All Things Contemplative
All Things Contemplative
Episode 8: Abundant Living Here-Now with Joan Tollifson
Show Notes
Joan Tollifson writes and talks about being awake to the aliveness and inconceivability of Here-Now—being just this moment, exactly as it is. Rather than relying on outside authorities, traditional ideas, acquired knowledge or beliefs, this is about direct, immediate seeing and being. Joan has spent time with many teachers, exploring Buddhism, Advaita and radical nonduality, but she does not identify with or represent any particular tradition. She is the author of Bare-Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life (1996), Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is (2003), Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogs about Nonduality (2010), Nothing to Grasp(2012), and Death: The End of Self-Improvement (2019). (Adapted from Joan’s website.)
Joan Discusses
- When is it contemplative
- Is there spirituality and does it develop
- The pathless path leading to the gateless gate
- Maps and conceptual constructions – help, hinderance or both
- Religious doctrine, dogma and beliefs vs. teachings
- How science and religion approach beliefs and direct experience
- The value of not knowing and groundlessness
- Suffering vs. pain: stories and identification with thinking as sources of suffering
- There’s no there there: self as fiction arising from thoughts and the paradox
- Here-Now defined and impermanence and presence as aspects
- Thinking as “mental chewing gum”
- "Dissolution" of my inner/outer boundary
- Freedom – what’s thought and thinking got to do with it
- What’s problematic – having thoughts or believing in them
- Non-Duality, unicity, making something an other (dualism)
- Yin/Yang symbol and being at peace with everything - more paradox
- Aging: natural loss and more wisdom, love, joy, peace, and beauty found in simple being
References Mentioned
Speaker 1:
Welcome. This is Ron Barnett, the host of the All Things Contemplative podcast, the podcast that explores the diversity of ways that life expresses its contemplative dimension. Guest today is Joan Tolleson, and I want to introduce Joan in a moment, but before I do, I have a couple housekeeping items to bring up. If the listeners are, or have, I should say, any person or topic that they would like the podcast to cover, to address, please let me know. My email address is on the podcast website and also on the blog, so just let me know, make a suggestion and we'll see what we can do. The other item I wanted to bring up that if you have any questions or comments about the podcast today with Joan, would invite you to leave those on the blog. I'll be posting the episode on the blog as well, and there's a place for your comments, questions that you might have.
So feel free, and if you have something specific for Joan, I'll relay that to her. Our guest today is Joan Tolleson. Joan writes and talks about being awake to the aliveness and inconceivability of here now being just this moment exactly as is. Rather than relying on outside authorities, traditional ideas, acquired knowledge or beliefs. The here now is about direct, immediate seeing and being. Joan's main teacher was Tony Packer, a former Zen teacher who left that tradition to work in a simpler and more open way. Joan has spent time with many teachers exploring Buddhism, a vita radical, non-duality, but she does not identify with or represent any particular tradition. Joan is authored five books including Awaken the Heartland, the Ecstasy of What Is Nothing To Grasp, and Her most recent book is On Death, the End of Self-Improvement. I always read that with a little bit of a chuckle, the end of Self-Improvement. That's a great title. Joan currently lives in Oregon, and Joan, we welcome you to All Things Contemplative.
Speaker 2:
Thank you, Ron. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1:
Great to have you. So the question I always ask all of our guests at the beginning is what do you understand by the word contemplative or what makes a person or some activity contemplative?
Speaker 2:
Well, it's a word I resonate with, and for me it points to a kind of deep, open, spacious listening. I don't mean just listening with the ears, but listening with the whole being, listening or wearing presence. And it's a way maybe of exploring life, exploring what is exploring reality, but it's not a way of, it's not about exploring it through thinking or reasoning or beliefs, but rather directly through direct experiencing, through sensing and aware and feeling into what is, I mean, it might include, and of course it can take a variety of forms. It might be just sitting quietly meditating. It might be reading a spiritual or non-dual book, but if it were reading, contemplative reading as I see it, you might read something and then rather than sort of reading it with a thinking, mind, reading it, and then maybe pausing and really feeling into what's being pointed to. So it always comes back, even if it involves some thinking or verbal expression, it comes back to that direct feeling, being sensing a wearing, and it also to me suggests something about stillness, presence. Yeah, so I would say it's a spiritual form of exploration.
