In 2017, I jumped out of a plane. I won’t be doing that again.

What I remember most clearly about the beginning of the jump was my incessant need to grab onto something. Anything! My hands kept searching for something to hold, soemthing that would promise me stability and then right before I jumped, I remember gripping the doorframe of the plane so freaking tightly that my legs, now dangled 10,000 feet above the ground, felt numb. Every instinct in me was screaming HOLD ON! This, minus the constant under-my-breath chants of ‘why the f**k did i sign up for this’.

I also remember wanting to make absolutely sure that the tandem instructor behind me was properly secured. I wanted to feel the harness connecting us. I wanted those straps to be tight. I wanted the tightness to be so evident that I could hear his own heartbeat. I wanted to know, beyond doubt, that there was something holding me to this person who presumably knew how to fall out of the sky without dying. I mean, Security!

Today, I still recognize that instinct within me. Whenever the structures beneath my feet begin to shift, I reach for something to hold on to. I reach for an explanation, a person, a plan, a philosophy, God. Something. Anything! Anything that tells me where the ground is, so I can be held. And the thing is, this would have been unremarkable except for the one uncomfortable fact: there is no damn ground that I know of that has ever promised to remain where I found it. And we know it. You know it! You know people who have died, you see how our bodies change, how relationships change, how governments change. Or even how our beliefs change. The person you were ten years ago believed things with complete sincerity that the person reading this no longer believes. Right? There were things you once feared that never happened and there were things you never thought to fear that did happen. You have been wrong about people. Wrong about yourself. Wrong about what would make you happy. Sometimes beautifully wrong. And still, we keep reaching for certainty. And I know why! Do you know why? It’s because uncertainty feels like jumping out of a plane!To be fair, ‘ground’ is useful and it has its utility! Those straps on the tandem instructor were useful on my jump. Our plans are useful too. A belief that gets you out of bed on a Tuesday when nothing else will is useful. See, a person with a broken leg needs a crutch. I am not bashing crutches. Psychological ground is not the problem. The problem is when we forget that we built this ground. When the crutch becomes the leg, when I start to believe the ground was always there, promised to me, mine, then there’s a problem.

We want to know. I want to know. Like, when will I finally become rich? Or, did I make the right decisions? Is this the right path? And when certainty fails us, many of us who try to cultivate a life rooted in spirituality, reach for a deeper certainty. We start to use phrases like “God’s got me.” Or “Everything happens for a reason”. Or even “The universe is unfolding exactly as it should.” or “All things work together for good.” But is it? Is it really? I even sometimes use the phrase “awarness is untouched by experience.” Yes, I have written that here on my Substack several times.

Lately I have become interested in what happens if I refuse to stop there. And I am not saying any of these phrases and positions are false. I do not know they are false(because once again, nothing is certain). But I have notied what the mind sometimes does with these positions and statements. It turns them into a new type of ground and then suddenly, the spiritual life, which was supposed to free us from our need to control reality becomes another way to control reality.

What if I surrender my need for certainty, and then surrender my certainty about surrender? I know I’m going meta here, but maybe we could treat that as a contemplative prompt also. What if I trust the Universe or God without turning God into my explanation for what happens next? What if “God’s got me” does not mean I know what being held will look like? Don’t we all know that being held might even still include loss. It could still include incredible pain. Like, what are we talking about? It could still include incredible disappointment. Being held might include years in which I cannot see the holding at all. And if my idea of God requires life to unfold in a particular way, perhaps I am still negotiating with life. Perhaps I have said, “I surrender,” while sneakily slipping the universe a list of acceptable outcomes.

And it’s laughable, isn’t it? How the ego will apparently attend all the retreats, do all the fasting and praying, quote Eckhart Tolle, Neville Goddard and all the favorite spiritual teacher. It will will surrender everything and then use surrender to make sure everything is going to be okay. Oh, we persistent creatures!

The incredible paradox is this: if I become comfortable with uncertainty, then uncertainty has become another kind of certainty. I know! I know! I know this feels like an attempt to split hairs but hear me out. But let’s check this out: Look at me! I know how to live without knowing. I have mastered mystery! Ah! And there we go again, that’s another holding on to something. Perhaps uncertainty is not something we are supposed to become comfortable with. Perhaps there is no final psychological position from which life stops frightening us. Perhaps, there’s no enlightened posture from which change stops hurting, no philosophy that turns the unknown into the known. Perhaps uncertainty gets to remain uncertain. Even our relationship with it. Yes, you read that right, even our relationship with uncertainty. Some mornings, I will meet it with openness. Other mornings I will grip the side of the plane. And both are okay. Both belong! Perhaps the only practice is the capacity to remain available. You see, there is a temptation in spiritual spaces to explain mystery too quickly. Like for instance, when something terrible happens, we say it’s God’s plan. When someone dies, we say they are in a better place. When a door of opportunity closes, we say another will open. But maybe we keep it at PERHAPS. I am not dismissing any of those possibilities. I am questioning our urgency to know. Why must the mystery immediately become a message? Why must pain immediately come with some deep meaning? Why must uncertainty immediately be converted into trust? Why are we so uncomfortable allowing the unanswered thing to remain unanswered? Could it be because an unanswered life requires something different from us? OUR DAMN ATTENTION?

If I already know what something means, I will stop looking. If I already know where God is, I will stop listening. If I already know how my life is supposed to unfold, everything that contradicts the plan becomes an interruption.

But if I do not know? Then suddenly I have to look, I have to listen, I have to be here. What we forget so often is that wonder does not begin with an answer. Wonder begins when the answer is totally, totally absent and, for the time being, we suspend the need to give langugage to it. That is the actual formular for wonder(feel free to quote me and attribute my name on this one).

The first time I saw the mountains I just stared in sheer wonder. I can image how it is, for a child to see the moon for the first time. I bet in that time, there is just this enormous luminous thing hanging in the darkness, right before the child says ‘Mommy, what is that?’.

So, let us Look. That just might be one of the purest spiritual instructions, actually.

Just look!

Look.

Looking doesn’t give us any form of certainty. We just look, because we are here. Look because this is happening. Look because, against all the damn odds that you will never be able to calculate, there is something rather than nothing and you have found yourself conscious inside of it. This this! Whatever this is!

Our hunger for certainty has cost us our capacity for amazement. We explain away so so quickly. We call it God, destiny, ppurpose, trauma, calling, healing, whatever words we want. We place a word over the actual mystery mistaking the words we have for having understood it. For instance, the notion of ‘God’. The word “God” does not contain God. No wonder, Meister Eckhart, in his contemplations said, “I pray to God to rid me of God”. The word “love” does not explain what happens when someone looks at you and your entire inner world shifts. The word “death” does not tell us anything whatsoever about death. The word “consciousness” does not explain why there is an experience occurring right now from what seems like ‘behind the eyes’. We name things partly because language lets us live together. But naming is not knowing. Spiritual maturity is remembering the difference.

