as follows: We are already essentially without experiential constraint, but we don’t quite recognize this because we are enmeshed with the three natural habits of mind, that is: We are either moving toward some things (ex. paying attention to, clinging), or else moving away from some things (ex. resisting, protesting, dismissing), or else blocking some things entirely (ex. active ignoring, dissociating from). We do this crudely at the physical level, somewhat more subtly at the conceptual level, and fundamentally (and typically unconsciously) at the sensual level. With these three subtle but active habitual manoeuvres, we dampen experience and sensation. If we simply relax those three habits together, we awaken sensation, precisely where it finds and awakens us.

Why do we blunt sensation in this way to begin with? Why do we distract ourselves from our actual condition by acting out our neuroses? Because we are instinctively afraid of the intensity of unfiltered sensation. We are afraid that we wouldn’t be able to handle it. We correctly intuit that we can’t control it, and so we contract around it. As infants dealing with the onslaught of raw sensation, and then as children and adolescents dealing with the imposition of form and feeling both inside and out, this was a sensible strategy for helping us meet the demands that reality was placing on our still young bodies and minds. As adults we no longer need to defend ourselves in that way. As we allow for a reconnection with natural experiential intensity, we can discover for ourselves, in any given moment, that we need no longer take shelter from the storm of experience that is bound up with full engagement in this life. We can discover that what we imagined we lacked in this world is already and always available.

Practice

The practice is deceptively simple: Find a comfortable position in which your body may abide for a preset amount of time, remain fully alert to all of experience, and let relax the three habits of mind.

The formal practice instruction is simply: Remain uninvolved.

To be comfortable and alert, the traditional posture has one sitting in a relaxed position (knees below hips) with spine self-supporting, but sitting on a chair or a stool, or even laying down, suits many seasoned practitioners just fine. The practice can be done with eyes opened or closed, but traditionally eyelids are let loose to hang naturally in an “almost closed” position, allowing in just a sliver of light to help provide activation without too much distraction. Then we simply sit, include anything and everything as it arises in experience, and remain uninvolved.

What are we to remain uninvolved with? Involvement may mean ignoring, engaging, or disengaging with respect to whatever forms or sensations arise in experience. By contrast, remaining uninvolved is: alert, open, keen, welcoming, aware, unbiased. There is no specific focus (paying attention to something specific is involvement), nor is anything outside of the scope of awareness (ignoring is involvement). All of experience and experiencing is simply permitted to abide as it does. Anything and everything that meets experience is automatically included. It’s worth dwelling on the expansive meaning of the word “sensation” in this context. For example: proprioceptive sensation, all manner of bodily sensation, visual sensation, auditory sensation, olfactory sensation, emotional sensation, thought-form sensation. Nothing is sought after, but everything is welcomed all the same, just as it presents itself in awareness. Do not look toward any sensation in particular, and do not flinch away from any either. Remain where you are, and allow whatever sensation to meet you as it does.

Effort & inclusivity

It would be incorrect to say that no effort should be expended in the practice of Opening Awareness meditation, but the required effort is subtle. That is, practising Opening Awareness demands a simply sufficient, minimal amount of effort of a very particular sort.

For example, awareness may find you having been lost in a daydream, and you may try to “regain your composure” or “open to some vast open space,” or whatever you feel that you should be doing. However, this is not the required effort. Instead, whatever state you find yourself in, you can apply the minimal effort by relaxing the triple actions of ignoring, paying attention to, or rejecting, and effectively abide wherever awareness finds you. Of course if you do recompose yourself, or shift mentally or physically (as you will repeatedly), this is not an impediment to practice, as you can simply abide and open to where you find yourself anew.

One of the defining features of Opening Awareness meditation is its embodied inclusivity. Indeed, putting subtle effort into actively looking for and/or including in awareness whatever was ignored could actually be an interesting “scaffolding” practice, and could be useful while exploring and experimenting with Opening Awareness, but it is not the practice of Opening Awareness itself. If awareness feels small, contracted or dulled somehow, then that sensation (a sort of mental proprioception) is included in awareness too and need not be nullified. (It’s true that the result of Opening Awareness practice can feel vast and uncontracted, but the practice is to remain uninvolved, and trying to expand awareness is involvement.)

Often, a wordless question, “what is this like right now?”, can point in the right direction. The answer to this question could include experiences of contraction or vastness, fuzziness or clarity, and the infinitude of possible configurations in which perception can play on awareness. Allow awareness to be touched by whatever and however it’s like in this very moment. No need to look further, though the answer in one moment may change in the next when a new sensation finds you: if you find yourself having been holding on to the previous configuration, that contraction (or its automatic release) may be included too.

Result

The result of Opening Awareness meditation practice is familiarity with the fruitional experience of spacious clarity, which is characterized by its lack of thought forms, its bright, alert, peaceful inclusiveness, and its relaxed, embodied, vibrant, sensual but undifferentiated enjoyability.

As we discover the reliability of the open potential lurking at the heart of experience, we may begin to more broadly recognize this potential as always present in the multitude of specific and differentiated forms that variously and momentarily imprint our awareness, just as they find us in our daily lives.

Precision

To be clear, “remain uninvolved,” is an instruction specific to the formal set-aside Opening Awareness meditation practice. It is not a generally applicable practice instruction outside of formal sessions. Outside of Opening Awareness practice sessions, life from without and life from within beg for attention, and we are naturally caring and engaged. Ironically, novel forms of involvement becomes more available as familiarity with uninvolvement deepens.

For, just as one might be ready to unconsciously and implicitly interpret some embodied sensation (ex. that one might label “anxiety”) as a sort of “existential dread,” and then furthermore find it paralyzing and problematic, one might easily have the exact same embodied sensation and perceive it instead as an intuition of the unconstrained openness of conscious experiencing, volition, and care. In this way, even a state that might usually evoke the reaction, “I don’t want that,” can nevertheless be greeted with care, a trust in workability, genuine appreciation, and may no longer seem paralyzing or even problematic.

It is for you to discover what the implications of practice are for life off of the cushion.

Support

You will likely need some support in your exploration, either from a teacher or from fellow practitioners. Evolving Ground is a community whose members are unified by their interest in practice and experimentation, while otherwise diversely differentiated in belief, motivation, orientation, gender, ethnicity, personality, care, and character. Come say hello.

Further vision

In its original context, Opening Awareness (“shi-ne”) meditation is the first of the four Dzogchen series-of-mind meditations (“Dzogchen semde”). With increasing familiarity of spacious clarity (“ne-pa”), we might venture to explore the second in this set-aside series of practices, Moving Awareness (“lhatong”), in which, starting from spacious clarity, we are instructed to open our eyes and welcome back thoughts, other forms, and involvement, to be experienced in a new context.

