FALLING INTO GRACE :PART 1

The Human Dilemma

When I was a young child, about seven or eight years old, one of the things I started to notice and ponder as I watched the adults around me was that the adult world is prone to suffering, pain, and conflict. Even though I grew up in a relatively healthy household with loving parents and two sisters, and actually had quite a wonderful and happy childhood, I still saw a great deal of pain around me. As I looked at the adult world, I wondered: How is it that people come into conflict?
As a child, I also happened to be a great listener—some may even say an eavesdropper. I would listen to every conversation that went on in the house. In fact, it was a family joke that nothing happened in the house without me knowing about it. I liked to know everything that was going on around me, and so I spent a lot of my childhood listening to the conversations of adults, in my home and the homes of relatives. Much of the time, I found what they talked about to be quite interesting, but I also noticed a certain ebb and flow to most of their discussions—how conversations moved into a little bit of conflict, and then sort of flowed back away from it, closer to conflict, then back away from it. Occasionally there would be an argument or hurt feelings, and people would feel misunderstood. It all felt very peculiar to me—and I really didn’t understand why adults acted the way they did; the way they communicated and related with one another really baffled me. I didn’t know exactly what it was that was happening, but something felt off.

BELIEVING WHAT WE THINK

As I watched and observed, day after day, week after week, month after month, even year after year, one day I had an epiphany: “Oh my gosh! Adults believe what they think! That’s why they suffer! That’s why they get into conflict. That’s why they behave strangely, in ways that I don’t understand, because they actually believe the thoughts in their head.” Now, to a little child, this was actually quite a strange notion. It was a very foreign idea to me. Of course I had ideas in my head, but when I was a child, I didn’t walk around like adults do, with a running, continuous commentary going on in my mind. Basically, I was too busy having fun, or listening, or being mesmerized or amazed by some aspect of life. What I realized was that adults spent a lot of time thinking, and more important than that—and more odd, it seemed to me—theyactually believed what they were thinking. They believed the thoughts in their head.
All of a sudden, I had an understanding of what was happening when adults communicated with one another; that what people were in fact communicating were their thoughts, and that each person believed that what they thought was actually true. The problem was that all of the different adults had different ideas about what they thought the truth was, and so when they communicated there was this unspoken negotiation, this attempt to win each other over and to defend one’s thinking and beliefs.

As I continued to observe how adults believed their thinking, it struck me, “They’re insane! I understand them now: They’re insane. It’s insane to believe the thoughts in your head.” In a strange way, to discover this as a child was quite a relief. It was a relief to at least begin to understand this strange world of adults, even though it didn’t make much sense to me. In sharing this experience over the years, I’ve learned that many others remember a similar insight when they were young, of the insanity of the adult world. Rather than providing a sense of relief, however, this insight causes many children to begin to question themselves, wondering if there is something wrong with them. It is a frightening experience for us as children to think that the adults we depend on for our survival, care, and love may actually be insane.