Speaker 1:
We're going to be talking in time about non-duality, which you have mentioned and you've written about extensively what that is. That may be a new concept for some people. So we'll kind of do the rudiments of that also to talk about the here and now. And I know for many people, and certainly it was true for me, I first discovered the whole thing about being in the here and now from Baba Ram Das’s book Be Here Now, which came out in the early seventies. And of course since then many people have adopted that kind of as a guiding principle in their life. Many teachings and traditions talk about the importance of living in the moment. It's my sense though, Joan, that you kind of can unpack that a bit more than just the little short statement, be here now and then move on, that there's more there than initially meets the eye. So we'll talk about that a little bit, but before we do, certainly people listening are involved in some sort of spiritual tradition. It could be a formal religion, it could be something less formal. How do you view now, at this point in your life, how do you view spirituality and is it something that actually develops over the course of one's life?
Speaker 2:
Well, I'm not overly fond of any of these words that are around religion, spirituality. I mean, none of them quite fit for me, but we have to use something. So I tend to use spirituality and non-duality. But when I speak of spirituality, I'm not speaking of spirits or angels or anything sort of woo woo or anything like that. I'm speaking of just what's right here right now.
And does spirituality develop? Well, I think that's a paradoxical thing. It's often called a pathless path, which kind of, or the pathless path to the gateless gait. And I think that points very well to the kind of paradoxical nature of it's always about just right here, right now, it's never about some future attainment or some future arrival or something, nor is it about some past thing that happened to us before. It's always right now. So in that sense, it doesn't develop. There's nowhere to go. But in another sense, for sure, there's a sense of life unfolding and developing and evolving over what we would call time, although every moment of time happens right now,
So we're never actually leave here now. But within that, there is certainly a sense of unfoldment, but it always takes thought to kind of conjure it up as one thing I noticed, if people were to ask me, well, how have I developed spiritually? I'd have to go into the realm of memory and thought and kind of construct, well, where was I at 20 years ago or 40 years ago, and how have I changed? And how is that different from now? And what of those changes had to do with spirituality? And it would all be a kind of constructed conceptual thing. So, which doesn't mean it's invalid to talk about that, but it's important. I feel it's important to remember that it is a construction. It's never, it's a kind of make-believe construction.
Speaker 1:
So would it be true to say it's not really reality, as you say, it's a construction?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Well, it's an interesting thing because I often talk about seeing the difference between the map and the territory and the map, or we should say the map is real in a certain way. I mean, mapping is something the territory is doing. In other words, thinking and storytelling and conceptualizing is something that whatever this whole thing is doing, it's something that's happening. So it's not other than this, but the sort of content of it, the content that it kind of paints and evokes and claims to, it isn't what it claims to represent. The map of New York City is not New York City, but it's a useful tool. So it's not like maps are bad.
Speaker 1:
So I suppose we could say things like doctrines and dogmas are kind of maps to something that they refer to, or even teachings. I am thinking of the zen line where don't mistake the finger pointing to the moon for the moon.
Speaker 2:
Well, I mean, I would distinguish between doctrines and dogmas and maybe what we might call teachings or pointers when religion, as I see it, when religion goes into belief and doctrine and dogma and all of that, it goes astray because it's in the realm of maps and concepts, and science has a way of questioning its beliefs. Science uses belief in a sort of rational way, and it's always open to questioning its beliefs and revising them. But religion, when it gets into belief, doesn't question them. And so you get into things like ISIS and the crusades and fundamentalism and all that. So to me, religion at its best is really not about belief or doctrine or dogma. It's about direct experiencing right here, right now. Now, of course, there are useful pointers to that. For example, I hope my books are useful pointers to that, and many teachers and teachings are pointing to that. But as soon as anything, any one of those pointers becomes a dogma or a belief or a doctrine, then I think it has gone astray as I see it,
Speaker 1:
And maybe even beyond its usefulness, if it had any usefulness.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think it's become actually an obstacle at that point, because to me, this has a lot to do with openness and not knowing groundlessness, not knowing, knowing I don't mean by that ignorance, but it's not about some kind of ideology and then believing in that. To me, that's an obstacle to what I'm pointing to. Not a helpful thing.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Are you familiar with the book, the Cloud of Unknowing?
Speaker 2:
I've heard of it, but
Speaker 1:
To
Speaker 2:
Be honest, I've never read it.
Speaker 1:
Never read it.
Speaker 2:
Good things about it.
Speaker 1:
Well, it was written by an anonymous monk in the 14th century, and it basically lays out that the way to know the unknowable is through unknowing,
And it uses that as a metaphor, the unknowing, the cloud of unknowing, of leaving the area of knowing with rational discursive mind and moving in to being open to into the cloud of unknowing. So it's quite an interesting book, and it was really the foundation, Thomas Keating was certainly the inspiration for me for starting this podcast and the type of meditation that he and a couple other monks revived, I should say, is the best word. They didn't create or invent. It was based upon that book. One more thing for our reading list, perhaps we'll see.
