The heart of man is nearer to the Truth than his intelligence.

—Aurobindo

God is in me or else not at all.

—Wallace Stevens

If you haven’t wept deeply, you haven’t begun to meditate.

—Ajahn Chah

Just as with time and thought, the mind generates scripts to be delivered on the Stage of Mind that are specifically associated with physical feelings and emotions. We can use the same course of examination as we have before to see that feelings and emotions are little more than deeply held energetic states onto which we project our stories. The ego adheres to many of these feelings and emotions, especially the intense ones, with tremendous energy. But since feelings and emotions are simply objects of attachment, we have the opportunity to radically diminish their hold on us. While feelings and emotions are often deeply held by each of us, they are still objects of mind that we can, with practice, choose to meet consciously, instead of indulging or avoiding them. Just like everything else, any object of mind is both interdependent and temporary. In addition, if we look at any object deeply enough, we see that it is mysteriously Infinite at its core. At the summit of the Mountain of Spirit, our view allows for a shift in our perspective that uncovers the Infinite experientially, thereby giving us a chance to meet our lives in ways characterized by increasing levels of openness.

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Only when we ultimately let go of our attachment to our mind and its activity of thinking can we uncover the ever-present Now. This doesn’t mean that we should get rid of any mental creativity we might find or should avoid thought in general. Nor does it mean that having the ability to intellectualize about the Path isn’t potentially a good thing. Thinking, after all, isn’t problematic unless we become caught by the thoughts. So when we practice letting go all of the time, we become more and more comfortable with nonattachment. The view from this height is one that is similar to what is seen by good parents who continually practice letting go of their children as they grow into and through all of their developmental stages. These parents can gain a certain comfort with the instability inherent in rearing children. They find themselves glad when their babies sleep through the night, when they graduate from being terrible twos, when they graduate from diapers, when they graduate from total dependence to ever increasing levels of self-sufficiency.

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An attentive mind is an open mind. An open mind is a surrendered mind—one that neither clings nor avoids—which is the opposite of what minds normally to do. Minds are supposed to categorize and compartmentalize in ways that allow us to create order out of chaos. We get a sense of a surrendered mind when we realize the clarity of experience in the space between our thoughts, where there is no past and no future. We might just as easily call this surrendered mind experience the arising of “no ego” since the ego and the mind are both fueled by past and future. Similarly, we can interchange ego and mind since both are continually oriented in greed and aversion patterns.

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Past and future veil God from our sight.

Burn both of them with fire.

—Rumi

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

—Ludwig Von Wittgenstein

The only version of time that is infused with Awareness is this very moment. The present moment, or the Now, is always here. Always. It is never absent. In fact, there has never been any time other than Now. Something in the past may arise in our minds as a memory, but it still arises in the Now. Something in the future may arise in our minds as anticipation, but even this only ever shows up in the Now. From this moment, the past extends infinitely. From this moment, the future also extends infinitely. Therefore, the present moment is forever at the center of all existence. Just like Awareness, the Now never moves. The causes and conditions that arise in the Now might change, but the Now itself is always simply right here. The present moment itself is simply always, already, forever outside the boundary of past and future, never falling behind or moving ahead. It is in all ways just this. When we connect with this present moment with our full attention, we can actually experience what the Zen tradition calls “No Mind.” No Mind shows itself when the mind lets go of itself and connects spontaneously to the impersonal experience of the Awareness that exists between each and every thought that we might have. In this spaciousness offered by the present moment, we are totally alert yet unfettered by anything personal.

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There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison.

—William Shakespeare

So the world, grounded in a timeless movement by the Soul which suffuses it with intelligence, becomes a living and blessed being.

—Plotinus

Key among our efforts to climb beyond both personal and collective suffering is our ability to allow for a conscious opening to the Awareness that is beyond time and mind. To uncover this perspective, it is helpful to imagine that the stillness underneath all that moves is the source of everything that we can conceive in our minds or sense in our bodies. In other words, all things that move are born from and then die into stillness. At the top of the Mountain of Spirit we Know this stillness as the primordial Awareness; the source of everything, including our thoughts and feelings. As the source of everything, it must also be the endpoint of everything, since whatever arises out of it must fall back into it. Whatever is born, in short, must also die. Since this primordial Awareness is the origin of all birth and the destination for all things at death, every single circumstance in the Universe exists as the contents between these two points.

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After we’ve begun to climb past the tangle of egoic living, we begin to uncover a clearing beyond anything the mind can grasp. It’s as if we’ve literally climbed past the tree line and into an open space on the other side of everything that used to trap us. In spiritual terms, we are approaching the summit of the Mountain of Spirit.

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Life after death, or life after life, depending on how one looks at it, is one of the more fascinating aspects of spiritual practice since we’re not really sure what happens when we die. There are plenty of scriptural teachings to suggest that reincarnation exists. Maybe it does. Certainly, this would make things easier on each of us since we get to live all of this over again and again until we get it right. But aside from faith, scripture, and suggestion, there is little if any authentic empirical evidence to suggest that reincarnation actually happens. There are undoubtedly cases suggestive of reincarnation, but in our conventional world, we just don’t have the tools to determine if reincarnation awaits each of us or not. But does it really matter?

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A big part of living a conscious life means that we are living fully at every moment, aware and accepting of the fact that at any moment we might die. At this point of experience, everything simultaneously becomes a gift and a mystery. But there is a common spiritual confusion with this carpe diem attitude. Some practitioners feel that conscious living means that we should “go for it, because nothing matters.” The fearlessness that comes with the go-for-it attitude can be helpful along the Path, but any fixation that “nothing matters” is dangerous unless the mindset is met with a clear sense of ethics and responsibility. This is why an enlightened recognition must be also met with a purposeful relationship to an ethical code. The Precepts arose out of Zen and other Buddhist practices for this very reason. The Old Testament offers us the Ten Commandments, which provide similar guidance, and other traditions do the same. Allowing a deep intimacy with these rules, rather than attaching to them, prepares us for embodying the equanimity that comes with an Awakened perspective.

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