THE DILEMMA OF HUMAN SUFFERING

For me, for some reason that I don’t really understand, this insight did not cause me to fear the adult world. Instead, it was actually a great relief that I could at least understand why they were doing what they were doing. Without knowing it, I was actually gaining my first insight into one of the great dilemmas of being a human being: the cause of human suffering. This is something the Buddha questioned over 2,500 years ago: What is the cause of suffering in the human being?
When any of us looks out into the world, of course we can see unimaginable beauty and mystery. There are many things to appreciate and be in awe of, but we can’t really look out at the human world without acknowledging that there is also a great amount of suffering and discontent. There is a great amount of violence, hate, ignorance, and greed. Why is it that we human beings seem to be so prone to suffering? Why is it that we seem to hold onto it as if it was a very important possession?
Having grown up around dogs and cats, one of the things I noticed is that adog could get upset with you—it could get resentful and disappointed; it could get its feelings hurt—but within minutes, or even sometimes seconds, the dog would just slough it off. It could put down its suffering and return back to its natural state of happiness in a very short period of time. I wondered, “Why is it that human beings have such a difficult time putting their suffering down? What’s the reason that we often carry it around, when it becomes such a burden to us?” In some way, many people’s lives are defined by the events that have caused them to suffer, and many are suffering over events that occurred long, long ago. These events are no longer happening, yet they are still being lived, in a sense, and the suffering is still being experienced. What is going on here?
This insight I had as a child, even though I didn’t know how significant it was at the time, was the beginning of my understanding as to why it is that we suffer. It became very clear that one of the primary reasons we suffer is because we believe what we think, that the thoughts in our heads come uninvited into our consciousness, swirl around, and we attach to them. We identify with them and grab hold of them. This insight that I had as a child was much more significant than I realized. It took me many years, probably a good couple of decades, to realize that what I’d seen as a child struck at the root of why we actually suffer, that one of the greatest reasons that we suffer is because we believe the thoughts in our head.
Why is it that we do this? Why do we believe the thoughts in our head? We don’t believe the thoughts in someone else’s head, when they speak them to us. When we read a book—which is nothing but the recording of somebody else’s thoughts—we can take them or leave them. But why is it that we are so prone to grasp at the thoughts that occur within our own mind—to hold onto them and become identified with them? We don’t seem to be able to put them down even when they cause great pain and suffering.