I still use the word, “God”, I still talk about “Awareness”. I will keep saying it. Only I hold the words differently. More like a prayer. Not in the way I used to think about prayer which for most of my life was like a contract. A contract wants assurance. But a prayer says “I am here”. That’s all it is. Simple straightforward: prayer is presence.Faith, at its strangest and most alive, begins somewhere around there. It is not certainty about God, not certain about what God will do. Not certainty that everything will turn out according to some hidden architecture that will one day make perfect sense. In fact, maybe it just never wilL!

Well, with all this rant over, I will say that I do not know what happens next, or why anything happens. I can say these:

* I do not know whether every wound becomes wisdom.

* I do not know whether every loss contains a gift.

* I do not know whether life owes me an explanation.

* I do not even know whether my ideas about surrender are another elaborate attempt to make myself safe.

And even this, I do not know.

Strangely, when I allow myself to reach that point without immediately building another philosophy underneath it, it’s pretty damn interesting what happens. Presence happens, I notice the room, I notice sounds outside the window. Oh, I notice a body. There’s movement in it! Oh my gosh, this is what it is to be PRESENT. I am left with all of curiosity that requires no explanation, answers or resolution. See, the thing here is, the concepts we hold about anything is super thin. For instance, the belief that "God's got me" is a sentence, and a sentence is about two inches deep. But the room you’re in, the sound outside the window, this breath going in and the one coming out? That is not two inches deep. That is so freaking bottomless. When I find myself trading the explanation for the thing itself, I do not lose God. I lose the word, and what is left is so much bigger than the word ever was. It turns out the concept was the small thing. The living IN REALITY was the large thing. I had them backwards. We almost always have them backwards.

So, what is this? What will happen? Who am I without the answer? Who is God when I stop requiring God to explain the world? There is a kind of awe available only when I stop pretending I know what I am looking at. And this is exactly where I find myself now. Not learning how to conquer uncertainty. Not trying to become comfortable with it. Not replacing worldly certainty with spiritual certainty. I am just here noticing how quickly my hands reach for something when the door of the plane opens. They reached for the door this past weekend. Something happened that I did not think was possible. In fact, I still don’t have a shelf to put it on, so I watched myself go straight for the doorframe, grip it, explain it, make it make sense, quickly, before I could allow it to stay a strange experience(this is a story for another Long Walk). For now I will only say that my allegoric plane door opened, and I did the exact thing I’ve been ranting about: I gripped it.

And so, sometimes, when I remember, I loosen my grip. I loosen it knowing full well that I may fall. I will fall. I have no final sentence about ‘God’ that makes the whole world safe again, and I have stopped waiting for one. I honestly think it’s lazy. Ultimately, it’s because for one terrifying and beautiful and unexplainable moment, I am here.

It is so so freaking wild! I am here! I am! Wow! It is incredible to recognize the wildness of this recognition.

Oh, the plane door is wide open. I do not know. I still do not know. And the sky, IT IS GYNORMOUS!

Ah, You’d Love These Related Reading:

Hey! If you’re new here and you missed any of the previous posts, I’m personally recommending these ones for you.

This one, I wrote because of the recognition of this incredible mystery that we exist within. More modern philosophical conversations call it Consciousness. The ancients called it In Him. I say, I don’t freaking know but it’s apparent.

I wrote this one to demonstrate the mechanism of suffering within us. The pull of want and don’t want. Oh, it is amazing to see how we experience these.

How do we approach this visitor, fear, that comes visiting? Rumi says, let it. I echo the same thing in my own words. Same with the one below. I wrote this one at a time when I needed to go into solitude. I hope you enjoy these!

I have not been writing as frequently as I thought I would. At this time, Life has called me to be more present with other things. But if you’re new here, Contemplative Currents is to be a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity.

Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

I have been super inspired by the works of G.I Gurdjieff’s brought to my attention by Cynthia Bourgeault’s Wisdom School and recent book, Mystical Courage. Alongside it, Brian O'Connor's Awareness Games: Playing with Your Mind to Create Joy deserves mention: several of its exercises radically shifted my perception and helped me understand the true seed of contemplation (pun intended, with a nod to Thomas Merton's Seeds of Contemplation). The inspiration is part of what birthed this Contemplative Currents substack.

For today, I’m pulling a very short exercise. To go deeper, I’d recommend listening to the audio version; I’ve paced it for ten minutes in total. If you have the time and space, wonderful. And please let me know how it lands when you try it.

One thing I’d say to anyone new to these practices: a consistent practice opens you to a clarity in which the mind gives way to seeing with the heart. That seeing is often described as non-dual. I hesitate to call it a state, though, since it is the ground from which every state of mind arises. I offer this as I offer myself— a taster!

I hope you enjoy this one.

* So let’s start with you reading this entire post once and then come back again. For this first round, do absolutely nothing deliberately. I know! Don’t meditate or regulate your breath or try to become peaceful. Just do absolutely nothing! Only thing I ask is to notice the room. Now, pay attention to how everything you see is appearing effortlessly. Sounds, sensations, even your thoughts…they just pop in and pop out! And the weird thing is you’re not manufacturing any part of these. It’s just happening like that! Stay there for a bit. Stay!

* Now find an actual object near you. Something simple that you can hold or at least see. Take a look at it and for the next copuple of minutes, don’t give it a name. If it’s a chair for instance, don’t see it as a chair. See its color, its shape, its texture, its light. Then with a slight internal tilt, I want you to imagine what it is before you knew what it is. If you never knew it was a chair(if the object is a chair), what would it be? See it for the first time. But don’t overanalyze and don’t actually come to a final answer.

* Now if you can, close your eyes. Yes, I know, how can you read this with your eyes closed? Well, maybe listen to the audio :P Okay, close your eyes, listen for the most distant sound you can hear. Then now to the nearest. Then notice your breathing. Then your body. Then your thought. Now notice this amazing discovery: the distant sound, the breath, your body, your thought all appear in the same place. In an actual experience. Now, I want you to notice, “Where exactly is the boundary between me and what is appearing?” Okay, don’t philosophize. Just notice.

* Now, you can open your eyes. I want us to perform another tiny experiment. Notice you are here. Right? Listen to the words ‘I am here’. Remove ‘here’. That remains “I am”. Hold it! Now remove “am”. Don’t replace it with another word. Stay here for a bit.

* Now, we are halfway done. Let’s take it another angle. Notice how you thought I was creating an experience for you. Notice again how I have produced no experience whatsoever. I supplied words. Your mind produced expectations, your body produced sensations. The room supplied the sounds, your memory somehow choked up meanings, your attention selected objects. And all of these happened without your consent. It then seems there has been a PRESENTNESS that existed before the outline of experience. What is that, that is present? Sit with it.