Resources

• Opening Awareness: The book

• Attitude: Radical Empiricism

• Theory: Presence of Awareness (Realization of Completeness)

• Practice: Full of feeling in any situation

• Result: Vividness

• Support: Evolving Ground

Setting: It’s 2007. I’m 30 years old, but I’ve only just begun to discover the life of the world, and the life of the mind. I’ve smoked a lot of pot in the past six years, trying to make up for my sober (but totally dissociated) adolescence. I’m in love. Erin just moved in. She’s a psychologist. I know nothing of psychology, but I did just read my first self-help book (Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway), and I am suddenly interested. I know nothing of meditation. Kegan Stage 3. I know only what pop consciousness has suggested to me about psychedelic drugs. I’m prepared to be transformed from my repressed self into a full-on tree-hugging hippie. Erin has agreed to be my trip-sitter.

Set: Of course there was plenty of anxiety already going into it: People with family histories of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia should steer clear. We know that, yes, for some predisposed people, psychedelic drugs can trigger and unleash latent psychosis. No family history, so I guess I’ll be safe? And then there’s the anxiety of anticipating experiencing something totally new and unpredictable that one can’t prepare for. Not to mention the anxiety over getting the dose right (which is prone to error, since psilocybin mushroom potency can vary drastically naturally, even from one part of the mushroom to another). And then you actually have to eat the things. I mean, I thought I liked mushrooms but, fuck me, that was a nasty and unpleasant way to start something that I thought was supposed to be fun.

The next thing that I remember is feeling like I had poisoned myself. Nauseous, on the sofa, awkwardly shifting this way and that, trying to find a way to be comfortable, when discomfort was clearly the central message being emitted from the core of my being – seemingly from the fabric of the universe itself. I clearly remember thinking, “why? why would I do this to myself? what the actual fuck was I thinking?” And then I remember when, still horribly uncomfortable, I started to notice how beautiful everything looked. The fibers of the fabric on the sofa. The wood grain on the floor. The textures. The light. The colors! Everything was sensuous and beautiful. Everything was new.

Erin must have put on Rufus Wainwright. I remember writhing around in blissful ecstasy, in a state of awe. Go or Go Ahead was playing on the hi-fi. The “do-do-do do-do-do-do” vocalizations were synesthetized with the sparkles of light all around the room, like twinkling stars in the morning sky. The bookshelves in the room started breathing: rows of books were like opening and closing accordions in rhyme to the music. The whole room was breathing. And I felt like I was breathing for the first time. There was such an abundance of fresh air. I wanted to cry of overwhelming relief. I remember looking at my hands and being hit by the dawn of new consciousness. “Holy shit, I’m an actual human animal.”

In the years that followed, I chased after that experience. Of course I was only interested in the positive feelings and far less into the discomfort. Much of my efforts went into attempting to find ways in which to maximize the former and eliminate the latter, mostly with predictably frustrating results. The same played out in the relationship with Erin, where I insisted only on connection and I threw tantrum after tantrum over our regular disconnects. It took a bunch of years to admit that that particular chase was a dead end, and a bunch more years just to begin to understand why.

The bliss and the ecstasy are not separate from the reintegration into the world of form and relationship. Reintegration is not separate from, and can only ever follow disintegration. In fact, though there is no way to contrive connection, for it is uncontrivable, we can cultivate the soil by accepting the disintegration, just as it comes. We can even will it. We can even see the pregnant beauty and perfection that is embedded in its formless nature. It is, in any case, the one thing that we can truly count on readily having access to in our daily lives, and we can either choose to resist it, or we can choose to embrace it: in our selves, in our relationships, and in all of our moment-to-moment encounters that make up our conscious experiencing. We can stand corrected. We can take what the world is giving us, and we can give some back too. And then… when it may come, we can also accept the momentary grace and splendour of the inevitable reintegration and reunification with our fellow human animals.

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Sometimes I turn to look for something to reassure me, to soothe me. Like that sump pump that I replaced a month ago and is working so well… Oooh that dry foundation. Tick that one off the list. I’ll bask in that: Turning away from the uncertainty of this moment and rekindling one long gone. Trading the anxious and energetic buzz of the present—of the only place in which vitality is possible, and indeed is identical with—for a clinging to a feeling that I was once, and might once again be, united for a moment with the object of my love.

Orpheus

Eurydice died. That most perfect of moments ended. Still, you think: if only you could get her back, it’d all be good. Bring a corpse back from the underworld? What could go wrong? So you charm and persuade us with your beautiful voice and your undeniably touching song. We’re convinced you are sincere and worthy of what you want to have. Take her! You can have her back! Just one condition: If you turn and look at her before you’ve reached the surface, you’ll have then lost her forever (and this time no backsies!).

Insecurity is ever lurking. It’s in the evolutionary makeup of humankind. Those people survived. Many people, still today, finding themselves in genuinely dangerous situations, survive only due to their continued anxiety-driven vigilance (plus a bunch of luck). But what of you, Orpheus, who beyond all reasonableness, got enough of what you asked for, and couldn’t trust in it: couldn’t help yourself but to check for sure, just a moment too soon, even knowing the consequences, and in that very moment lost it all? And what of the rest of your life? Will you now just repeatedly relive your self-inflicted trauma: letting your guard down only to again remember to check elsewhere for what you most desire, or else for what you most fear, rather than ever face the unknown head on?

Eurydice

Eurydice—the object of my care—oh how I wish to know you. Frankly I’d have been relieved to know that you are dead; better than to be uncertain of your aliveness. Hence the insecure and obsessive looking to check on your always changing status. I love you! I want you. But who are you? And what are you? Are you out there? Or are you in here? I call for you and you forsake me. I surrender for you, and you remake me. Inside and outside, life keeps on living. The bells keep ringing. I still want you. Who am I, if I am without you?

Meditation

I have had experiences of getting in my own way. This can come in the form of an unwanted self-consciousness: checking to look at myself in the midst of being and thereby tripping myself up. Grasping for something and missing all that’s immediately and freely on offer. In shi-ne meditation, anything that arises in awareness is included all the same: the whatever it is dynamic constellation of colour, sound, feeling, space-body awareness, awareness of thoughts, or even the awareness of tripping myself up; of contracting to try to find something, or else relaxing and letting oneself be entirely found. Without bias, it’s all captured and simultaneously released, moment after moment, on the boundless screen that is the fabric of awareness itself.