THE SHADOW SIDE OF LANGUAGE

Much of our programming to believe our thoughts begins with our education and with the very natural process we all go through when we learn language. To a child, language is a great discovery. It’s an amazing thing to be able to name something. It’s highly advantageous to be able to point toward something and say, “That’s what I want!” “I want a drink of water.” “I want some food.” “I want to have my diaper changed.” It’s a wonderful breakthrough when we first discover and begin to utilize language.
One of the most powerful pieces of language that we come upon when we’reyoung is our own name, when we realize that we have a name. I remember this moment of realization in my own life. I used to just repeat my name over and over in my head, because it was so fun to do. It was a great discovery. “Oh! This is who I am!”
As we grow up, most of us have a certain infatuation with language. Language becomes quite useful in communicating amazing things, a powerful tool for sharing our experience and moving through life. As we age, it becomes a way for us to express great creativity and intelligence. But language also has a shadow side, as does everything. Thought, too, has a shadow side, and it’s the shadow side of thought that we are uneducated about. Nobody tells us that to believe the thoughts in our minds might be a very dangerous thing to do. What we’re taught is just the opposite. We’re actually programmed as we grow up—by our parents, by the world around us, by each other—very much like a computer. We are taught to think in terms of absolutes. Something is either one way or the other, right or wrong, black or white. This programming thus affects the way we think and the way we perceive the world. Is it blue? Is it red? Is it big? Is it tall?
The great spiritual teacher Krishnamurti once said, “When you teach a child that a bird is named ‘bird,’ the child will never see the bird again.” What they’ll see is the word “bird.” That’s what they’ll see and feel, and when they look up in the sky and see that strange, winged being take flight, they’ll forget that what is actually there is a great mystery. They’ll forget that they really don’t know what it is. They’ll forget that that thing flying through the sky is beyond all words, that it’s an expression of the immensity of life. It’s actually an extraordinary and wondrous thing that flies through the sky. But as soon as we name it, we think we know what it is. We see “bird,” and we almost discount it. A “bird,” “cat,” “dog,” “human,” “cup,” “chair,” “house,” “forest”—all of these things have been given names, and all of these things lose some of their natural aliveness once we name them. Of course we need to learn these names and form concepts around them, but if we start to believe that these names and all of the concepts we form around them are real, then we’ve begun the journey of becoming entranced by the world of ideas.
The capacity to think and utilize language has a shadow side that, if left unattended and used in an unwise way, can cause us to suffer and experience unnecessary conflict with one other. Because after all, that’s what thought does: It separates. It classifies. It names. It divides. It explains. Again, thought and language have a very useful aspect and they are therefore very necessary things to develop. Evolution has worked very hard to make sure that we have the capacity to think coherently and rationally, or, in other words, to think in ways that will ensure our survival. But when we look back upon the world, we see thatthe very thing that has evolved to help us survive has also become a form of imprisonment for us. We’ve become trapped in a world of dreams, a world in which we live primarily in our minds.
This is the dream world that is addressed by many ancient spiritual teachings. When many of the old saints and sages say, “Your world is a dream. You’re living in an illusion,” they’re referring to this world of the mind and the way we believe our thoughts about reality. When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that’s something I’ve created. I’ve turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.
To genuinely understand the cause of suffering and our potential release and freedom from it, we have to look very closely at this root of human suffering: When we believe what we think, when we take our thinking to be reality, we will suffer. It’s not obvious until you look at it, but when we believe our thoughts, in that instant, we begin to live in the world of dreams, where the mind conceptualizes an entire world that doesn’t actually exist anywhere but in the mind itself. At that moment, we begin to experience a sense of isolation, where we no longer feel connected to each other in a very rich and human way, but we find ourselves receding more and more into the world of our minds, into the world of our own creation.
COMING OUT OF THE MATRIX OF SUFFERING
So what’s the way out? How do we avoid becoming lost in our own thoughts, projections, beliefs, and opinions? How do we begin to find our way out of this whole matrix of suffering?
To begin with, we have to make a simple, yet very powerful observation: All thoughts—good thoughts, bad thoughts, lovely thoughts, evil thoughts—occur within something. All thoughts arise and disappear into a vast space. If you watch your mind, you’ll see that a thought simply occurs on its own—it arises without any intention on your part. In response to this, we’re taught to grab and identify with them. But if we can, just for a moment, relinquish this anxious tendency to grab our thoughts, we begin to notice something very profound: that thoughts arise and play out, spontaneously and on their own, within a vast space; the noisy mind actually occurs within a very, very deep sense of quiet.
This may not be apparent on first observation, because we’re used tothinking of silence and quiet in terms of the exterior environment: Is my home quiet? Has the neighbor’s dog stopped barking? Is the TV turned off? Or we tend to think of quiet in internal terms: Is my mind noisy? Have my emotions calmed down? Do I feel settled? But the silence or quiet I’m talking about is not a relative silence. It’s not an absence of noise, even of mental noise. Rather, it’s about beginning to notice that there is a silence that is always present, and that noise happens within this silence—even the noise of the mind. You can start to see that every thought arises against the backdrop of absolute silence. Thought arises literally within a thoughtless world—each idea appears in a vast space.
As we continue to look at the nature of thought, and in particular what or who it is that is aware of thought occurring, most of us are quite convinced, “Well, I’m the one that notices thought.” This is what we’ve been taught and what we naturally assume—that “you” and “me,” as separate individuals, are the ones who “think” our thoughts. Who else would be thinking them? But if you look closely, you’ll realize that it’s not actually true that you are the one thinking. Thinking simply happens. It happens whether you want it to or not, and it stops whether you want it to or not. As you start to see this process, it can be quite a shock that your mind just thinks on its own, and it stops on its own. If you stop trying to control your mind, you begin to notice that thought occurs in a very vast space. This is an extraordinary discovery, because it begins to show us that there is something present that is other than thought, and that we aren’t just the next thought that we have in our minds.
When we believe in our thoughts, when we believe at the deepest level that they in fact are equal to reality, we can start to see how this leads directly to frustration, discontent, and ultimately to suffering on many levels. This realization is the first step in unraveling our suffering. There is something else, however, which needs to be seen—something even more fundamental. This deeper realization comes long after we’ve formed our opinions, our beliefs, and our capacity to conceptualize. Why is it that, even when we start to see that it is our minds that are making us suffer, we still grasp onto our minds so deeply and with such vehemence? Why do we still hold on to this identification, to such an extent that sometimes it feels like it’s holding onto us? One of the reasons we do this is because we think that the content of our minds—our beliefs, our ideas, our opinions—are actually who we are. This is the prime illusion: that I am what I think, that I am what I believe, that I am my particular point of view. But to help us see through this illusion, it is helpful to look even deeper—into what it is that drives us to see the world in this way.WHAT IS IT THAT WE’RE SEEKING?
There was a saying attributed to Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas, written shortly after Jesus’s death, in which he says: “The seeker should not stop until he finds. When he does find, he will be disturbed. After being disturbed, he will be astonished. Then he will reign over everything.” This was the first quote by Jesus in this gospel and, in many ways, it’s the most shocking teaching in the whole collection of writings. “The seeker should not stop until he finds.” What is the seeker seeking? What are you seeking? What are human beings really seeking? We all have many names for what we’re seeking, but really, whether we call it God, whether we call it money, whether we call it approval, whether we call it power, whether we call it control, what we’re really seeking is to be happy. We’re only seeking these outward forms because we think if we attain them, we’ll be happy. So really, no matter what we say we’re seeking—God, money, power, prestige—what we’re really seeking is happiness. If we didn’t think that what we are seeking would give us happiness, we wouldn’t seek it.