Speaker 2:
Well, I have read Thomas Keating and I have actually done, what do they call it, centering prayer.
Not extensively, but I did dip into it. But I love the title, the Cloud of Unknowing, and to me that totally resonates because when we just opened to what's right here, right now, on the one hand, it's completely obvious and unavoidable and clear as can be. It just is. Whatever this is, it just is. But then as soon as we try to grasp it with the mind, as soon as we try to formulate it with the mind or say, what is it? Which is already a step away because it isn't something else, it's itself, it's like what is, it sort of implies that it's this or something. It's like, whatever this is, we can't pin it down that way. We can't formulate it. I mean, in practical ways, we can, this is a computer, this is Joan. This is Ron. We're not saying that's practical kind of everyday stuff, but when we really look for any of those things that we've identified, we can't really even pin them down when we really deeply contemplate them.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. You've kind of began in talking about beliefs sort of began to touch on the subject of suffering. I think we would all agree that at least part of life involves suffering. That was the Buddha, one of his first statement I think was life is suffering. Right. You've suggested that adopted stories that we learn as children, even as adults, and beliefs lead to suffering. Can you say something about that?
Speaker 2:
I think I often distinguish between suffering and pain. Pain being something that's an inescapable part of life, whether it's physical pain or emotional pain that is just inherently part of life, but suffering, as I often talk about it, is what we do with pain, how we look at pain, how we approach pain. And so suffering is perhaps something that can disappear, maybe not permanently or forever, but in the moment it can be seen through. And stories are one way that we suffer. I mean, I love stories. I love movies and novels and plays, and there are many stories like that can actually wake us up in various ways and show us things that open us. So stories can be enlightening and liberating and wonderful, or just plain entertaining and enjoyable, but the kind of story that leads to suffering is the kind of story I've ruined my whole life, or I'm a failure, or I'm not enlightened yet, or I am enlightened. I know everything, or I'm not good enough. Those kinds of stories. And even gets down to the story of I'm Joan, I'm a woman, I'm a lesbian.
I am a leftist or progressive, I'm this, I'm that. I'm an American. All these things that we sort of identify as me, and again, they have a practical kind of everyday reality that can be useful and can't be denied, but when we really take them to be solid and substantial and we identify them with them, it opens up a lot of suffering. So it can be just that the story of my life, and again, there's something really, I mean, I wrote a whole book called Waking Up from the Bare Bones Meditation. Waking Up from the Story of My Life was my first book. And there's nothing wrong with telling one's life story, but what's liberating is to see that it is a story and to really see that everything in it is made up. I mean,
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it would seem that these sort of self beliefs or self stories, perhaps I'm a good person, I'm a bad person. I'm this, I'm that kind of go together to define a self.
Speaker 2:
Exactly.
Speaker 1:
And I guess, would you say it's to that extent that the self is a source of suffering?
Speaker 2:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, because we can't really find this self, this me who is, we have this sort of impression that there's this me here who's authoring my thoughts and making my choices and living my life, me, and we kind of think of it as this little encapsulated entity that's sort of inside this body looking out through the windows of my senses at this external world. But when we really look closely with contemplation, with meditation or any kind of exploration of that kind, when we really look closely, or for that matter was science with physics or anything. But when we really look closely, we don't find that we don't find any little me in there. As I'm speaking right now, if I look back, I can't find anybody. These words are just coming out. I don't know where they're coming out of. They're just coming out.
I mean, I can make up a story about, well, they're coming out of my conditioning and blah, blah, blah. But really just looking, they're just appearing and there's no me there. And when I really meditatively look to see if I can find an actual boundary between what I think of as inside me and what I think of as outside me, I don't find a boundary. I don't find that in actuality. And the self, it seems to me is a kind of mirage that is created by a combination of mental images, sensations, stories, thoughts, memories, et cetera. But yeah,
Speaker 1:
This really runs contrary, Joan, and it's something I struggle with. I'll just be frank, and particularly being trained as a psychologist, that that's what we study. We study the self. There's personality. What is it that resists this notion that we're not a self, because it's apparently a very central part of Buddhism. There's no self.
Speaker 2:
To me. See, I think it's an idea that has confused a lot of people as well because of how it gets misinterpreted. It doesn't mean that there's not a personality or that there's not an apparent person here whose name is Joan. And I can distinguish myself from the computer, and that's functionally necessary. I mean, if I can't discern the difference between my hand and the carrot, I'm cutting up for lunch. It's not going to be a good thing to function. We need that sense of location and boundaries, and there are certainly boundaries in a psychological sense that it's not okay for anyone who wants to just come into my apartment and rape me or something mean or whatever.