Checking to see if I’m secure—if I’m united with the object of my wishes—might sometimes turn up nothing conclusive, but it’s clear that any security that is built on the conditionality of our ceaselessly changing states of mind and circumstances, can only be of temporary relief. I’m caught surprised; my friend dies; our relationship changes; society rearranges. The whole universe is decomposing and recomposing everywhere and at all times. Real security can only be based on the steady recognition that nothing is stable. Everything is in motion, yourself included, and your only options are to try to dance with the bullets, or to be danced by them.

Is Euridice with me right now? Is she alive, or is she dead? In some ways she's a bit like Schrödinger's cat (and like my real cat who is beautiful just as Euridice and equally ambivalent about my love). Perhaps she's both very much alive, and long since dead, all at once. Is my love for her true? Is she herself true? Her aliveness in this moment is nebulous. In any case, turning to check for sure won't reveal a truth but will simply create a new one, just as the act of observing inevitably changes in some way what it observes. And when there’s no more use for checking, well then, it’s time to go.

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I think a lot of people have this image and with it a fear of feeling okay without reason, the way that intoxicants, or even just chance can, for a moment, sometimes provide. The fear is of the obvious: If we were okay, then what motivation would we have to continue in any particular way over another? How could we give a fuck if no thing could fuck with us?

Afraid that we’re heartless at our core, we find insidious and stealthy ways to keep ourselves miserable, so that we don’t have to face seeing ourselves in what we fear to be our most basic colours. In this way, we can at least care about the things that are making us miserable. In this way, we can feel like decent and dignified people, even if also frustrated and unhappy ones.

The image of the hippie wasteland is a confusion. We see the rotting hope and we believe that this is the result of unconditional acceptance, but it was actually born of rejection: of a drawing a hard line between us and them; of a blotting out of cares that were too damn upsetting to admit to. If we were truly okay in spite of the reasons, then we would come face-to-face with these cares. It is only by finding ways to claim that we’re not okay—that we need to protect ourselves—that we can ever justify hiding ourselves from those things that we care most about.

If a person were truly okay unrelated to reason, then everything would be back on the table. We could no longer presume to know each other at all. Because it’s not that nothing could fuck with us then: It’s that anything and everything could touch us; could be welcome to mess with us. For pain is just one truth of the game, and this life is an open curtain.

There are those who instinctively shit on the parade of anyone who presents as okay. They too fear apathy. Perhaps these two types of creatures are, together, but one. For what would it even mean to be okay if there were no shit storms to be okay with. And what would giving a fuck have to do with itself all day, if not for lending a caring hand.

As we entertain the possibility that we are somehow okay, though it defies any sensible reason; as the struggles in the world keep finding our focus; as the heart relaxes open, grows softer and continues to absorb whatever it encounters… Finally, together, we might put to rest the old lie.

No fear of the fire.
No bandaids, white lies.
Feel it inside and outside.
Know and own what is mine.

What’s alive? What is living?!
Let it live till it dies.
Which here fucks are worth giving?
Give them all! Pay full price!

There is pain: Don’t enjoy it?
Lean to swallow with pride.
It’s this moment or nothing.
It’s for us to decide.

Some day soon just won’t cut it.
Here I stand now aboard.
First okay beyond reason.
Next get ready my sword.

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As far as I can remember, negative affect was never really admitted to while growing up. The older of my two sisters was born with a psychiatric disability. My mother was all perky energy and smiles. She still is. Without knowing it, I absorbed the truth of basic okayness unrelated to conditions from her. Still, what of her pain? What of the dumb luck of the draw? What of the comfort of some and the agony of others? What about the holocaust? What about the disappointed look on my partner’s face? What about the real hurt I’ve caused? What about feeling sad, or angry, or even just annoyed for no justifiable reason? I don’t remember anyone ever acknowledging those types of feelings in our house. Ours was a modest household, but I felt lucky to be born at such a time in the history of humankind, and to be healthy; to be born into such relative comfort. I didn’t feel bad but, then again, I didn’t feel very much of anything.

So as an adult, for example, when I find myself hot, angry, having a real fight with my partner, my habit is to understand implicitly, without even thinking it, that something is very wrong with me, my relationship, my life, perhaps even the universe itself. “It shouldn’t be like this.” It’s the worst thing: it’s the feeling of the sustained annihilation of my image of reality as I think it should be; the dreaded nightmare that I’ve worked so hard to avoid acknowledging. “She must be a monster for bringing me here.” Panicking, I might spew some pointed vitriol, certain that I’ll kill the whole context dead on the spot and secure my escape from this bad trip. To my horror, where there was one monster, now there are two. Now my anger gets directed at myself as well. If I pause here I can feel it coming. The pull. Some other old pattern could have triggered it, but this time it was this one. It’s happening again.

The process of artificially maintaining and intensifying
emotional pain with thought is gyroscopic.
If we keep a cycle of thought constantly spinning,
we generate a charge that actively prevents the dissipation
of pain. But without conceptualisation,
emotional pain becomes pure sensation and is
released to dance in the vastness of the open dimension of
experience. Without the strait-jacket of concept, pain ceases to
be pain and becomes a free and ecstatic energy.

From Spectrum of Ecstasy1

I spent my childhood avoiding feeling anger, sadness, and other disturbing emotions. These feelings never had much of a chance to express themselves in the light of conscious awareness and are now queerly formed. Invented to facilitate their subjugation, the resulting patterns and interpretations are compelling, as they have a lifetime of inertia behind them. Pain will always be a potential because unwanted news surely is right around the corner. The ancient vortex will get triggered again and perhaps gyre anew the spinning in circles of emotions and ideas, feeding each other with an erotic conviction that captivates my identity.

Let go of interpretation and embrace the dynamic experience of this embodied feeling without concept as valid and complete on its own terms.

The shame around feeling broken when depressed has been extreme for me. It’s self-perpetuating: I felt shame for disappointing myself, and then because I couldn’t “will myself” out of that state, recursively fuelling the story of my fundamental brokenness. I still feel all of this from time to time — the pull is still there — but the habitual interpretations have gradually become less sticky. There is real pain in this world, but there is also no need for superfluous pain, and there is plenty of room for kindness, joy, even ecstasy.

If you’re a human and you struggle with this stuff, you are not alone: Send me a message. Let’s chat.