* Now we will change directions completely. If you can, stand up. Come on! Just do it! Yes, I know you are still wondering if I’m talking to you. Yes, you! Stand up! :) For the next minute, become unreasonable. Shake your arms, move your hsoulders, dance really badly, make one ridiculous facial expression. See, I know you’re reading this alone so do it! And if someone is there, I guess this is where they will begin to question your sanity. But do it! SERIOUSLY!

* Now, stop. Feel what remains in the body. Notice your heart rate, your breathing, the warmth, the tingling, whatever is present. Now, if you can, say this out “This is what being alive feels like right now.” Not what life should feel like. This! Yes, this this.

* NOw, feel free to sit down. There is something else I want you to notice. You may have spent years asking profound questions. Yes, I know. If you read this, you have asked these questions or questions around these topics: Awareness. Suffering. God. Self. Wholeness. Love. Surrender. For the next minute, abandon every one of them. Ask instead: “What question is my life asking me right now?” Do not search for any type of impressive answer. Just stay noticing the noticing. If something comes, fine. If nothing, fine.

* Now let’s add an interesting part. This one is imaginative but please indulge. Think of yourself at ten years old. Do not analyze. THis is a light imaginative exercise. Let the ‘you’ at 10 years old stand in front of you. At this point, he(I will use this pronoun for now) doesn’t know your career, accomplishments, disappointments, what you’ve worked with or what worked out. He only knows he became you. Look at him/her. Then tell him one thing you learned about being alive that nobody had taught him yet. Say it out loud. Give him the answer you wish someone had given you. Wait with him in this.

* Now, let the child disappear. Let the questions you had disappear and look around your room again. Nothing spectacular needs to happen.

Here is the surprising part about this exercise that you can pay subtle attention to. You exercised the pulling and directing of sight, hearing, feeling, imagination, thought and its interpretative utility. Notice in all of this, that attention moved into the object being directed. Where does attention come from?

Well, welcome back from the silence, Seye.

I have not been writing as frequently as I thought I would. At this time, Life has called me to be more present with other things. But if you’re new here, Contemplative Currents is to be a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity.

Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

I don’t hold a lot of my childhood memories but I remember exactly where I was when my parents first attempted to teach me how to read the time from a clock.

“Where is the small hand?”, my mother would ask.

I was confused. I didn’t see any hand.

“Where is the small hand?” she asked again. Probably frustrated with me at this time.

“It’s there”, I pointed, hoping to pacify her because I just could not see any hands! Were they little tiny children hands or were they the size of my hands? The hands were there the whole time. My mother was pointing straight at them. In hindsight, I can see they were trying to teach me while I was not comprehending the lesson. My parents were my first teachers, and I was the student.

On this path, I have had the pleasure of having teachers like Terence Stephens and Caverly Morgan. Often a session would leave me with more questions than answers as they transmitted their teachings to a mind that was hard as a rock. Sometimes, I would leave with the clarity of a watch face after the fog under the glass finally burns off. It was the clock again. They were pointing at something already in front of me, waiting on me to see it.

Over time, I have learned that my physical teachers are students together with me in this unending school where we don't pass or fail, where we are not tested or scored, where our souls evolve through experience. I have learned that the greatest teacher is Life itself. I mean this plainly. I am anthropomorphizing Life as Teacher in the truest sense of the phrase.

I forget often, but when I remember, like I remember now, I lay flat on this metaphoric floor to this Teacher. It never comes to class dressed the same way twice. It wears the robe of every circumstance. It wears the shawl of sunshine. It wears the plain coat of an ordinary Thursday afternoon with nothing in it. It wears the heavy coat of the phone call I did not want to answer. And when the Florida heat scorches my balding head, it was even that too.

It disappears when I forget, comes when I remember. Often times in the gentle words of a friend that says, “Seye, you’re holding your ideas too tightly again”. It was always here in the background as Everything.

The immense joy I feel when this awareness descends, it‘s unspeakable. It’s a gentle, subtle, hidden joy you would not notice from my appearance.

My parents and I got frustrated with each other over those hands. The Teacher is patient. Maybe I am the one who is impatient. The same lesson comes tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after the day after, all the while putting on a different face each time, and waits for me to see the hands. Do you see its hands?

This week:

Once today or this week, something will happen that you did not choose: it could even be the heat, the traffic, the unexpected letter. Stop where you are and say to it, out loud or under your breath, you are here too. Leave the meaning alone. Then carry on with what you were doing.

Before you sleep, name one garment the Teacher wore today.

I have not been writing as frequently as I thought I would. At this time, Life has called me to be more present with other things. But if you’re new here, Contemplative Currents is to be a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity.

Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

I want a cup of hot coffee but I don’t want to stand here for four minutes waiting on this kettle to boil to 180. I want the blue mug, the one that’s chipped at the corner, the one I keep meaning to throw out. I don’t want the other mugs for coffee. Those are for tea. Oh, also I want the house quiet. I just don’t want it too quiet. I want a little sound here and there. Like the good sounds. The sounds of birds chirping at 6am and the wind chimes chiming their crystal notes. I only don’t want the sound of the leaf blower. No, not the leaf blower!I want to sleep in. I want to be the kind of guy who’s up at five without setting an alarm. By the way, I don’t want to be tired. I don’t want to go to bed early. I want my phone in my hand, scrolling till I get to the end of the Instagrams. But I don’t want to hold the phone in my hand. I want to receive texts. I just don’t want to answer the one I got.

I want my knee to stop hurting. I want to run the bridge again the way I did before the knee pains. At the same time, I don’t want to stretch for twenty minutes to warm up. I want the body I had at thirty-one and I don’t want to have spent this much of my life thinking about the body I had at thirty-one. I want someone to say I look well. But I don’t want to be looked at. I want the second helping of my pounded yam and ogbono but I don’t want to be so full that I feel like an idiot.I want her to call me. I don’t want to be the one who called. I want to be understood without having to explain again and again, but then I want to explain anyway. This time with thirteen analogies and two ‘for examples’. I don’t want to be asked about it. I want her to arrive at my conclusion on her own so I can be gracious about it. I want to be right. I want to be right so badly that I’d take being right and alone over being wrong and in company. I want to be left alone. I don’t want to be lonely. I want to be invited so I can decline.

I want this potential client to say yes. I don’t want the onboarding call though. I want a record-profit year, and I don’t want to send the email that starts it. I want my work to mean something. I want it to also pay. I want a slow week. I don’t want a slow week showing up in my bank statements. I want to be busy and look like i’m important. I want Friday to come fast. I don’t want the year going so fast. I swear I’m not lazy. My work ethics would show you.