In this quote, Jesus begins with encouragement and direction by saying that the seeker should not stop until he finds—until he finds happiness, peace, or reality itself. And the truth is that until reality is seen clearly, as it is, there will be no lasting peace or happiness, so we must first find out what is real, who we are, and what life is at its core. We’re encouraged to keep at it, going further and further, until we find. The challenge is that most of us have no idea how to seek. For most of us, seeking is just another form of grasping and attainment. But this isn’t the kind of seeking that Jesus is referring to here.

Jesus is pointing to a way to seek that was revealed long, long ago: to seek within. If we really look at it, anything we can acquire from the outside will eventually fade away. This is the law of impermanence that the Buddha taught about thousands of years ago. Whether it is power, control, money, people, or health, everything that you see around you is in a process of arising and then decaying. Just as your lungs breathe in and then breathe out, it’s necessary for things to fall away so that life can breathe new again. This is one of the laws of the universe: that everything you see, taste, touch, and feel will eventually disappear back into the source from which it came, only to be reborn and appear yet again, receding again back into the source.

In the second line of this saying, the power of this gospel is revealed: “When he does find, he will be disturbed.” This line is pointing to why most people don’t find lasting happiness—because most people don’t want to be disturbed. Most of us don’t want to be bothered. We don’t want our search for happiness tohave any difficulty in it. What we really want is to be given happiness on a platter. But to find what true happiness is, we must actually be willing to be disturbed, surprised, wrong in our assumptions—and cast into a very deep well of unknowing.

What does it mean to be disturbed, and why would we possibly open to this or desire it on any level? To understand this, we must look closely at our own minds, at those things we believe in, at the thoughts onto which we grasp. We must investigate our addiction to control, power, praise, and approval—all of the things that ultimately cause us to suffer. These things out in the world, which are external to us, may bring a certain temporary happiness and enjoyment, but they do not bring the deepest fulfillment for which we are all longing. They are incapable of addressing the question of why we suffer, and they are ultimately unable to bring the deepest relief to the human dilemma.

If someone said to you, “You can stop suffering. You can really stop suffering completely, right here and right now. All you have to do is to give up everything you think. You have to give up your opinions, you have to give up your beliefs, you have to even give up believing in your own name. You have to give all this up, but that’s all you have to do. Give all of that up, and you can be happy, completely happy, free of suffering forever.” For most people, this would be an unacceptable bargain.
“Give up my thoughts? Give up my opinions? If I did that, I’d be giving up who I am! No! I won’t do that! I’d rather suffer than give up what I think, what I believe, what I’m holding on to. I’d rather suffer than give up my opinions!” This may sound ridiculous, but it’s exactly the place that most people are in. This is the mind-state that most of us come from. When we’re not willing to be disturbed, which means when we’re not willing to find out that what we thought was real in fact wasn’t real, we can never be happy. If we’re not willing to find out that what we believe in really isn’t the truth, then we can never be happy. If we’re not honestly willing to look at the whole structure of who we think we are and be open to the idea that maybe we’ve been completely wrong about ourselves—maybe we’re not who we thought we were at all—if we’re not open to that idea, at least that possibility, there’s no way we can find our way out of suffering.
This is why Jesus said that when you begin to find, you will be disturbed. When you begin to become conscious, more aware, when your eyes begin to open, the first thing you see is how deluded you are and how much you’re holding onto that which makes you suffer. This is, in many ways, the most important step: Are you willing to be aware? Are you willing to open your eyes? Are you willing to be wrong? Are you willing to see that you may not be livingfrom a standpoint of truth, from a standpoint of reality? This is what it means to be disturbed. But to be disturbed isn’t a negative thing, not in the context in which I’m using the word here. To be disturbed means you’re willing to see truth, you’re willing to see that maybe things aren’t the way you thought they were.