Speaker 1:
Or even touch you.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, whatever. In public, yes. I mean, there are boundaries in that sense. Healthy psychological boundaries or social boundaries or whatever. So it's not a denial of all of that or of the apparent person or of the personality. I mean, I can say all kinds of things about my personality. I can tell you my Enneagram point and my astrological signs, and I've been through therapy and worked on various aspects of myself. So it's not a denial of all that. But when you really look for this self, what is it? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What is it? And you can't actually find it. And the things that you're describing like personality, personality is it's not solid. It changes. There may be patterns. It's like a wave in the ocean is the old analogy that the wave, no wave is separate from the ocean, and you can't really find where one wave begins and another wave ends, and it's a moving event.
It's not a solid frozen thing. And so it's the same with even this body. It's not the same body that was here when we started talking. All kinds of things have happened at a cellular level, a molecular level, and a subatomic level. I mean, it's not the same body that was here two seconds ago. And the mind is always the so-called mind. You can't really find the mind, but whatever, the thoughts are always changing. My ideas change over time. And so it's not so much to deny all those things, but to see that they're not as solid or as substantial as we think they are. You can't really separate me from everything around me. I mean, I wouldn't be here without air, water, sunshine, all the plants and animals that I've eaten and all the people that have raised those plants and animals and all of the soil that nurtured them. It's all, I wouldn't be here without the whole universe being the way it is. And you can't really find the borders or the boundaries between all these different things. When you look really closely,
Speaker 1:
When you talk with people about this idea of no self in the sense that you understand it and not as the misunderstanding of no self, do you find people have difficulty in gring it to use that word or understanding it?
Speaker 2:
Well, yeah. I think because we're strongly conditioned to see things as solid, separate, independent things, and in a way that
Speaker 1:
It's kind of an Aristotelian view of the universe. There's objects, everything's an object.
Speaker 2:
And from early on, we learn there's me here and this is the world outside of me, and you are not me and I'm not you. And again, that has a functional aspect to it that we can't deny. But when we start to look closely, we can't really find where you end and I begin, or is this voice inside you or outside you? Is it separate from you or is it you? At this moment, you can't really say in a way it takes thought to sort of come up with the idea that, oh, that's Joan's voice, and it's coming in through my headphones into my brain.
But our actual direct experience isn't like that. And in our actual direct experience often, well, lately I've been pointing to sort of two aspects of our direct experience that are not really separate. One of them I would call impermanence, and the other I would call presence and impermanence is the world of forms that we see. And it appears at a quick glance that there are all these separate independent forms. But when we look closely, we can see that it's all changing. And this was one of the central messages of the Buddha, apparently. I mean, who knows what the Buddha really said, but anyway, but I mean, one Buddhist, great Buddhist teacher, una famously said that the true understanding of impermanence is that there is no impermanence because everything is so thorough, goingly in flux that no thing ever actually forms or coalesces as any persisting, substantial separate thing. And so this impermanence is at the same time, paradoxically, wholeness, inseparability, seamlessness and presence, which is another word for here now. And there's always these two aspects that are not really two that we can see in any moment. There's the changing, ever changing, and there's the ever present. It's always here now, and it's always changing. And both of those things, there's all this differentiation and variation, and at the same time, it's all arising as one whole picture, one whole moving picture, we could say
With many different, there's shapes and colors and textures and sounds, different qualities, but they're all here as one whole movie, one whole picture, one whole happening. So there's both these elements at the same time, inseparably arising. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
And is it correct to say in some sense they're the same thing, even though they're two aspects?
Speaker 2:
Even to think of them as things is sort of immediately to go back to our old habit of trying to coalesce things into things to
Speaker 1:
Things.
Speaker 2:
And it's kind of built into our language. We can't really talk without doing that. But to really see that everything that we think is all these things that we think about, including me, and you don't really have the independent, substantial, persisting existence that we think they do. And that's actually very freeing because we're not stuck in some idea of who I am.
Speaker 1:
Actually, you've foreseen my next question, Joan, already. You've already answered it. So let me ask the question then. So very good. So Joan, why would it be good to have an intention to be aware of here now?
Speaker 2:
Well, I wouldn't say it's good because that's sort of the dualistic thinking, mind dividing things into good and bad. And I wouldn't speak really about having an intention to be here. Now, when people talk about being here now as a kind of practice, what they're pointing to is a shift of attention from being lost in thoughts and stories, suffering thoughts and stories to being awake to the immediacy, the presence, the direct experiencing of what is right here, right now. And we can also notice as a sort of additional step, if you want to say, we can notice that we never leave here now that we are here, now, that there's no little me who is lost in thought and therefore spiritually bad, and then back in the present moment and therefore good and on track that that whole story is a story and that there is no little me going back and forth, and that actually it's all one hole happening.