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Of course the 10 year old me didn’t cringe. Mostly I hadn’t understood what I was watching at all, but I was in awe that someone could be naked before others. I don’t just mean without clothes. Even back then I recognized that he was absolutely dedicated to… something that took precedence over concerns of appearance. Was it authenticity? And why do I cringe now? Is it his otherness, or do I recognize something in him that I can’t tolerate being aware of in myself? Is it his humanity, when I demand to see a god? If I choose to dedicate myself to truth and transparency, how far might I go? If I can’t even bear to look at someone I claim to admire, how can I hope to look at myself? And how can I discover who I am – and what I’m capable of – unless I allow myself to follow my nose whilst simultaneously consuming my own wacky reflection, as Leonard seemed to be demonstrating.

Though dedicated to authenticity, Leonard sprinkles some clues throughout the film that all is not as it appears. He questions his own ability to actually be transparent in the context of a watching camera. The act of intentional transparency itself quickly begins to look like a ridiculous pretence, and he acknowledges this. He doesn’t want to pretend, but he admits that this is exactly what’s happening.

I think the same thing that attracted me to young Leonard is also what resulted in my cringe reaction. It was his unabashed earnestness. It was the way he took himself so seriously. Growing up engulfed by the songs of his 1967 debut album, I too took him seriously. Suzanne had me mesmerized. I had the sense that, one day, I would understand this song, and then I would finally understand life. (It’s taking longer than anticipated. While my children were still young enough, I would sing Suzanne to them at bedtime. It still seemed new, and I would regularly imagine new connections to my then current experience.)

Leonard was also trying hard to understand. He tried many things. He tried Kabalah, and Jesus, Buddhism and the I Ching, psychoanalysis and Scientology, LSD and Prozac, indulgence and renunciation, to name but a few . Leonard was in spiritual pain. He sounds desperate and as if on the brink of giving up altogether on his 1971 album where he sings that most exquisite expression of raging nihilism, Diamonds In The Mine. That song (along with the later Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On) pairs too well with the 1972 footage2 of Leonard in Berlin when he leaves the stage, goes off into the crowd and finds himself writhing around on the ground with a young woman he just met. The shot from the documentary leaves to the imagination what actually happened, but later he utters to the filmmaker, “I disgraced myself, I have.”3

Perhaps Leonard was conflating authenticity with self-indulgence. It’s a common confusion. Still, he is intent on being exactly where he is and refuses to knowingly pretend. In his first concert in Israel, in 1972, he has to walk off the stage in tears after telling the audience:

Now look, if it doesn’t get any better, we’ll just end the concert and I’ll refund your money, because I really feel that we’re cheating you tonight. You know, some nights, one is raised off the ground, and some nights, you just can’t get off the ground. And there’s no point in lying about it. And tonight, we just haven’t been getting off the ground. It says in the Kabbalah… that if you can’t get off the ground, you should stay on the ground. No, it says in the Kabbalah that unless Adam and Eve face each other, God does not sit on his throne. And somehow, the male and female part of me refuse to encounter one another tonight, and God does not sit on his throne. And this is a terrible thing to happen in Jerusalem.

Backstage, he and his band end up dropping acid before getting back on their feet and killing for the rest of the night.4

Leonard struggled with ups and downs5; from visions of a higher purpose, to a chilly bleakness that hit me in 1992’s The Future. (The Future was one of two album purchases that my 15 year old self made that year. The other was Tori Amos’s Little Earthquakes. Three years later she did a great version of Famous Blue Raincoat). However, at some point his view of the continuing emotional and spiritual tug-of-war seems to have become totally clarified. Listen:

O Crown of Light, O Darkened One,
I never thought we’d meet.
You kiss my lips, and then it’s done:
I’m back on Boogie Street.

…

And O my love, I still recall
The pleasures that we knew;
The rivers and the waterfall,
Wherein I bathed with you.

Bewildered by your beauty there,
I’d kneel to dry your feet.
By such instructions you prepare
A man for Boogie Street.

Excerpt from Boogie Street (2001)

And what is Boogie street? Leonard mostly tells us what it’s not. It’s not the depression of oblivion, but neither is it the delirious high of some glimpsed eternal meaning. When he says, “I'm wanted at the traffic-jam; They're saving me a seat,” we understand that Boogie street is there whether or not he’s cognizant of it. Boogie street, the ground to a halt traffic-jam, is the most ordinary of mundanities: a forgettable in-between space — between moments and out of time — from which we habitually flee as soon as practical. Ever-pregnant, it is the source from which all fleeting kisses simply spring forth and then finally return to. In this way of seeing, everything in our life that appears as meaningful, or else meaningless is, all the same, something of ritual: appearances become self-secret symbols, serving only as a gateway into direct and immediate experience of the here and now, without providing support for any fixed certainties of any one thing or another.

Leonard battled with depression throughout most of his life, but 2012’s album Old Ideas (older than Leonard6) finds him, at least at moments, seemingly happy and downright amused by himself. Listen to Going Home. He calls himself a “lazy bastard living in a suit”, but what comes through his voice is the gentleness and joy at the declaration. In addition, Leonard is admitting that there is an eccentricity that is driving him now:

He wants to write a love song
An anthem of forgiving
A manual for living
with defeat

A cry above the suffering
A sacrifice recovering
But that isn’t what I need him
to complete

I want to make him certain
That he doesn’t have a burden
That he doesn’t need a vision
That he only has permission
To do my instant bidding
Which is to say what I have told him
To repeat

Except from Going Home (2012)

For years Leonard has written poetry as his way of coping with depression7. Many artists live here, and many even believe that their suffering is part and parcel of the creative act. In this way a cycle of self-indulgence and self-immolation fuels the confusion that the work pretends to finally clarify, but instead simply restarts. Perhaps the pain and the writing were the most consistent elements that followed Leonard throughout his years. Here though, he turns the whole enterprise on its head. He says that he won’t write at all, unless he knows for certain that he’s fundamentally ok beforehand. He won’t write until he knows for sure that there is nothing that needs to be done in order to heal himself; that there is, in fact, nothing in need of healing.

I think about my own motivations in writing this essay. I’m not a writer, even as I pretend to play one on the Internet, but I do enjoy writing. Still, I recognize: Beneath the joy of creative expression there lurks the desire to prove something: no matter if to myself or to others. Will this act serve somehow as an attempt to prove my self-worth? For, if yes, then I should understand clearly: Such validation is temporary at best. Inasmuch as it validates anything whatsoever, it won’t sustain for more than a bit, and then I’ll be on to the next fix. In this way the act of creation will actually reinforce the semi-conscious belief that I will not be whole until some imagined future fruition… again and again. Perhaps making art or being productive or gaining insight into the historical and psychological basis for one’s current patterns is a healthier way of coping with existential angst than, say, taking recreational drugs, scrolling one’s social media feed, or fantasizing about a possible purchase. Nevertheless, in some ways they all share a common deficiency. Leonard is no longer interested in that kind of contingent relief from the pain of existence. Instead he homes in on a freedom that is always, and only ever available as the groundless experience of right here and right now, regardless of happiness, sadness, personal preference, clarity, or confusion. That type of freedom can’t be validated; nor can it be invalidated.

