This message is for anyone anywhere who is in pain, grief, anxiety, anger, isolation, despair, fear, anguish and so on. This message is for you.
It just happens to be especially appropriate for April Fool's Day because the greatest joke ever perpetrated on the human race is our seduction by our mind.
Remember that old phrase "Come to your senses!"? Usually we hear it in reference to someone who seems to have a crazy idea or to be going off the deep end somehow. But this old phrase embodies in its everyday way a deep and profound truth.
Usually we humans, in daily life, give vast importance to our thoughts and feelings. Whatever we're thinking and/or feeling about is paramount. We let thoughts and feelings take center stage; they're given the foreground of our consciousness. And, though the details are another story, our suffering derives from this.
There is an immediate antidote, however. That antidote is to shift our precious attention to our senses. Whatever is going on, just begin paying attention to the raw details of what's coming in from the senses. The thinking/feeling activity will begin to fade into the background as we let the immediate sensations of this moment take the foreground.
It's whatever is occupying this ordinary moment. It might be the feel of the water as we take a shower. It might be seeing and hearing the wind blowing through the trees. It might be the feel of our body against a chair. It might be a dog barking, or the sounds of rain on the street. It could be the smell of coffee or diesel oil. It might be a sight that's commonplace—a sewing machine in front of us, perhaps, or a bare dirt floor, or someone dying. Or it could be just silence in the darkness.
Whatever it is, we let our senses predominate. We let the immediate bodily sensations and sounds and sights occupy our attention. We become absorbed in the immediate sensory present.
As we do this, as we "come to our senses," as it were, it has several effects.
First, we notice that even the most mundane moments are actually rich and subtle textures of sensory input. As we tune in, it becomes not boring but extraordinary—whatever it is.
Second, we notice that the fear, grief, anxiety, resentment, sense of problems or whatever begins to radically diminish as we let the realm of thinking about something recede into the background.
Third, as we "come to our senses," a sense of well-being begins to emerge. This sense that things are okay on some level that we can't really understand is a direct function of coming into the present. The infinite present. As we come into the present, we come out of the realm of mentating about the "I" and the past and the future.
In a different setting, I saw this happen a lot in the '70s and '80s when hallucinogenic drugs were popular. Now and then someone would have a "bad trip" on acid or mushrooms or whatever, and they'd be anxious or in terror at what was happening.
There were occasions when I had the privilege of being with someone in such a situation. What to do? They were freaking out in some way.
What we see, hear, smell, etc., whether internal or external, doesn't freak us out. It's what we think about it, the meaning and interpretations that we give to reality, that freak us out.
So I would ask my friend or whoever to direct their attention to just their sensations going on in the present, with particular attention to their breathing. When they did this, in a minute or two the trip would "flip" and turn positive—and often into something beautiful and deeply insightful because of the sudden surrender and lack of resistance.
In effect, we do the same thing now when we shift our attention to our senses. In moving from the thinking/feeling complex to our immediate sensations, we come into the present. And the present mundane moment, when we pay "bare" attention to it, begins to reveal the fragrance of the eternal, hidden within.
We can't pay attention to our senses for very long without noticing the primacy of our bodily sensations. The body, we find, is constantly sending us subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle sensations of various kinds. As we tune into them, these sensations in the body become more apparent. Our ability to sense them becomes more acute.
Then we notice that primary among these bodily sensations is the sensation of breathing. It's always going on, it's always there, but usually in the background. Now it takes its proper place in the foreground. Our belly, as it rises and falls with breathing, is a particularly noticeable sensation.
As we notice our breathing more and more, our perception of it changes. It becomes this alive, fascinating phenomena that ceaselessly pulls us into the present. And the ordinary present is where the ungraspable resides.
An extraordinary calmness begins gradually to overtake us. Now, instead of thoughts and feelings, the simple wonder of breathing and the senses begins to occupy the foreground.
And while we might be afraid that we'll lose all human feeling, all that we value, paradoxically it works just the opposite. We become more available to the wonder of this moment., to the presence of our heart in this moment—or more accurately, to the presence of the ungraspable heart in this moment.
And what about our problems? Don't we need to think about them? Another paradox. The less we think about them, the more some greater intelligence works them out behind the scenes. This cannot be understood; yet we can become aware of some mysterious process.
As we "come to our senses" and to our breathing, as we come to the immediate, sooner or later we can't help but notice that something is behind everything else. We begin to become aware of awareness itself—that which is always in back of everything else, that which can never be an object in awareness, that within which everything else takes place, that within which everything else is possible.
That awareness of awareness itself, which is always there, closer than even our breathing, can become the foremost foreground.
As it does, we become aware that the ungraspable is everywhere, is all there is, is all there ever has been, is within and without, its heart forever beating within this ordinary moment.
Then we see what a privilege it is to be the divine fools that we are, lost in some mystery that we can't understand—and yet here, right here, in the awesome majesty of the ordinary.
—jim sloman, 4/1/01 for Apr 1
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