Even the thoughts and stories, those are just waves on the ocean of being, and that there's no me in the picture. It's just different experiences showing up. But what is liberating about that shift of attention from being lost in a story? I'm no good. I'm not enlightened yet. I'm not good enough. I'm a failure. I've ruined my whole life to just being here. Maybe just hearing the traffic, hearing the birds singing, feeling the breathing, feeling this kind of spacious, open presence that we are. When that shift happens, what happens to the suffering? A minute ago caught up in that story. There was horrible pain, anxiety, depression, sadness, whatever. It was not a fun to think and believe because it's the believing of the thoughts that's really the problem. But to believe that I've ruined my life and I'm no good, that's suffering. And to wake up from that and just come back, if you will, to the place we've never really left, which we always are, just this presence, this beingness, this direct experiencing, suddenly there's no suffering.
There might be physical pain, there might be emotional pain if you're just lost your partner or whatever you might be. There might be pain, but we're not suffering over it in the way that we were a moment ago. So that's liberating. But then when we add onto that a story about, well, it's good to be in the present moment and it's bad to be lost in thought. And my job as a spiritual person is to be in the present moment all the time and never be lost in thought where that's a whole new story, a suffering agenda. Of course. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
The key word that you used is, I'm hearing it, is the word attention or awareness that we can be aware of here now or we could not be aware of here now if we're lost in thoughts, if that's the case, how do we know when to bring our attention back, if you will, to here now? Is it something that's just sort of willy-nilly, or is there something that informs are doing that? And I assume it's not just when we're conscious of suffering it in some way as an antidote.
Speaker 2:
Well, I would question the whole notion that there's a me in here who can choose to do that. This gets into the paradox again, because on a certain practical level, if you're teaching meditation or maybe if you're a therapist, you do speak to people as if they have a certain kind of choice that, oh, wait a minute. When you catch yourself, when you notice that you're lost in the story of I'm a failure. It's possible to shift your attention to the present, just what's happening right now. And that's a kind of useful teaching point or a pedagogical tool or however you want to put it, or therapeutic tool. But when we really look closely, that chooser isn't really there. What we actually find is that we're lost in thought, and maybe because we've been hearing spiritual teachings or because we've been working with a psychotherapist or whatever, we're lost in thought and suddenly we kind of wake up from it, not because we try to wake up there, just this waking up happens and there's a noticing of, oh, I've been lost in this thought.
And then we remember this message we've been getting about the possibility of, oh, I can just be here now. And in some moments we can notice that the thought we're lost in is so compelling that we go back to it because it's just really compelling and addictive. And even though it's sort of like the mind says, screw being here now, I want to keep thinking about this. And then at other moments we do return and just sort of open to the present moment and feel great relief or whatever. But as soon as we kind of formulate that into a story where there's me who's either lost in thought or back in the present moment, we've gone into a conceptual story that isn't really accurate to what's actually happening when we pay attention closely.
And that story is another layer of suffering because that story leads us to think that I should be in the present moment a lot more than I am. And so I'm a failure. I've really failed. And a lot of people will say, oh, I can't meditate. All that happens is I sit there and think, well, as I see it, the point of meditation isn't that you're supposed to arrive at some incredible thoughtless state, but just to see thinking for what it is, just to see it. And there's nothing really wrong in a certain sense with anything. I mean, some things do clearly create suffering for ourselves and others, and some things bring relief and joy and happiness, but which we can notice. And that's really what's liberating is to notice for ourselves what feels good, what brings us joy, and what feels suffering, what brings suffering, and not add onto that or to see through the story that there's me in there who's supposed to always stay on this place and not go over to this place. And to recognize that a lot of thinking is quite harmless, actually. I mean, some of it is just kind of, I like to say it's mental chewing gum.
That's what the mind does. It just churns out thoughts. That's just part of what it does. And so if we're trying to get into some perpetually thoughtless place, we're always going to be failing because thoughts are going to bubble up. And when people, I've had people tell me, oh, I haven't had a thought in the last three months, and I'll just say, well, you might notice that that itself is a thought,
Speaker 1:
Right, right. As you're talking, Joan, I keep thinking about freedom, and there seems to be in this situation of here now or not, even though we're always here now, understood that there's more freedom. Would you agree? And if so, how is there more freedom?