Though there is a logic to his thinking, ultimately Leonard admits that reason is secondary in imposing on himself the prerequisite of “no burden.” He sees his choice as primarily aesthetic, and makes no appeal to artistic integrity, morality, philosophy, religion, belief or anything of the like. Listen as he argues with himself about whether or not he should continue to write the poem he’s in the midst of composing, or perhaps whether or not he should even continue to write poetry at all:

You want to live where the suffering is
I want to get out of town
C’mon baby give me a kiss
Stop writing everything down

Both of us say there are laws to obey
But frankly I don’t like your tone
You want to change the way I make love
I want to leave it alone

Except from Different Sides (2012)

In 2014’s Slow, Leonard declares, “slow is in my blood.” I too have “always liked it slow,“ which is perhaps one of the reasons that Leonard’s aesthetic grabbed me from an early age. What I can’t much relate to though, is the steady diligence he applies to his craft. Leonard famously spent five years writing Hallelujah, composing more than 100 draft verses8 before finally calling it good enough. This is my first essay that’s taking me more than one sitting to complete, and after a handful of one-night stands, I’m ready to explode. Aside from having to endure the anxious, twisting experience of impatient desire, I’m also forced to re-read my own writing repeatedly. That shit is cringe-worthy! Why this feeling again!? Maybe it’s seeing myself pretending or even just trying. Maybe it’s the same cringe that I experience when watching young Leonard. Then again, maybe it’s a drop straight to Boogie street.

It’s not as though Leonard claims to be unaffected by the opinions of others (or himself). Listen to Almost like the blues:

I have to die a little
Between each murderous thought
And when I'm finished thinking
I have to die a lot
There's torture and there's killing
And there's all my bad reviews
The war, the children missing
Lord, it's almost like the blues

So I let my heart get frozen
To keep away the rot
My father said I'm chosen
My mother said I'm not
I listened to their story
Of the Gypsies and the Jews
It was good, it wasn't boring
It was almost like the blues

Except from Almost like the blues (2014)

Filing his experience of bad reviews into the same folder that houses missing children and nazi genocide, we discover Leonard viewing history and psychology, the world outside and the world inside, as but one. He hasn’t overcome negative affect: he seems as plagued as ever. However, he now sees it all together, noticing a peculiar type of beauty to the tragedy that is inextricably bound with living in the world. Leonard sees that his historic reaction to such experience of pain was to “let my heart get frozen;” he says, “I was staring at my shoes.” Our reflexive attempts at self-protection typically take the form of either looking away, or else acting out our anger, frustration, whatever. Finally though, the “invitation” to an alternative to these habitual modes presents itself, “and it's almost like salvation; it's almost like the blues.”

You Want It Darker, released 17 days before9 Cohen's death in 2016, finds Leonard looking back, as he looks around, finding the division between himself and everything else blurred beyond recognition. Listen to Traveling Light:

I'm traveling light, it's au revoir
My once so bright, my fallen star
I'm running late, they'll close the bar
I used to play one mean guitar
I guess I'm just somebody who
Has given up on the me and you
I'm not alone, I've met a few
Traveling light, like we used to do

Except from Traveling Light (2016)

In his later years, Leonard would sometimes repeat the words of his Zen teacher who told him, “You are not a Jew, I am not a Buddhist.”10 Eventually he seems to let go of any conception of fixed identity whatever, and laments past constrictive viewing, as when he says, “I'm so sorry for that ghost I made you be” in Treaty. If there were ever any words in Leonard’s writing that were directed at anyone other than himself, those days are long gone. As he begs in Leaving the Table, “You don't need to surrender; I'm not taking aim.”

At the end of the 1964 documentary, we watch Leonard view a screening of himself with the filmmakers:

Leonard [watching himself in bed]: It’s a very privileged thing to be able to see yourself sleeping…. Of course the fraud is that I’m not really sleeping.

Filmmaker: It’s a very privileged thing to see yourself pretending to sleep.

Leonard: Yes… that’s a privilege of a higher and more esoteric order. Because there are some people who are very interested to know how they look when they’re pretending…

I think I had a whole misconception about what style of man I was. And I think the whole thing is changing now.

Filmmaker: You mean just looking at this movie?

Leonard: Yea.

Filmmaker: That may affect your whole life.

Leonard: I hope it affects my whole life.

Leonard began his journey with hopes of overcoming his pain; of transcending himself. As a child, I found in him a symbol for all that I imagined I was not; I wondered wordlessly at his otherness. Today I wonder wordlessly at my own otherness, which I continue discovering as I re-read my own thoughts; as I begin to watch myself alternating between pretending and not pretending.

Perhaps we can, or perhaps we can’t overcome some of our historic limitations, but as a continuing goal it risks dangling the carrot of actualization forever out of reach. Maybe all the usual preferences, habits, dissonance and cringe factors will still be there in the end anyway. Maybe everything will remain the same. Then again, maybe something will be different. In any case, we can’t help but continue our journey in every waking moment, and “even though the news is bad,” we might occasionally and inexplicably find ourselves effortlessly falling forward with clarity, awareness, and compassion; without any ground to break our natural momentum. With only the subtlest possible of attitude adjustments, we might recognize the self-aggression and folly in the hope to escape our very personal human condition, but nevertheless begin to consider the possibility that even that kernel of fantastical desire is but another instant portal back to Boogie street.

So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear.

Though all the maps of blood and flesh
Are posted on the door,
There’s no one who has told us yet
What Boogie Street is for.