THE GREAT INTERNAL SPACE

What opens inside you when you’re willing to entertain the possibility that things may be different than you thought they were is what I call the “great internal space”: a place where you come to know that you don’t know. This is really the entry point into the end of suffering: when you become conscious of the fact that you don’t really know. I mean that you don’t really know anything —that you don’t really understand the world, you don’t really understand each other, you don’t really understand yourself. This is such an obvious thing when we really take a moment and look around. When we look at the world that human beings have created and how we relate to each other, it’s so obvious that we don’t really know anything at all. This is one of the things that I saw when I was a little child: This adult world has an insane quality to it. Everybody’s going around pretending like they really know things, pretending like they know what’s real and what’s not, pretending they know what’s right, pretending they know who’s wrong, but actually nobody really knows. But this is something we’re afraid of. We don’t really want to admit that nobody really knows.
Again, we can see that there’s a great unwillingness in most of us to be disturbed in this way. But if you’ve suffered enough—and I imagine that you have suffered plenty—then maybe you are willing to be disturbed. Maybe your suffering has created a longing for this great internal space. Maybe you are willing to become open to the idea that you may be something completely different than you imagined yourself to be, that others may be completely different than you thought they were, that the world may be something completely different than you ever imagined. The place to start, as always, is with yourself. This is the entry point. Because, after all, this great internal space is within us. Our tendency, though, is to start with somebody else: “You change! You change, and then I’ll be happy!” “If the world changes, then I’ll be happy.” “If my environment changes, or my work situation or my mate changes, then I’ll be happy.” But actually, we have to start with ourselves—not trying to “change” ourselves, because if we don’t even know who we are, we won’t know how to change ourselves. The first thing we have to look at is our own self, who wereally are. Before we try to change anything about ourselves, we must first begin to know who and what we are, because by finding out what it is that we are, we step into a dimension of consciousness which brings an end to needless suffering.
So we begin to look into ourselves right now, in this very moment, wherever we are. I’m sitting here on a stool, and exactly where I am, when I look into what I am, I don’t really know. I find that I’m an unfathomable mystery. I find that I could put a name onto myself, I could call myself any manner of names, I could come up with many descriptions for what I am, but really, all of these are just thoughts. When I look underneath the veil of thinking, what I find is that I am a mystery. In some ways, I disappear. I disappear as a thought. I disappear as an imagined someone. What I find, if I’m anything at all, is that I’m a point of awareness, recognizing that everything I think about myself isn’t really what I am; I recognize that the next thought I have could never truly describe me.
What do you find when you look underneath the veil of your thoughts? What do you really find when you open up to something beyond your mind? What happens when you become still and you inquire, without just jumping at the next thought? Quietly ask, “What am I, really?” Isn’t that moment absolute stillness? And aren’t you completely aware of that stillness? And isn’t it obvious that if we don’t go to our minds, that what we are is something spacious and of amazing mystery, amazing wonder, that we are a still, quiet point of awareness and consciousness? Within this consciousness, within this space of stillness, many thoughts can and do appear. Many emotions can and do appear, many ways that we could imagine in our minds that we know. But really, it’s all imagination. How do we know it’s all imagination? Because when we stop imagining, it disappears. When we stop naming ourselves, who we think we are disappears until we begin to name ourselves again. But when we stop and we look, what’s obvious is that there’s just the looking, an open space of awareness, and nothing more, because the next thing is simply the next thought.