Speaker 2:
Yes, because we're never really bound. It's only in the thought story that we are bound in some way, that we are trapped in the mind or lost in thought or whatever, not good enough. That's always in the story. And when we come back to or wake up to just the simplicity of what is this presence, this beingness, present experiencing, just as it is, the sound of traffic, the feeling of the breeze coming through the window, whatever, just the simplicity of what is. There's a freedom in that. No me in that, the me people make a big deal out of this falling away of the self or something. And I don't see it that way. To me, it's like there are many moments in everybody's ordinary day when there's no me there. You're just doing what you're doing. You're just driving the car or changing a diaper or washing the dishes, and there's no me there until suddenly a thought pops up and says something like, why am I always the one who has to change the baby's diapers or
Speaker 1:
Do the dishes?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, why am I the one that has to do the dishes or whatever? Suddenly with the arising of that kind of thought,
Suddenly there's me and maybe this other person and the dishes and my life, and suddenly all that kind of shows up. But in the moment before, it wasn't there. There was just the feeling of soapy water and dishes, and there's no me there. So it's not really this big mystical experience or something. I mean, people can have big mystical experiences, but that's not the point. And those are always going to be passing things, but it's just an ordinary when you just notice what's really happening right now, there's no me in the picture until a thought pops up. How am I doing? How am I doing with this interview? Am I doing okay? Then all of a sudden, there seems to be me, does Ron like me? Oh, then there seems to be me and Ron. And so just when those thought kinds of thoughts to pop up, it's just sort of a learning to see them as for what they are. And when we believe them and take them seriously, that's when we suffer.
Speaker 1:
Thoughts are the root of suffering.
Speaker 2:
I wouldn't say thoughts per se. I think it's more has to do with, well, certain kinds of, for one thing, some thought is creative and functional, and some thought is just, like I said, chewing gum thought. But some thought is certainly a form of suffering. But I think it's important to see that it's believing in the thought that's actually the suffering. Because for example, if I have the thought I've ruined my whole life, and I instantly see that as just a thought, it's hysterically funny because it's so absurd. You can't ruin your whole life. But if I believe it and take it seriously, and there really does seem to be me and the possibility of ruining my life, then I'm off into a train of suffering.
Speaker 1:
So Joan, you've written several books on non-duality. Can you tell us when that word is used, what is it describing then? How is it related to here now, if it is related?
Speaker 2:
Well, different people may define it differently, but just as different people may define spirituality differently, but as I see it, non-duality just simply means not to. It means there isn't any real separation or otherness. Everything is one whole unicity we could say. But even that is going too far because even then we've sort of turned unicity into a thing that we can sort of grab onto. So it's more like there just isn't any real. Those two aspects of here now that I mentioned, impermanence and presence, the ever changing and the ever present, they're both here in this moment right now. And in fact, everything that appears to be dualistic is also right here. On the one hand, you and I are perfectly aware right now that we're Joan and Ron having a conversation on a podcast on our computers, and at the same time, there's an experience.
We may not be focusing on it, but we're actually having, there's an experience of just a whole seamless happening in which there's no divisions, no borders or anything. There's just this whole arising, and those things are both happening simultaneously, and it's a way of sort of not making anything into another. So if I'm thinking, if I'm lost in thought instead of sort of going to, oh, no, I am lost in thought, that's the bad stuff. I have to get back to the good present moment. That's dualistic thinking, that's making things good and bad. And actually, I think Western thought tends to be very dualistic, whereas Eastern thought has more tended to be non-dualistic in Western thought, we have sort of had good and evil, and we have the idea that good will eventually triumph over evil. The light will triumph over the dark and all that.
Whereas Eastern thought has more always had the understanding that this manifestation could only appear in polarities. You can't have up without down. You can't have the left without the right, and there are no one-sided coins. You can't have just heads and no tails, and you can't really find the place on a coin where heads turns into tails. There's no actual boundary. They are one hole happening, heads and tails that we conceptually have divided up, but it's not like good is going to triumph over evil or something, or the light is finally going to vanquish the darkness that isn't going to happen. So more has more about maybe you could say, being at peace with everything as it is, which doesn't mean we always like it, but it's being okay with not liking it. It's like whatever's showing up, even if I'm angry or sad or upset or defensive,
Speaker 3:
That's
Speaker 2:
Just what's showing up. It's like a wave on the ocean, but it's the ocean. And I don't have to label it good or bad or take it personally as me and my triumph or my screw up. It's just a movement of life, a movement of the ocean, and there's nobody really running the show. It's all happening as one fluid happening, and no wave can ever really go off in a direction other than the ocean. It's like you can't really ruin your life. It's just not possible.
Speaker 1:
Well, that's good to know.