Soundtrack

1. Suzanne (yt)

2. Diamonds In The Mine (yt)

3. Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On (yt)

4. Boogie Street (yt)

5. Going Home (yt)

6. Different Sides (yt)

7. Slow (yt)

8. Almost like the blues (yt)

9. Traveling Light (yt)

10. Treaty (yt)

11. Leaving the Table (yt)

Footnotes

I admit that I’m frightened of my very own family. Sometimes I find myself in tiptoe around them; it’s true. I want the people I love most to be happy! I want them to have positive experiences! I want the same for myself too! This all seems frankly impossible to me at many moments, but the kicker is that my seeming need for those around me to be happy doesn’t actually lead to happy people around me. Quite the opposite! I’m regularly surrounded by a miserable bunch. It makes it hard to not jump to the conclusion that I should leave them the fuck alone and stop treating them as if they are defective people in need of my continuous attention, lest they wither of their own undoing. Indeed, in as much as this is possibly true, I have helped build it with them. Now I want out; to admit defeat. To just feel the unhappiness, the frustration, the annoyance, the boredom, the anger, all grabbing at me with fingers everywhere… And to stay still there. Here I am dear: The once location of your rightful acceptance, sense of agency, sense of competence, sense of ableness. You got deprived, and I kept my pride, and now we’re stuck on that ride.

So this is how, it seems, I bring upon, precisely what I am most attempting to avoid bringing into existence. I give birth to exactly those things that I wish didn’t exist. Half the human being: those putrid parts of me that I have consistently unseen. Now brought to life in these walking talking things! And so long as I consider that they can’t get by without my light, so they will show, in their way, that they can survive just fine without me.

Without meaning to, I seem to think of my kids as pretty helpless beings. And I tolerate to no end, and barely question, their seeming ineptitude at the most basic of means. But clearly this is pure spiritual bypassing. I’m doing nobody any favours by “not noticing” what I can’t ever deny. You don’t need to feel guilty: If there’s guilty, I guess it’s the adult’s supply. Then again, that’s the same old broken perspective: That I’m enlightened, and you guys are just fry. Now I see how I’ve taken from you, precisely by giving to you waaay too much of my blind-spotted time. Now I’ll love you beside you. Now I’ll let you just be. You’ll be just fine.

I have made a mistake here, and I’ve no doubt I will mistake again. But never again without some illumination. Never again without admitting what’s plain: That I am no one else's way to freedom. That light comes out only from within. I can’t lead you to where I’m heading. But I’ll love you while bearing together with it. I’ll love you for totally no real reason. I wish you were happy! The desire is clinging. I want to make it better. But finally I think I’ve “helped” quite enough already, and perhaps I should take my own advice and worry about me.

It doesn’t mean that I’ll stop caring: If you ask, I’ll give you whatever I’ve got inside. It just means that I admit that I haven’t yet been all that helpful. That the evidence seems to point to my help, in fact, to me being your biggest hurdle. You are already fully intact, as am I. You don’t really need me. There’s actually no real problem. But if I try to convince you of that, then I’ll have succeed only in recreating the usual display of distorted projections; distractions to keep us stuck in time. Instead I think I should just be quiet. Or, at least, laugh like a lunatic at my own stupid antics. Or not share this lyric. Or share it and live with backlash of yet more projection.

I will always adore you and would happily give my life to save yours. But it seems that this attitude does both of us a disservice. Instead, how about I actually live my life, and you can go ahead and live yours. Maybe, in some years, our gazes will meet and we’ll see that we’re separate people. But maybe, some years later, we’ll gaze again and think we’re still symbians all the same. In any case, I obviously have no way of knowing, and janky-at-best control. What I’ve seen with my own two eyes, I might as well just withhold. One day you’ll see something too. Perhaps you already do! If you want to take me for a ride, that’s cool: For one moment, I might see it all just like you.

What I can’t do is tell you how to do you. I can just about manage to know for myself what to do. Discipline works, but doing whatever the fuck works too! Finally, I can’t even say what this very moment means, or if this one’s meaningless, but regardless, we’re just passing through. Open up your eyes, and open up your nostrils too. Smell and feel what’s outside is inside you. Even projections are real (projections) too. The big mistakes appear full view. Then there’s the ever present fear. Happiness is not so clear. But beautiful is this night still.

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The dawning of my recognition of the distinction between this and that, began and ended in torrents of in and out; of vacillation between dead certainty and aimless drifting lost in perplexity. This was me trying. This was me caring. This was me attempting to join in with the other humans. This was my first admission of the principle of difference. Each ecstatic union of the flesh and spirit would be inevitably answered with a cringing, self-reproaching child. Half the time was spent in dazzled wonder. The other half was spent in the foetal position, waiting for it all to end.

There was a repeated hope to transcend myself. I tried to reinvent myself: New friends, new spirit, new me. It didn't work out well. Hurt friends, hurt spirit, hurt me. I thought, how else could one care for themselves, and why is this all so hard, and why do I feel totally alone with all of this, and what the fuck is wrong with me, etc. And so, unable to unsee what I had seen, there was more of the same trying, leading to more of the same sadness, anger and confusion. I would wake up in the morning praying for an afterglow and bracing for a hangover.

All the while, the countryside beckoned, and many times I’ve wondered if I was just fooling myself: Why bother with all of this? Look at what it gets you. Trouble begets trouble. Simple begets satisfied. Half of me knows it to be true, but half of me is still curious, and none of me is dead yet.

For many years I kept alive a story of how I imprisoned myself. “I knew that simple was beautiful, and I did it anyway.” This was my self-talk. This was the obvious explanation for why I suffered so. I was guilty and I was reaping just what I sowed. There’s some truth to this, but no compassion and only fractional understanding. In fact, I did it to myself consciously, and as my way of taking honest care of myself at the time. The simplicity that I crave now, I was then desperate to extricate myself from. I was dying and it was a last-ditch effort at being born. It was the best I could do at the time.

Of course no one ever knows for sure what will come from this or that, and yet we’re still irrevocably making choices to take care of ourselves and others all the time. How can we know anything new if we don’t allow ourselves the visibly awkward groping to find out? And how can we allow the required total exposure, day after day, moment after moment: How can we ever even tolerate the sensitivity and rawness of allowing ourselves to be totally vulnerable, unless with an attitude of earnest and unconditional kindness and gentleness towards ourselves? Even our worst mistakes were our best attempts at care. Perhaps we need to admit that this pain we feel is not proof of some sort of mistake, but simple evidence that we are alive and that we care.

In all, but a single principle reigns
Yet here, where I live, it divides
Though lone is the vision of joy and of pain
It seems to be two in my eyes

Let the unending light of equality shine
On the beauty of differing ways
On the intricate nuance of body and mind
As the love seen in action each day

For as long as the one might appear to be two
Know that failures are dreams, not mistakes
For the hopes of a future I long to see through
As I find myself here, wide awake

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What is this putrid feeling anyway? I seem to have orchestrated a life where the bulk of my time finds me without that particular disturbance. Then again, the bulk of my time is also solitary, and I crave more connection in my life. More connection increases the likelihood of experiencing said awkward discomfort. Therefore, if I actually desire to relax the loneliness of my existence and mingle a bit with the other humans, perhaps I have no choice but to explore the full flavour of this nauseatingly perfumed corridor of experience.