STANDING IN YOUR OWN AUTHORITY

Nobody told us that what we are is a point of awareness, or pure spirit. This isn’t something we’re taught. Rather, what we were taught was to identify with our name. We were taught to identify with our birth date. We were taught to identify with the next thought that we have. We were taught to identify with all the memories our mind collects about the past. But all that was just teaching; all that was just more thinking. When you stand in your own authority, based inyour own direct experience, you meet that ultimate mystery that you are. Even though it may be at first unsettling to look into your own no-thingness, you do it anyway. Why? Because you no longer want to suffer. Because you’re willing to be disturbed. You’re willing to be amazed. You’re willing to be surprised. You’re willing to realize that maybe everything you’ve ever thought about yourself really isn’t true.
When you’re open to all that, then and only then can you stand in your own authority, on your own two feet. Only then can you really look for yourself underneath the mind and into the space between the next thoughts, to see clearly that what we are exists before we think about it. What you are exists before you name it. What you are exists before you even call it “male” or “female.” What you are exists before we say “good” or “bad,” “worthy” or “unworthy.” What you are is more fundamental than what you say you are. What you really are is quite a surprise when you see it for the first time, when you feel it. You can start to feel your own transparency. You begin to recognize that it’s possible that you really aren’t a “someone” after all, even though the thoughts of a “someone” arise, even though in your life you often act as if you’re someone. It’s the way you get along in life. You respond to your name, you go to work, you do your job, you call yourself a husband or a wife or a sister or a brother. All of these are names we give to each other. All of these are labels. All of them are fine. There is nothing wrong with any one of them, until you actually believe they’re true. As soon as you believe that a label you’ve put on yourself is true, you’ve limited something that is literally limitless, you’ve limited who you are into nothing more than a thought.

IMAGINING OURSELVES AND OTHERS

Let’s look at how we form an image of ourselves out of nothing, because that’s actually what we’re doing. Out of this vast inner space of quiet and awareness, we form an image of ourselves, an idea of ourselves, a collection of thoughts about ourselves—this is something that we’re taught to do when we’re very young. We’re given a name, we’re given a gender. We acquire experience as we go through life, as we go through the ups and downs of what it is to be a human being; with each event that happens, the ideas we have about ourselves change. Bit by bit, we accumulate ideas of who we imagine ourselves to be. In a rather short time, by the time we’re five or six years old, we have the rudimentary building blocks of a self-image. Image is something that, in our culture, we value very highly. We pamper our image, we clothe our image, wetry to imagine ourselves to be more or better or sometimes even less than we really are. In short, we live in a culture in which the image we project to ourselves and to others is held as a very high value.
I remember when I was studying psychology in college and one of the topics was the importance of a good, healthy self-image. I was fascinated by the subject, and one day it occurred to me: “Image? Good image, bad image, it’s just an image!” I realized that what we were being taught was to go from having a negative image of ourselves to a good image of ourselves. Of course, if we’re going to stay in the realm of images, of believing that we’re an idea or an image, then it’s better to have a good image of ourselves than it is to have a negative image of ourselves. But if we’re beginning to look at the core and the root of suffering, we start to see that an image is just that: It’s an image. It’s an idea. A set of thoughts. It’s literally a product of imagination. It’s who we imagine ourselves to be. We end up putting so much attention onto our image that we remain in a continuous state of protecting or improving our image in order to control how others see us.
So in effect, we are all walking around presenting an image to each other, and we’re relating to each other as images. Whoever we think somebody else is, it’s just an image we have in our mind. When we relate to each other from the standpoint of image, we’re not relating to who each other is, we’re just relating to our imagination of who each other is. Then we wonder why we don’t relate so well, why we get into arguments, and why we misunderstand each other so deeply.
Everybody knows how painful it is and how much suffering it causes to walk around with a bad self-image. Almost all of us, either consciously or unconsciously, are in some process of trying to feel better about ourselves. It’s very common that once you get through the façade of most human beings, what you find at the core is a feeling that the image they have of themselves is insufficient and not good enough. It’s an image that seems in some way wounded—and it can never quite capture the essence of that person.
But there’s something deeper going on here; there’s a possibility of looking at image in a whole new way, from an entirely different vantage point. Allow yourself to see that your self-image is just an image—not reality, not the truth, not who we really are. We can think we’re pretty good, or we can think we’re really not so worthy, but either way, both of those conclusions are based on an image we have in our minds, which is something that we’ve inherited and created based on influences from our society, our culture, our friends, our parents, anyone with whom we’ve ever engaged. As we grow up, we gain the ability to re-create this self-image, but when we’re young, society, parents, andculture condition us with an image of ourselves. When we transition out of childhood, we try to change our image—because we decide it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t feel quite right. It is like an old piece of clothing that we don’t want to wear anymore. So we try something else on; we create new images, new illusions of who we imagine ourselves to be. But whatever this image is, when we look deep down in the core of all images, there is this feeling that we’re faking it, this sense that we hope we don’t get caught, because we’re not really being who we are, that we really don’t know who we are.
When I was quite young and I looked out at the world around me, I remember thinking, “Hey, everybody else seems to know who they are.” Whether it was my friends or my parents, whether it was people whom I met as I went through life, I had this feeling that everybody seemed to know who they were, and they seemed to know what they were doing, with a fair amount of certainty. But as for myself, I felt like I was faking it. What I didn’t realize was that everybody else was faking it, too! It looked like almost nobody else was faking it but me. But really, when I began to talk to more people about it, when I began to listen to what people said and how they said it, I began to realize that more people were faking being themselves than I had ever imagined.