Speaker 2:
It's good to know. You can think that you've ruined your life, but it's not really true. It's all based on these thought ideas. So that I guess maybe that clarifies non-duality. You think of y, the yin yang symbol, the Taoist symbol with, and how it's got the light and the dark, and they kind of interpenetrate each other, and there's a light. There's
Speaker 1:
Darkness in the light, and light, the
Speaker 2:
Darkness. Darkness, light, darkness. And we experienced that in our own lives. Mean we have, for example, you and I have both experienced disability. I lost my right hand in the uterus before I was born and was born with one hand. And on the surface you could say that's a form of suffering and misfortune, but it's been a tremendous gift. It's brought me all sorts of blessings. Recently, a few years ago, I had a very serious cancer, but it was, in many ways, it was a blessing. It was a gift. And I think we've all experienced the way that that works, like the old Chinese farmer story where we think, oh, this is great, and then, oh, no, and then we think, oh, no, and then we have to move out of a place that we think, oh, no, this is terrible. And then the place we find is twice as good or our partner runs off with somebody and the marriage ends and we think, oh, this is horrible. And then we meet the love of our life that those kinds of things happen to people all the time.
Speaker 1:
In terms of the relationship between non-duality, I think you've touched on and tried to define its relationship to here. Now, it's almost seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, that when there is awareness of here now there is non-duality.
Speaker 2:
Yeah,
Speaker 1:
It's almost like, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:
There's always actually, I mean, that is the actual state of things, of things,
Speaker 1:
Just
Speaker 2:
The way there's always here now. But it's true that when we're sort of consciously aware of, so to speak, of here now when the attention is there, so to speak, then that is what you might call a non-dual experience. If you're just hearing the traffic sounds from the street, no, if you really pay attention, you'll see there's no listener and something being listened to. There's no separation there. There's just
Speaker 1:
Sound.
Speaker 2:
There's just, and the same thing. This is the old Zen thing of getting hit with the stick or something. There's just bang, and then thinking comes in and makes dualism apparent dualism by, oh, I got hit, or I heard the traffic, or The traffic is too loud, it's bothering me. Those are all kind of dualistic thoughts. And yet I would point out that the deepest understanding of non-dualism is that even non-dualism includes dualism. It includes the appearance of duality
And dualism. It includes the fact that I might think, why doesn't my neighbor turn off their stupid leaf blower? That's right. I don't like it. But when I come back, it's interesting with a sound like that, that we find irritating. It's interesting that when we come back to just really experiencing that sound without judgment, it's the same thing with physical pain, which I discovered in Zen years ago, having to sit through pain, that when you just really come back to the actual experiencing itself without the label, without the story of how this is bothering me or whatever, or when will it end? Just the actual direct experiencing of the sound of that leaf blower or the pain in the back or whatever it is, without the label, without the story, suddenly there's no me anymore. There's no me and this thing that's attacking me. Suddenly there's just what it is, and it can actually then amazingly enough, it could be interesting. It can be like, and you see that it's not a solid thing. It's changing. It's vibrating, it's moving. It's not solid. We have a word for it, leaf blower or pain. We think of it as, it makes it seem solid, but when we're actually attending to it directly, it's not solid. It comes and goes. It changes. It's vibrating, and it becomes interesting even.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I've noticed as I age, just to turn 70 this year that I have more aches and pains, and I can't just get up out of a chair and hop away like a rabbit I used to be able to do, but that it's impermanent, those little stiffness, whatever. And if I just sort of go through it, it tends to diminish. And
Speaker 2:
Speaking of aging, I wanted to say that my newest book, death, the End of Self-Improvement, is not just about death, it's also about aging, and it's about being with my mother at the end of her life and my own aging and my cancer. And so it's really about being with what, and I tried to present aging in a way where I didn't want to sort of airbrush out all the bad parts of it, so to speak, the painful parts, the gritty parts, which is a lot what our culture seems to want to do. And yet I wanted to show the beauty of it just the way it is.
Speaker 1:
Well, that was actually a question I was going to ask you about. Are the elder years a time of one view is, well, it's downhill from there, right? Loss of control, loss of functions, abilities. The other view that we hear in the culture at least is it's a time of flourishing, of finding new activities, working out new interests, meeting new people. It's a time of blossoming, actually. Do you say anything about that in the book? When you say the end of self-improvement, I think, oh, it's all downhill.
Speaker 2:
Well, when I point to the end of self-improvement, and the title was intended to be, people Laugh because it's something just really freeing. I think in that title, we're also obsessed with self-improvement. It's like, oh, thank God. Finally it's going to be over. But what I'm pointing to is not, I mean, I have spent my life involved in things that have to do with transformation, whether it's political work or psychotherapy or spiritual work. So obviously I'm interested in transformation and the ways we've been talking about, but self-improvement, this sort of obsessive focus we have on fixing me and making me finally Okay and all that. And we've approached aging in our culture in a sort of similar way, I feel like, where it's almost like a bad thing to get old. And we have anti-aging workshops, and we hear stories about 90-year-old people jumping out of airplanes book parachutes.