I want the rain to hold off till after my evening walk. I want a storm, a real one. Not this fickle one that starts and stops. I want the type that shuts down the power in two of the divisions here. That way, I can call off work together with many others and complain about the poor infrastructure and the government’s inability to respond to change. I also don’t want the fridge to defrost.

I want my mother’s voice on the phone. I only don’t want to hear it getting older. I want to have called more. I don’t want to feel this while I’m on the call. I don’t want to want it, because wanting it is how I know how it goes.

I want to be free and I want to be chosen. I want no obligations and I want to be needed by name. I want to be unknown and I want to be read. I want silence and I want somebody to tell me something. I want less. I want more of the less. I want to want less than I want.

I want the mind to be quiet during meditation, which is a bit like wanting the ocean to hold still so I can look at it properly. I want the insight I had on Tuesday to come back on demand. I want the good sit. I don’t want to sit for forty minutes to get the good sit. I want the fruit without the fruiting. I want to stop wanting. I want that one more than most of them. I don’t want to become a person who wants to stop wanting, because I’ve met a few of those ones. I want this damn wanting to be finished without me having to be the one who finishes the wanting in the first place. I just so desperately want it lifted. I want it free of charge.

I want to stop worrying. I want to worry properly first, thoroughly, all the way to the end of it, until I solve all problems and then stop. I want to have thought of everything. I don't want to think about any of it. I want the small hard rehearsal at 3 a.m. where I say the sentence I'll have to say, and then say it better, and then say it a third way that's in essence, the same as the first. I want to be told it's going to be fine. I don't want to be told that by someone who doesn't know exactly how hard it is. I want to stop checking. I want to check one more time so I can stop. I want to be the person who doesn't do this, and I want to be that person retroactively, so that the last twenty years get amended. I don't want to be careless. I want to put it down and I want to keep holding the handle, you know, just in case.

I want this essay to land. I don’t want to have wanted it to land. If I sing this wanting and not wanting long and hard enough, with the same pitch, with the same little muscular clench at the front of the chest, I would come to find that one note, and it plays it against everything. If I played it long enough, I may stop finding the singer. If I looked at it long and hard enough, I start to notice the “I” in the song. The “I want” and the “I don’t want” are the same “I”. I want the coffee hot. Who wants it? I want this pain to end? Who wants it?

Something wants it.

The wanting is definitely appearing. And it’s a pull, an ache, a leaning-forward. God, take this thorn from my side! I search to find this “I” that’s leaning and there’s an embarrassment, like reaching for a step that isn’t there.

I want.

I don’t want.

I want.

These prefixes! Don’t you hear them in the mind? Don’t they haunt you? So damn sticky, aren’t they? So damn sticky, this “I”. How do you even catch them? Just like how you notice the fridge’s hum only when it stops, that’s how obvious it is to hear this ceaseless “I” and then one’s able to see clearly that what is is already what is. My wanting can’t change what is already the case. How could I learn to just accept this? What would it take to?

My coffee’s already cold. And the leaf blower’s blowing already.My coffee’s already cold. And the leaf blower. It’s still blowing.

I have not been writing as frequently as I thought I would. At this time, Life has called me to be more present with other things. But if you’re new here, Contemplative Currents is to be a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity.

Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

Last night I fell asleep and I have no idea how I did it.

There was a stretch where the day was still running its accounts in my head. And then I sent a text with an Australian joke. Then blackness! Well, not blackness but nothingness. Just absolute nothing. Then morning. Usually Milo would come over to my bedside and rub his face under my dangling hand. Then I’d remember where I am. Somewhere in the gap between the falling asleep and the waking up, the ‘one’ doing the worrying stops worrying. What’s crazy is ‘I’ didn’t authorize any of it. I couldn’t have. If you have laid wide awake in bed at 3am in the morning, you know precisely how much sleep obeys your ...free will.

This is the closest thing I have to a working model of Grace.

One can darken the bedroom, put the phone in the kitchen, take magnesium and all of the ashwaghanda gummies, keep the same bedtime for a month, all of that work and it not necessarily guaranty sleep. In fact, none of it is sleeping. Sleep arrives on its own three feet. Yet, sleep itself is not something one bestows on one’s self.I will argue that Seeing works the same way. For the sake of this conversation, Seeing is what I will call the seeing through suffering and the illusion of separation.

The pit comes first

You see, suffering isn’t noble and I won’t dress it up. If you’re like me, you’ve also spent most of your life dealing with one variant or the other of suffering. For me, the pit of suffering is where most of my Seeing has happened, and I think I understand why. When what I consider as ‘my life’ works according to plan, the mind has enough material to keep building. Everything is a hallelujah, every song is kumbaya, Grace is the sweetest nectar. Everything holds from the hand of Reality secure in the vice-like grip.But when the plans collapse! My gosh! The mind runs helter skelter, out of scaffolding. Sometimes in it, I catch sight of the ground it was standing on the whole time. Sometimes.

My gosh! It is an existential mess- this being human! I’d love to tell you I live in absolute bliss. I don’t. A client goes quiet on an invoice or I remember the dates on a pending immigration case, or a conversation with someone I love goes badly and keeps replaying at 2 a.m. with better lines I didn’t say and a conditioned mind flutters like a butterfly that found milkweed. Three weeks of the same worry wearing the same groove, the clouds come in, thick and total, and the shutter closes, and there is no Seeing at all. Just gruesome terrible weather.

But then, in all of this, I’ve come to think of the confusion as a privilege. Even that too is GRACE! On this contemplative path, something in us is stubborn enough to keep asking what all this gooey goo is! The difference between the me of then and now is that I no longer treat the closing as a failure of technique. It isn’t a sign I did the practice wrong either. It’s freaking Tuesday and the world seems to be falling apart— from one true viewpoint.

What the books can’t do

Friend, I have read all of the good books until the pages came loose(well, all the popular good books, the Spiras, John of the Cross, the Desert Fathers, Jean Klein etc).I have searched until my soles wore out. I have sat in meditation for hours daily. I can tell you with the weight of confident authority that I have, that none of these have any procedure for ending the Illusion of Separation or that moment of enlightenment where suffering ends forever. What all of the practice does is arrange the room neatly. The studying, the searching, the sitting for hours in meditation, all of it makes the individual more available just the way a darkened bedroom makes a person more available to sleep. But nothing will happen to wake you up to end suffering for good! Or something may happen. Doesn’t matter! It has always not been of anyone’s doing. It has always ONLY BEEN THE hand of Grace.And in those clear moments of insight, forgetting will still happen. Look at it! Who is it that forgets. If the Seeing belonged to anyone, won’t they just keep it? Wouldn’t I just keep it during the useful hours? Nobody sets an alarm to forget their own nature. The forgetting comes by itself as unauthored as the remembering of our true nature.