THE DISCOVERY OF NO-IMAGE

If we’re living from the standpoint of a self-image of who we think we are, who we imagine ourselves to be, this also creates an emotional environment. For example, if we think we’re good and worthy, we’ll create good and worthy emotions. But if we think we’re unworthy, then we’ll create negative emotions. So we can have a good or bad self-image, a self-image that feels emotionally either better or worse, but no matter what it is, if we look deeply at the core of all our images, there is this feeling of not being authentic, not being real. There’s a reason for this. It’s because as long as we’re taking ourselves to be an image in our minds, we can’t ever feel completely sufficient. We can’t feel completely worthy. Even if the image is positive, we don’t feel completely enlivened.
If we’re willing to look in a deep way underneath the appearances, what we expect to discover—or perhaps hope to discover—is some great, shining image. Most people, deep in their unconscious, want to find an idea of themselves, an image of themselves, that’s really good, quite wonderful, quite worthy of admiration and approval. Yet, when we start to peer underneath our image, we find something quite surprising—maybe even a bit disturbing at first. We begin to find no image. If you look right at this moment, underneath your idea ofyourself, and you don’t insert another idea or another image, but if you just look under however you define yourself and you see it’s just an image, it’s just an idea, and you peer underneath it, what you find is no image, no idea of yourself. Not a better image, not a worse image, but no image. Because this is so unexpected, most people will move away from it almost instinctively. They’ll move right back into a more positive image. But if we really want to know who we are, if we want to get to the bottom of this particular way in which we suffer, arising from believing ourselves to be something we’re not, then we have to be willing to look underneath the image, underneath the idea that we have of each other, and most specifically of ourselves.
What is the experience of feeling and knowing yourself as no image, no idea, no notion at all? At first, it might be disorienting or confusing. Your mind might think, “But there’s got to be an image! I have to have a mask to wear. I’ve got to present myself as somebody or something, or in some particular way.” But of course, that’s just the mind, that’s just conditioned thinking. It’s really just the incarnation of fear, because there is a fear of knowing what we really are. Because when we look into what we really are—underneath our ideas, underneath our images—there’s nothing. There’s no image at all.
There’s a Zen koan—a riddle that you can’t answer with your mind, but that you can only answer through looking directly for yourself—that says, “What was your true face before your parents were born?” So of course, if your parents weren’t born yet, then you weren’t born yet, and if you weren’t born, then you didn’t have a body, you didn’t have a mind. So if you weren’t born, you couldn’t conceive of an image for yourself. It’s a way, in a riddle, of asking: What are you, really, when you look beyond all images and all ideas about yourself, when you look absolutely directly, right here and right now, when you stand completely within yourself and look underneath the mind, underneath the ideas, underneath the images? Are you willing to enter that space, the place that casts no image, no idea? Are you really willing and ready to be that free and that open?