On the Path to NoWHere

Go to that place where no one is looking. Go deep inside. Where there are sensations. Where there is sight. Where there is sound. Where there are feelings. Go as far as you can. Now. Stay for a while. What do you discover?

Feel that you are not sick. Feel that you are simply feeling. Nothing more, nothing less.

When we are yearning for this present-moment experience, we are basically yearning to be relieved of our attempt to be different right now. We are relieved of our distance from our own presentness. We realize that we have always been ok as we are now.

This moment is EVERYTHING, and so it welcomes everything: Every sight. Every sound. Every feeling. Every comfort and every discomfort. Every pain and every joy. Everything is welcome. Nothing is excluded, not even you.

The gateless gate cannot be entered through magic words or mental strategies. There is no gate to enter. There is no threshold to cross. There is no one who needs to arrive, who is not already here right now. Before the word, before the seeker, before the effort to understand.

And even this— the silence, the seeing, the one who recognizes the gateless gate— must fall away. Not because something is wrong with them, but because nothing was ever outside that could be brought in. No entrance. No arrival. No attainment. And even these words have already gone too far.

Discern what you can do right now from what you cannot do now, and you are free. Managing your emotions? Can you do or undo your present feelings? Observe.

The allowance of life which is always here. The allowance of this moment which is ever-present.

A life in which we are free to move like the waves, without the endless impulse to control what is felt. Conscious of the freedom within. Conscious of the freedom without. Totally, utterly free.

Emotional freedom isn't measured by how much pain you can access in this moment. It may be measured more by how little coercion is involved in your relationship with what you are feeling right now.

It's actually quite fascinating: when I tune into it, the less of me is actively doing anything within me—neither rejecting nor accepting, nor making any other clever move—the more deeply and truly I feel like myself right now. I can finally breathe again, consciously, without doing the breathing.

Perhaps the deepest form of acceptance is not the deliberate act of staying with pain. Perhaps true acceptance is the point at which you no longer need either to preserve the pain or to eliminate it in order to be free. It is the end of needing any particular inner state to be finished and whole.

What is actually here right now? Not what should be here, not what your feelings are telling you, but what do you honestly notice? And what, if anything, is the mind adding to it? Perhaps urgency, judgment, resistance, fear that feelings will last, or the idea that you must be able to change it.

Non-delusional acceptance: 1 Recognizing what is happening: sight, sounds, thoughts, feelings—everything 2 Allowing it all to be true 3 Not resisting it 4 Remaining free to respond “Delusional”: to believe, without sufficient grounds, that one can somehow manipulate what is—the present experience

Spirituality is not about consciously choosing to accept this or that feeling in order to change the present experience to the better. No. It's about acceptance itself, fundamentally—as the default mode of being, now and in general. Because no one changes this moment by acceptance. It is as it is

Notice: In this moment it will never feel "better" than it now feels. Embrace this reality of experience. Embrace the reality of now.

Liberation mentality. “YOU KNOW WHAT? FUCK YOU. I WILL FEEL WHATEVER THE HELL I AM FEELING RIGHT NOW.” You cannot scare me. You cannot shame me. I give myself permission to exist as I am, feel what I feel, and take up space in this world. You do not own my inner world. I belong to myself.

Instead of asking: "How do I become free of resistance?" you might ask: "How exactly do I imagine that resistance to be resisting?" And then look. Into your bodily sensations. Not for the right answer, but for what is actually there.

Present thoughts. Present emotions. Their present awareness. Unresisted. Unopposed.

Your lifetime isn’t running out. Your lifetime is happening. You don’t have to rush any of it. You don’t have to hold on to it. You don’t have to make every moment count. You’re never running out of life. You’re right in the middle of it.

In Vipassana (Truth) meditation, we can only clarify what we are already experiencing right now—never more—because the truth of the present experience is all there is to clarify right now.