See, what did you eat for dinner fourteen nights ago? Ah! You can’t remember? Notice the strain, the blank, the two or three candidate meals your mind offers as plausible. Now notice that if it comes at all, it comes later, at the sink, with the specific bowl and the specific person across the table. And if you even remembered, the remembering was not produced by the straining to remember. The straining was just the noise we made while waiting.

I have spent years making that noise. I don’t regret it.

The one practice I keep

Whatever is in front of me, I turn attention back along the line to what it’s appearing to. And somehow there is some very strange joy in that. No, it’s not a joy. It’s a weirdness. No, it’s a gentle softening.Then I turn my attention to the computer screen, to the ache in my right shoulder and the sound of the fan. Milo shifting his weight against my right leg. Each of these is appearing somewhere, to something, and I look for the somewhere. It isn’t a search for an object. There’s no image to find and there’s no state to install. It’s more like noticing the one place attention never has to travel to reach. It takes a very skillful metaphoric tilt of the neck to find that sweet spot. I don’t see it all the time. It’s the center through which everything arises. It was there during the worst week of last month, unmoved and uninterested in my opinion of It. It doesn’t require good conditions. It doesn’t require me to be calm, or kind, or clear. It was there while I was arguing, while I stood in shame confessing my closest and darkest secrets. It still was there while I was asleep and not present for any of it.

The whisper

It, that It …is the ever-present standing through all of it. Call it God or the Universe, or Reality or whatever lingo honors the Unthinkable, Unknowable, Untouchable. That objectless object makes no promise that pain will stop, offers no timeline, and doesn’t seem interested in explaining itself.

But it whispers, and it whispers to me the way it may for you: all may not be well, and you are in it, through it, out of it, for it, as it.

There is no rescue from the mess. We are included so completely that there’s no seam where one ends and it begins. Grief happens inside it. Confusion happens inside it. The whole ugly stretch we’d erase if we could, is happening inside it and has never once been outside it.

Back to the bed

So, back to that bed. I fell asleep and cannot tell you how.

Everyone falls asleep and thinks it’s their own doing, but when people are up at 3am staring, it’s their failure.But look at it again. Nobody authorizes the 3am either! The man lying awake, rehearsing better lines for a conversation that ended nine hours ago, did not sign up for that shift. It was handed to him. He could not put it down, and he could not have picked it up. Which means Grace has both hands in this thing. It opens the shutter. It also closes it. It hands out the clear morning, and it hands out the milkweed mind, and it does not beg for your opinion.

That is the part I resisted all along. I wanted Grace to be the good weather. I wanted the Seeing to be the reward and the clouds to be our fault, because at least a fault can be corrected and a technique can be improved and I could stay in business as the one running the operation. But if the forgetting is not mine, and the remembering is not mine, and the falling asleep is not mine, then the pit is not mine either. Somebody put me down there. And the something in me stubborn enough to keep asking what all this gooey goo is, that too was issued, not earned.

So Grace is not a thing that comes when the suffering ends. Grace is what the suffering is made of. It is the Seeing and it is the blindness. It is the voice of the client who goes quiet at the most critical moment of the project. It is the immigration date circled and the 2am replay. It is not around it, not underneath it, it is not waiting for the storm to pass so it can finally come out and be praised for its disappearing act(when all was good and rosy). It is in it, as it.

And when I wake, Milo comes and rubs his face under my dangling hand, and I remember where I am. None of that was my doing either.

This being alive, I did not create it. Did you?

A contemplative prompt

Will you join me in this exploration? Give this twenty minutes. Read a section, put the page down, and stay with it before moving on. Nothing here is meant to be figured out.

Begin without repairs. Sit and let whatever is here be here. If you’re restless, be restless. If you’re grieving, grieve. IF you’re sitting with fear, sit with it. We are not wanting to be a better version. In fact, we will make this the new home.

Take one thing that hurts. Bring up something currently painful. Let it be as sharp as it actually is. Now look for the one it’s happening to. For a bit, let’s temporarily pause the story about them. Look for the one who is going through it right now. What do you find when you look directly?

Take one thing that delights you. Something small and recent. Sunlight on the wall, the thought of the laugh of your favorite person, the first sip of good wine. Ask the same question. Where is the one this is happening to? Notice whether the answer is in a different location than it was a moment ago.

Find what is already fine. Without improving anything, locate one thing that is unproblematic at this moment. The weight of your hands. The breath doing itself. Notice contentment isn’t manufactured here. See whether it was already running underneath, unattended.

Turn around. Whatever is arising, look back along the line to what it’s arising in. Don’t try to see something. Just notice the place you never had to travel to reach. Stay there without making it into an experience. I know it’s hard. Don’t overthink it.

Let the whisper land. Say it slowly, and listen for what refuses it: all may not be well, and I am in it, through it, out of it, for it, as it. Notice which part of you argues. Don’t argue back. Just listen.

Close by forgetting. Get up and do the next ordinary thing. The shutter will close. That closing is not yours either.

I have not been writing as frequently as I thought I would. At this time, Life has called me to be more present with other things. But if you’re new here, Contemplative Currents is to be a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity.

Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

One should not give up, neglect, or forget for a moment his inner life, but he must learn to work in it, with it, and out of it so that the unity of his soul may break out in all his activities —Meister Eckhart

I held Milo against my body as I felt the waves of trembling rolling through his furry body. In the five years we have shared together, I had never felt him shake with this much intensity and helplessness. Outside, the July 4th fireworks were splitting the night sky, crackling with no cadence, startling even me with every eruption. Holding him, it occurred to me that he’s never once seen the explosions or even where they come from. He has no framework for what was happening to him except that his nervous system was responding to the imagination that the ground may be turning against him.

As I tried to hold him steady, I knew this fear. This same one! It is mine!

The loud sounds that haunted him became, in me, the possibility of displacement from a life I have gotten familiar with. A future that was floating somewhere. An unseen catastrophe that my mind had rehersed so vividly that my body answered it as if it were already happening. My own body shivering exactly as Milo’s shivered. Oh, how little fear depends on reality yet flourishing in suggestion, feeding on distance and no evidence beyond the stories that the body believes to be true. My body, it clenches and tightens and braces against a world that exists only in my own imagination.

My gosh! Who would tell this body? Who would heal the disease of my mind? How can I help myself?

You see, we could all lay back in our spiritual stupor, and like Jacob watch the ladder set itself up between heaven and earth, the angels moving easily up and down its rungs, the whole host visible …if you just tilt your head right. We could all enjoy what it is like to feel transcendent— the clouds arranging themselves into readable jolly shapes. Every philosophical position, every sermon about grace hitting the right spots, sounding right and balanced, every recognition of one’s self as the Divine sitting comfortably on the carriage of the mind. But let the world shake! Let turmoil and turbulence come knocking and that ladder into heaven disappears. The angels you saw dancing and floating around like bubbles from a bubble maker are no longer visible from the vantage point. All the techniques, prayers, mantras, pranayamas that worked a moment ago, scatter like something you’re now trying to remember from a dream. The cruelest realization then becomes this: the peace one once knew was only visible in fair weather.