I want to imagine that if I truly know this feeling, then it will dissipate. In one sense that is true of course, as it is in the nature of feelings to arise, crescendo and dissipate. Still, if history is my guide, I won’t achieve overcoming or transcending this feeling. This unwanted discomfort will arise again and again when the historically conditioned constellation of context and character collide within me and effervesce as the felt texture of now. If I must be awake right now, then it has to include this feeling too as valid; vital. Furthermore, if this feeling is coming in opposition to those originating in solitary, habitual, dissociated routine, then perhaps said awkward discomfort is none other than the feeling of non-routine. Of open-endedness. Of possibility.

What might it mean to live a life in which I’m no longer compelled to escape from this, or indeed any feeling. If I might linger there and bask in its dynamic texture; in every nauseating nuance. For my preferences to momentarily appear as twinklings in the clear night sky. Some people enjoy roller coasters. It’s the exhilaration. It’s the intensity. It’s the feeling of a world that is almost perfectly outside of my control, reaching right inside and touching me exactly where I’m most sensitive, but also where I am perfectly still. Is this just the feeling of being alive? What might it be like to stay with this feeling and just keep on living. Keep on doing my work. Keep on doing my chores. Keep on kissing my partner. Keep on kissing my children. Keep on helping me brothers. Keep on helping me sisters. Yes. This feeling too.

After all, what is happening right now is the only thing that must possibly be happening right now!

Let the living vortex of chaos and consequence fling me precisely where it is going to fling me!

There is no final answer! Only ceaseless questions that are forever ripping open my heart!

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When I grew older–and when I frequently bit off more than I could chew–I figured I had to push. I still didn’t want to. It embarrassed me. Here and there, I push and I say I’m sorry. Here and there the push lands me new comfort or enjoyment or helps somebody or opens up new possibilities. Here and there the push vibrates my body and mind in a thudding elastic rebound and triggers my old fears and frustrations.

I want to pretend that the problem with pushing is that it inconveniences others. Why should my drive interrupt your life? I’m embarrassed to expose my commonly human potential for self-centeredness. This is just a cover though. It is my dependence (and our interdependence) that is exposed. The biggest problem with pushing is that it shows that I care, and exposing my cares makes me feel quite vulnerable. If you all know that I care about something, my position has been compromised. You can hurt me with ease.

So all these years, where I’ve been too polite to push, have I just been hiding myself for fear of being seen? Has shame been defending before panic of the possibility of complete exposure? What would happen if I was exposed? What would happen if you knew what I cared about deeply? What would happen if I had no way of defending myself? I would like to make a fumbling excuse, and get back to things, not even finish this essay, but instead I stay right here. Imagine falling. No parachute, but the ground is nowhere in sight. What exactly am I afraid of? Is it the infinite and perfectly complete feeling-tone of being alive in this very moment?

So now, when I witness the display of my clunky attempts at displaying my care, I find myself wishing that I was a bit more practised at this engagement stuff. And while wishing won’t make it so, practising will. And so, I remind myself:

If fear is the reason
Then right now let it seep in
Respire the season
Awake what’s been sleepin’

If panic’s the stinger,
Dig in and let linger
As it slips from your fingers
Taste it drip in your singer.

And if shame is inside you,
Just now, get on the ride too.
Let earnestness find you
Stay here and be fine too.

Perhaps with enough practice I can back off the pushing a bit more gracefully. With no more reason for self-defence, but just because of some basic intelligence, I might choose not to push anyway. After all, I don’t always enjoy pushing. I don’t feel obsessively compelled to. I don’t think it’s usually necessary. But when it’s called for… Just one little push will sometimes let the whole apparatus fall right over the cliff.

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Of course there’s always the option of dissociation. This one has been my dearest companion since I was so very young. I walk my way in and out of eddy-like-dreams of the local topography, forgetting the parent dream, fantasizing the baby dream, always wondering, sometimes barely there at all. Here denial and active ignorance lead the way. Thus, peace can be found in these dreams. However, since active ignorance can never be perfectly ignorant in every moment, the fear of awareness looms. Moments of dread abound and dominate in the form of reactive and avoidant behaviour and the frustration that naturally accompanies one who retrospectively rationalizes their own inscrutability.

So it might have been for me in my horrible prisoner rags. In that crowd, dissociation surely would have seemed like a healthy coping mechanism. In the here and now, with privilege and comfort and only the common suffering of a bourgeois lifestyle, along with the disappointment that accompanies all manner of arbitrary expectations, dissociation has been less practical, but nevertheless has been liberally slathered in application without discrimination. Dreams of happiness without condition, sprinkled with nightmares of active ignorance in bloody shattered fragments. Life has been perplexing beyond nature’s mandate.

And always this confused dichotomy: Am I a rock and an island? Or, am I a leaf in the wind? Sometimes feeling like one, sometimes just like the other. The problem today is that if I posit that I am a rock, I am, out of habit, likely to be lost in dissociation. If I posit that I am a leaf in the wind, I am, out of habit, likely to be lost in the paralysing dread of the unfamiliar. This flip-flopping of incomplete understanding, and the corresponding experiences of elation, or pain, or confusion, always obscures another possibility: I am a rock. I am a leaf. Embodied conscious awareness is to be both of these at once.

It matters that I’m not in Nazi Germany. It matters that I strive for justice and basic dignity for all. However, I also have the capacity to be ok right here, right now, no matter the circumstances. I lose this precisely when I dream that my conditions are irrelevant and fall into dissociative dreams with rude awakenings; or when I dream that my conditions are the only thing that matters, and fall into self-perpetuating states of fear, anger, resentment, and imagined helplessness.

Living your life as a rock and a leaf simultaneously is not intuitive. You say, “I am both a rock and a leaf,” and you blink, and you find yourself as a rock-beget-leaf in a state of anger, shame, fear and frustration. You try again. You think, “I am both a rock and a leaf,” and you blink, and you find yourself enjoying the ninja-like ease of being a leaf surfing the wind; so much so that you hallucinate that, in fact, you must actually be a rock of a super special sort. That won’t last either. Regularly, repeatedly, you're going to have to experience this stuff, so just dig in; go ahead and experience it. Experience the high, experience the low, experience the nausea. Get down and dirty with it.