Maybe this is the work after all. Maybe one of the deepest signs of spiritual maturity isn’t that we stop trembling. Maybe it’s that we become the kind of people who know how to sit with our fears and so learn to sit beside someone else while they are trembling. Maybe maturity is not reaching a spiritual altitude from which storms no longer exist. Thank goodness! Perhaps the work is seeing what fear is truly made of. Oh it’s easy for me to see that every fear begins with a story of separation. It says to me:

* I believe myself to create and direct my life

* I believe myself to be separate from all of life

* I believe the stories of the mind. I dance to the symphony of thoughts without questioning their ultimate existence

* The “I” that I think I am feels real.

The body hears the story and does what bodies have done for millions of years. It prepares for exile.

So this is what I’m left with, sitting on the floor with a dog who has finally stopped shaking. For him the danger is passed when all the bangers have stopped. Oh, I envy the simplicity of that. For us, the echoes linger. I keep replaying the echoes of chaos that have never happened to me. I keep inhabiting a future that just never comes. I keep exiling myself from a home I have never left. My gosh! Oh, what if Jacob only woke up to what had always been true: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not.” Nothing in his surroundings had changed. Only his seeing shifted.

My job was never to talk the body into stillness. It was to stay in all this freaking messiness, arms open(if i can open it), breath doing what breaths do, until the mind collapses into what is already true— it’s that everything is already as it is. Simple. Maybe just then the body will remember what was already true long long before all of the noise started.

Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity.

Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

When I dream, I sometimes dream of dreaming. This happens when my dreams are not clogged with the same familiar nightmares that mirror my waking life. And when I wake, there are moments when what we call ‘this reality’ appears dreamlike. Like right now! Oh, I’m not saying it’s unreal. I’m saying it feels insubstantial. Like the world is held together by an invisible field that’s lighter than we could ever imagine despite the shakiness that my legs feel when life’s illusory challenges sift my way. The contemplative life makes this easier to notice— how the solidity we grant our experience softens, how the edges lose their certainty. In all of this, what fascinates me most is how strange it is to argue about whether this is a dream or not. If I am a character in a dream, speaking to another character in the same dream, what conclusion could either of us possibly reach? That this is not a dream? Would we not be talking from the same dream?

“Hey fellow fish, don’t you see we are made of ocean and we are surrounded by water?”

Would it not be the ocean talking to itself? How do I tell you that all of this is poetry and not prose? That we keep lifting symbols and concepts as though they were concrete things? How do I tell you that your joys are mine? That your awards and accolades are mine? That your blessings belong to me as much as they belong to you?How do I tell you that your grief and sorrows reach me because it is not entirely yours? They are mine also! How do I tell you that my “me” and your “me” are known from the same I? That what we call “other people” begins to dissolve under careful examination? That beneath the names, histories, identities, and stories that we tell ourselves, there is a single Knowing appearing as many? Oh, how I could run around naked and feel no shame!

Fortunately, this is not a matter of belief. It is in fact something we can readily investigate not through philosophy alone, but through direct experience. Through direct experience!! Though I should warn you: it becomes simple only after the mind exhausts itself. Only after the endless commentary loses its authority and the clouds part long enough for the blue open sky reveals itself.

To see it is to enjoy the Silence. To sit in that space that the psyche has fought all its life to escape from. To sit in the very place the mind has spent a lifetime trying to avoid. To remain there long enough that resistance begins to loosen its grip. It is to make your body so stiff in silence that it eventually melts in surrender. Till your legs, they feel so loose and limp that they feel like jello. Oh, you have to be there, to see it. Let those thoughts die till there’s nothing left but sensations. Let sensations die until you hear the same humming echo that the universe has been humming. If you were outside this stratosphere, it’s that same humming. The same hum beneath joy and sorrow. The same hum beneath childhood and old age. The same hum beneath waking and dreaming. The same presence that has accompanied every experience you have ever had.

Then, only then would you know it. You know it. You remember! Not the way memory recovers facts. You remember as recognition remembers itself. Remember when you knew no names and your mother’s face was your face? Her hands, yours. Her smile, they moved through you as your smile. Her sickness, your own sickness. Remember when you were in the void of her belly? Shortly before you started to create separation? Before the world was neatly divided into self and other? Oh, you may see that your Knowing is the Knowing through which all is known. You, who you really are, having no boundaries, no edges, nowhere you start or end. You, who belong to no one and no one belonging to you. Belonging, it turns out, is a property of objects and you’re not one. Your body might be an object. A thought may be an object. A memory may be an object but that weirdness, that mystery that’s not even an object knows them and remains untouched. In your last dream, what did you see? Did you see all the people and buildings and mountains and roads? And what did you see them with?? What did you see it with? Eyes? Were there really eyes in your dream? Have you not noticed that you can see without eyes? What do you see out of right now? My friend, let the physical eyes surrender into Seeing.

You could not have created the dream, nor the dreamer. The dream and the dreamer are the same Dream. The truth is, all of this, every bit of it, this living, breathing, laughing, grieving, loving existence, is astonishing. And it’s not because it can be explained but because it simply CANNOT! It will never be explainable.

And perhaps wonder begins exactly there. So read this again not to understand it but to notice what is already here alive without aliveness, present before the body claims it as its own here-ness. Read this again.

I’m serious!

Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity.

Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

I have a lot of trouble! Oh, where do I begin? Let me start with the basic living-in-america problem— some form of debt or the other. Is it the debt reminders that greet me through the emails I sometimes archive in contempt? Is it the gentle burden of belonging to a family. You know, the beautiful, unbearable weight of being fully a part of people whose blood I share and whose love I was born into? Or is it my body with its sometimes surprising betrayals, the creaks and complaints, its not-so-polite little reminders that it is not forever? Who knows what I’d wake up to tomorrow morning? Oh, and I shred into pieces when I see what’s happening in the world. The news! Have you seen it lately? Don’t even bother if you haven’t. My friend, Lena Shaqareq calls me yesterday, and we talked for fourteen minutes, and two seconds about what we heard over the weekend, what is likely coming. By the end we both just exhaled long and hard, sifting through the pile for some good news. For one, it was not going to rain yesterday! That’s good news!

I shake. I’m sometimes shaken.

Nobody talks about the gift of being shaken. Well, maybe because it’s honest work. In the shaking, there’s a part in the psyche that’s refusing to go numb, an indication that a thorn is still alive and awake enough to be disturbed. You see, I have met people so armored, so sealed, they no longer shake. I am not sure that is peace. I think that is just a different kind of trouble. When I talk about peace, I’m not referring to that one.

Sometimes, from the thundering and the drench caused by the storms of life, there’s just a clear recognition of all that’s pouring into the room. I sit with the shaking. I let it be what it is. The house and car notes, the medical bills, the tiredness from my inability to sleep because of the heartburn that show up because I had dinner 3 minutes after 7pm. Or the conversations over the phone, full of grief — all of which are real life situations. And then, Milo curls up near my feet and stares at me as if to say: you’re doing that human thing again. Yes, Milo. Yes I am.

That recognition. That clear recognition…I’ve now known it to be presence. And I use that word loosely, like a coat two sizes too big that I keep stumbling into. And it’s not because I went looking for it with clean hands and a devotional strategy. But precisely when I am most undone. When the anxiety wraps around my chest like the first time I wore a tie and assumed ties should be super tight on the neck. When the weight of responsibilities, what I’ve lost, what I can’t fix, sits heavy in the room, that’s when I notice it. Gosh, how could anyone ever describe this? NOw, this presnece is in no way an escape plan. It is something far subtler underneath it the way the ocean floor is undisturbed while the surface does all its dramatic weather-ing.

I was raised in a faith tradition that gave this presence a name, a gender, a throne. I still love those images. They are not wrong. They are just smaller than what they’re pointing at. The Christian tradition pointed to the view but everyone worshipped the window. I’ve pressed my face against enough windows to know. And then, oh my gosh, I saw the view! Meister Eckhart, kept saying things that got him in trouble. He would say that the ground of the soul and the ground of God are one ground. Not two things touching. One thing. Rumi would echo the same thing. Teachers like Nisargadatta would emphasize the pointer— I am, and let that be the entire teaching. But that easily flies over our heads. These folks, it turns out, were all pointing at the same embarrassing simplicity: that what we are looking for is the thing doing the looking.

And still, what looks, looks at what we call ‘trouble’. I found out rather late, that the contemplative path is not a lifestyle upgrade. It is not stress management with incense. It does not remove the trouble. What it does (and I say this with the hesitation of someone who has been surprised by it) is reveal that the trouble does not touch what we fundamentally are. Not by avoiding the said trouble. Ah! If we could ever avoid it. By going so deeply into it that we fall through the floor into something that cannot be shaken. Oh, baJezus! Is that what the Christian scripture was referring to when quoting of Jesus it said, “…In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

This is what I mean when I say I run into you. Unashamed.

Not at the end of a long purification. Not once I’ve sorted out the finances and repaired the relationships and gotten my cortisol levels that inflates my belly under control. Right here. With the mess still on the table. With the shaking still in my chest. Unashamed, because shame assumes there is a proper version of one’s self that should show up first. There just isn’t. There is just this, exactly this, running headlong into the arms of something that was never keeping score.

But oh, when I run into the arms of the Lover — and here the tears come, they bleed from my eyes like a confession — I know the pain will not vanish. I am not promised a painless life. I can only choose not to suffer. I am not promised resolution or neat endings or only good news. The world will still be the world. The interactions, unfavorable economic conditions etc will still need to be tackled. The body will still have opinions. But everything returns to the source. Everything. Even the trouble. Even the shaking. It all folds back into the same silence it came from. The Tao Te Ching 16 would say, “All creatures in the universe return to the point where they began. Returning to the source is tranquility because we submit to heaven’s mandate. Returning to heaven’s mandate is called being constant. Knowing the constant is called enlightenment”.

And the Lover — I should tell you about the Lover. It is not a He, though I acknowledge a He in devotional lithurgical orations(geez is that even correct english). Not a She, though I have wept to She. Not an It like its this cold, clinical thing. Not a concept, not a theology, not the conclusion of a good argument. It is the very thing this vapor of me dissolves into. Yes, I used It again, damn it! Maybe because It cannot be fully qualified, cannot be contained in a pronoun or a doctrine or even a poem. And I say that knowing I just tried to write one.

Or maybe I need to just shut up.

Maybe the most honest thing I can offer you in this writing— my dear Co-Explorer, is this silence!

This one.

The silence on the other side of all these words is not empty. It is full. And it doesn’t wait for us to get it together to open.

So we can run. Unashamed.

Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity.

Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com

There are moments that move me out of center. A phrase said in passing, a tone, a memory that catches me sideways, and suddenly I'm no longer here. I'm somewhere inside the reaction. (Remember the one I wrote about my coworker?) For most of my life I assumed those reactions were simply mine. I assumed they were “my thoughts”. Yes, we tend to claim them as our own. I assumed my feelings were my feelings. The bare fact of being me. But sit long enough with any of them and a different realization starts to surface. If you’ve not done this before. All you have to do is sit long enough in silence and you’d notice this fascinating thing. You begin to notice that the reaction is not one thing. It has layers. And underneath the layers, quieter than any of them, something is holding the whole arrangement. Three of those layers are worth naming in a framing I’d call: content, context, and container.

In this exploration of who we are — who we truly really are, even these triggers are a part of the journey. A very interesting tool of conceptualization to use for this investigation is to pull out from the linearity in which we engage with experience, pulling it into the three layers: content, context and container. And here’s how:

Content

Most of us originally think we are trapped by what we think. To be honest, we believe that our thoughts are our own thoughts. We believe that we can shape them, change them, mold them, stop them. Despite our constant failure with these projects of control, we still stay adamant about our belief that we can. We have not investigated closely enough how thoughts create the coloring of meaning. That coloring is what is responsible for two people to see the same thing but experience them differently. Let’s call this layer the content layer. It is where thoughts play. It is where our emotional states lay. It is in fact where the experience of experiencing lives. Can you verify it? Then it’s there. Can you witness thoughts? Yes. It’s content. Can you witness sensations? That’s content.

Context

How about the context layer? It is the lens in which the content of experience is filtered. Imagine if two people heard the sentence, “you need to change.” For one person, it lands as encouragement. Maybe for the other person, it lands as rejection. Why? Because the content is identical.The context is different. The first person may have grown up around mentors who challenged them with love. Their context interprets change as growth, possibility, or movement. The second person may have grown up around criticism and conditional approval. Their context interprets change as “you are not enough.”

Same words. Different world. That invisible interpretive field is context. Or let’s put it in a contemplative frame. Imagine if you witnessed a thought that said, “I am alone.” The content itself is that thought. The context can be an interpretation of abandonment, of freedom, of peace or even failure. Well, maybe even solitude. Or see even silence as an example. Silence in a monastery feels sacred but in an argument it feels threatening. Meanwhile silence at the ocean feels expansive. The silence was still silence. But the context is different. Got it?