You’ve already had glimpses of life without fear. You’ve fallen in. You’ve fallen out. What you don’t know is how one might sustain it. Clearly not by trying too hard, and clearly not by trying insufficiently. You say, “I am both a rock and a leaf,” and you fall flat on your face. You try again. You say, “I am both a rock and a leaf,” and you soar to an ecstatic stupor. You try again. You say, “I am both a rock and a leaf,” and, inexplicably, you are the rolling river of experience itself.

A piano can transport your feelings into musical notes that can be heard and felt by other people, allowing them to share in some of your feelings, and to experience new feelings of their own.

Similarly, a camera can transmit your unique perspective to other people. When your eyes enjoy the colours and light and shadows that are playing together in front of you, you have found your unique perspective for that moment. If you share a photo, you give another person a chance to enjoy something that they might never have enjoyed otherwise.

What do my eyes enjoy? What is my unique perspective?

All artists will ask themselves this question, perhaps many times throughout their lives. It’s a fantastic question. It’s also a silly question. If you are looking at something that disgusts you, then that is what your eyes are enjoying. If you are looking at a beautiful tree, then that is what your eyes are enjoying. If you see other eyes looking back at you, that is a special type of enjoyment for your eyes. If you are looking at your feet because you feel you don’t want to look around you, then that is what your eyes are enjoying. If you are squeezing your eyelids shut as hard as you can – maybe out of anger, or sadness, or frustration – so that you see black, and stars, then that is what your eyes are enjoying. All of these could make perfect photos, though the last one is the hardest to capture (transmit via a photo).

At first you might look all around you for the most beautiful sight. This is great. Everybody does this from time to time. However, you must realise that the beauty is inside of you always, and so it doesn’t actually matter which direction your eyes are pointing. In all directions you will see colour and light and shadow, all reaching out to touch you, just as you are searching to touch them. Therefore, don’t waste your energy looking for “the perfect shot.” Instead, fully take in what you are seeing and feeling wherever you happen to be. What do you see and what do you feel? Without fail, it will always be your perfectly unique perspective for that moment. Take a photo in your head. If you want to take a photo with your camera, take a photo with your camera too.

Technique

There are many wonderful techniques to learn, if you so desire. Read some fun photography books! Just learning how aperture plays with shutter speed, will allow you to change the photo infinitely in two dimensions. Getting close to, or far away from, brings in a third dimension. You can take a photo of a blade of grass, or of the milky way galaxy. Somehow, each of these will easily fit in your frame (the photo rectangle). If you get down on the ground and press your face into the grass and point up, they’ll both be in your frame at the same time. Learning new techniques will allow you to do something silly and have fun in a new way. They will also let you capture a shot that you just wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

You may learn, for example, of a “rule of thirds” to help you choose your framing (the location of the things in the photo rectangle). All of these techniques and guidelines are good and will help you take still-more-perfect photos. However, always know that framing possibilities are infinite and can’t be captured by any rule. At school and work and elsewhere there are rules we follow, because they make sense to us: We understand that everyone is better off if we all share and follow those rules. However, the camera isn’t like that. It’s just for you. The only rule it follows is yours. Therefore, do whatever tickles your fancy.

Colour

Some people love red most, some blue, some green, some yellow. Some people go through phases of loving one, then move on to another. Some people just love all colours equally, but most people find themselves preferring some particular combination of certain colours next to each other. It doesn’t really matter. If your eyes enjoy it, your camera will too.

Shadow and light

Without any shadow, your photo would be all white. There would be nothing to see. Without light, there could be no shadow. They are always working together to bring you what you see. If you take a photo of something that is mostly in shadow, then that might be a perfect photo that lets a person think about light. It doesn’t really matter. Whatever mix of shadow and light you see right now is perfect for this moment, but will be gone forever in the next. When your eyes especially enjoy how the light and shadow are playing together in front of you, snap your photo.

Conclusion

Music from an instrument can entertain people’s ears. Photos from a camera can entertain people’s eyes. Words can entertain people’s imaginations. I wrote this guide firstly for my own amusement: I’ve enjoyed writing it. I hope you’ll enjoy it too.

When you take a photo, you are sharing your enjoyment with whoever wants to join you, but you don’t need to convince anybody of anything. Use your camera for your own enjoyment first. You may notice that your eyes simply enjoy looking at a camera in your hand. That’s your unique perspective for that moment. Enjoy.

At a practical level, my to-do list is part of a method of getting things that I care about done. In many ways this system works very well. I get many things done that make life better for myself and others. Frequently I even enjoy doing these things.

At a compulsive level, my to-do list is a way of maintaining an illusion that I have more or less control over my conditions than is perhaps accurate. Possibly it is also a method of excusing myself from full immediate engagement: “When I’m done!” Indeed, it allows me to feel some control, while simultaneously overwhelming me with its endlessness.

In spite of conscious recognition of the boundless project that is called "engaging in this life," there is frequently a background feeling of "needing to get back on top," as if I'm somehow out of sync with life. I'm being tossed around instead of doing the tossing. Perhaps if I didn't buy in to the fantasy that I can ever be the sole party doing the tossing, it wouldn't be so unexpected for us to be tossing each other about like so.

My to-do list is fine. It’s useful. Sometimes, however, its meaning to me is that there are one or more conditions to be satisfied before I'm allowed to relax into the vast expanse. Why? Perhaps I will feel that the moral balance is in check if I've worked hard enough for my side-moments of eternal beauty? Or, perhaps I feel guilty that I can feel so fine with nothing – with no reason. Perhaps I fear that apathetic torpor or nihilism wait for me on the other side of neurosis. Or maybe it’s all just outdated habit.

I want to have my list, and I want to eat it too. I want to experience every item as ends in themselves. I want to stop just bearing through things: Waiting to move on to the next; waiting for some peace; waiting to sleep; waiting for some relaxing time on my own without obligation; waiting for space. “Just waiting for it to finish,” has become such second nature that I regularly catch myself in this state even during activities that I claim to enjoy. Where do all these waited-through moments go?

I love you and I'm sorry. I don't know why it is that, when we're together, I can only think of being alone. I’ve treated you like you're another item on my list that needs to be checked off before I may re-merge with blissful oblivion. I'm still learning how to love, and so are you. We're still learning how to love ourselves. We're still learning how to love each other. The dance is still awkward. Practice is yet another (recurring) item on my to-do list.

Practice:

Add another item to the to-do list.
It might not get done. Add it anyway.
Feel the overwhelm.
Feel the possibility.
Feel the pregnancy.
Feel the fetus.
Feel the abortion.
Feel the fear.
Know that I don't know what I can or can not accomplish.
Curl up into a little ball and then explode into ecstatic wonder.

I open my hand as an item finds itself there.

Begin.