Container

Now the container. Let me put it this way. If you could imagine for a second that you’re at the theater watching a movie. The content is the movie itself. All the explosions(if you’re like me stressing myself out with action packed movies), the dialogue, the sappy romance…all of it is the content. The context then will be the genre and interpretation of it. If you believe it is a comedy you would probably laugh when some crude jokes are made. Same words that may move you differently in a different context. Now, the container becomes the screen. I have a little sketch here to illustrate what I’m trying to communicate.

Because our association with experience is trained on the senses and perception, we tend to find only solidity in it, denying the reality of the other layers. In particular, the entire container in which and WHAT WE ARE.

My dear explorer, first of all, don’t you just see that this is just absolutely weird. I mean all of THIS. It is so unexplainable, mysterious and generally humbling to think that anything exists. No, I’m not talking about just the heady sense of awe. Not turning it into another spiritual idea. I mean stopping long enough to recognize the sheer impossibility of experience itself. Look around you for a second. A sound appears in consciousness. A memory appears and then disappears. Examine the sensation of your hands. That tingle tingle hushy tingle feeling that YOU are not generating. Or the image of these words and how you can understand the symbols that is the letters. Or the feeling of being a person reading an essay right now. Where is all of this appearing? Not metaphorically. Truly! Where is it appearing in?

What is this space in which experience is unfolding? And stranger still, what is it that knows experience is happening? We move so quickly through life that we rarely pause long enough to encounter the raw fact of being here at all. Yet beneath our every thought, beneath our interpretations of anything whatsoever, beneath every identity, there is this open and inexplicable field in which the entire drama of existence unfolds.

The ancients called it spirit. Some call it awareness. Some call it consciousness. Others remain silent because language collapses when you realize it’s not even an object. All objects arise in it. And honestly, silence might be the most accurate response. You cannot step outside awareness to examine awareness the same way an eye cannot fully turn around and see itself directly. Yet somehow, unmistakably, it is THIS. RIGHT HERE. Before every thought. During every emotional outburst. After every emotional drama. After every experience.

Quietly present.

Holding the entire universe of life. Do you see it? Is that not what eternal life is?

A Small Experiment

Set the essay down for a moment. You don’t need to close your eyes.

Notice one thing that is here right now. A sound. The pressure of your body against the chair. A thought passing through. Whatever shows up first. That is content.

Now notice how you are meeting it. Is there a leaning toward, or away? A faint judgment, a flavor of welcome or resistance? You don’t have to change it. Just see that the meeting has a quality. That is context.

Now, the harder part. The sound is happening. The leaning is happening. Both are appearing somewhere. Not in your head, exactly. Not in the room, exactly. Somewhere more intimate than either.

Don’t try to find it. Just notice that something is already aware, without effort, without your having to arrange it.

Rest there for one breath.

That is the container.

Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity.

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Many of my recent conversations with close friends have circled around sustenance, the uncertainties the current economy presents, the ‘rising cost of eggs’, the incredibly tough job market and just general tensions in a more unpredictable world— not like anything was ever predictable. In the corporate environment, these conversations have become more scary. I currently work in IT and I have watched wave after wave of layoffs and the tensions that are created in different technology spaces. It feels so surreal to be able to feel in the air the thickness of uncertainty.

And so, in reflecting on this while writing live on my garden bench, I watch as birds land on the feeders right beside me. They take a few bites, look around, then fly off again. None of them seems interested in building a warehouse of seed for emotional reassurance. None of them seem to linger with the haunted energy of “what if there is not enough tomorrow?” Part of me finds this almost unreasonable. If I were a bird, I would stay at the feeder until I physically could not eat anymore. I would gather extra seeds, create contingency plans and then build tiny bird spreadsheets of all the locations with the best seeds. I will probably sell a course on “How to be a seed millionaire”. But what I’m seeing is quite different. They seem untouched by the psychological weight of future scarcity as they arrive lightly and leave lightly. I am so inspired by what nature presents.

But before I go on, I am extremely careful not to romanticize nature. I love to spell out the brutality that is the reality of nature. The same birds I am watching now, quick at the feeder and unhurried in the trees, are also hunted. Some go hungry. Some that I see may not survive the next winter. Some would have their nests ripped out. And the truth is, nature has no shred of sentimentalism in it. See, I won’t be using birds as proof that life is always materially comfortable and that nature naturally provides. That is simply not true if you pay close enough attention to life. However, might I attempt to shift us into a posture that reveals what wild birds could show us about another side of life. We could hold that posture and superimpose it on our reality goggles of perception.

First, I want to lay out this one posture. Birds wake into uncertainty every single day. They don’t store narratives about tomorrow(well, as far as we know). In fact, if we would call it singing, they sing before they would secure the outcome of the day. They participate in the world wihtout the burden of carrying the world psychologically. “Allegedly!”

In observance, using the wild bird as a reference point, there seems to be a difference between how they respond to uncertainty versus how we become internally consumed by uncertainty. No wonder the biblical framing ascribed to Jesus points towards contentment with today as opposed to the trying to figure out tomorrow. Even in that framing, the point was less “nothing bad happens to birds” and more “life is held by something larger than out anxious control.” And that ‘something’ is my Incredible Fascination.

I want to add that being provided for may not be devoid of difficulty. Maybe we could look at it instead, as a participation in a living process. The birds search for food, they build nests, they migrate when needed, none of it passive. And yet they do not appear to psychologically collapsed about the burdens of tomorrow, morosed by the empty bird feeder at 9842 Gelbert Blvd. This is what draws me to the old reflection about the birds of the air.

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet ...

Birds don’t live easy lives but they seem free from the kind of mental burden many of us carry every waking hour. You know that constant anticipation of future lack. My gosh! I know of it!

In reflection, it’s easy to see how birds illustrate a trust that doesn’t have guarantees as part of the package. If anything there’s an asterisk that points to the fine print. Perhaps because they don’t sit down to think about ROI while analyzing all of the risks they need to take. They seem to move around without relying on a complete map. There seems to be an enoughness in the present moment, while instinctively participating in what is already available. This also includes flying away at the slight sign of harm. See, my fellow explorer, there is clearly an intelligence that moves through it. That intelligence is not like a cosmic vending machine that proponents of ‘the law of attraction’ tout. Instead, it’s more like an ongoing relationship with reality itself. Provision does not lift participation from our hands. It lifts the loneliness from our shoulders. Oh, am I not so grateful for the provision from the great Fascinator. Tha I would be gifted a mirror the last week. That I would be bought food from Green Papaya, that I would be handed a source of living, however little. The giving that I am giving, the receiving that I receive— all of it in service to the participation in that living process.

And so I sit. Another bird lands. Another bird leaves. The feeder lowers a little. The day keeps unfolding whether or not I authorize it. There is a kind of company in that. In noticing that life is already moving, already feeding, already singing, long before I lift a finger of effort. Whatever this Fascination is, it does not ask me to stop participating. It asks me to stop participating as one who is separate from all that is.

Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are, is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity.

Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com