And the idea we get Botox and hair dye and everything we can to sort of cover up and deny aging. And to me, B, it's a wonderful natural part of life, aging in death, and it does involve all the things you described. Loss of control, loss of independence, loss of loved ones, loss of mental abilities, loss of eventually loss of everything. And I found that unique. That's an interestingly parallel thing towards the spiritual awakening journey, which is also about a loss of a lot of certainties and beliefs and sense of identity as me and all of that. And it is a kind of, I mean, for me, it's been a very rich time. I wouldn't want, it has its downside. There's no question that I go for a walk now and I'm in pain. I'm in physical pain the whole time. It's not unbearable physical pain, but it's not like I'm 20 anymore.
And so to me, it's not about denying that from my cancer. I am left with an ostomy, which means my intestine comes out my belly and empties into a bag, which has limited my life in certain ways. But it's been a great gift also in many ways. And to me, it's not about denying any of the gritty parts of aging, but embracing them, like having this ostomy and having to manage it one handed that's really been the bigger part of it. And then have just the ostomy, but I probably will never travel again. And if I were 30, maybe that would really bum me out. But I'm 72, and in a way, it's a great gift. I've spent my life sort of roaming around looking for the perfect place, and now I'm not going anywhere.
And in a way that's beautiful. It's a gift. So to me, aging, and there are things that I think there's a wisdom that comes with age, a sort of peace that comes with age, where you do have this bigger picture just naturally. You've seen the sort of span of history. You've seen how empires rise and fall, and we go left, and we go, right, and this happens. And then that happens. And so you have a different perspective. And I think there's a lot of freedom and joy in that as well as, and people die more and more of your friends die, your loved ones die. I mean, it is a time of loss in many ways. But again, it's so important to separate out thinking about all that from the actuality. If I sit around and think, oh my God, what if she dies? What if he dies? What if I end up in a nursing home? What if this? Then I'm suffering. But I'm suffering. As Mark Twain once beautifully put it, I've been through some terrible things in my life, and some of them actually happened. I'm suffering needlessly over things that may or may not happen. And if they do happen, they won't be the way I imagined them. And if I had imagined what it would be like, well, when they told me You're going to have an ostomy, it was not a happy moment.
But the reality of it is not. It's fine. It's okay.
Speaker 1:
It's okay.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. If you said, oh, hey, you're going to lose your right hand, it'd be like, oh, no. But then it happens. Well, of course I wasn't thinking about it back then. That's
Speaker 1:
Right. That's one of
Speaker 2:
The advantages of being a baby. But it's been okay. Not to say there haven't been some difficult moments. There have been, but that's part of life, that there's difficult moments.
Speaker 1:
Well, Joan, as we begin to wind down, what should I ask of you that I didn't, and is there anything you want to leave us with? I'll give you two choices there, whichever you'd like to respond to.
Speaker 2:
Oh, dear. Good question. Well, what pops into my mind is the word love for some reason, which we didn't really ever talk about. And
Speaker 1:
Well, maybe we'll have you back for part two today. Well,
Speaker 2:
No, I was just going to say I feel like one of the things I could say about presence, about just being here now is that it naturally is, there's naturally love and joy and peace in just being, even if we're going through something that's painful, there's an acceptance, which is, yeah. And just what I notice, and I've, I've been this way for a long time, but I've noticed it even more as I age and after my cancer and everything. There's just the joy in the simplest things of life, just having a glass of water, having a cup of tea or looking at the leaves colored, leaves blowing in the wind outside my window or taking a walk. Just the simple joys of life, I think because we spend a lot of our lives focused on trying to get somewhere in the future and imagining that we're going to find whatever it is, the perfect place, the perfect relationship, the perfect this or that, enlightenment, whatever, and then sort of overlooking what's actually our actual life, which is just this. And when we really tune into it, it's amazingly interesting and radiant and beautiful. And maybe it's dangerous to say that because then people think, wait a minute, am I seeing radiance and beauty? Maybe I'm not. But again, that's just thought. That's right. But if you really just drop out of thought into being here, there's something beautiful. There's something beautiful. Even in the things, the things that the wrinkles and the sags of old age, there's something beautiful, even in the things we think are not beautiful,
The cigarette butt in the gutter.
Speaker 1:
What you're saying about the love of the joy is I grew up near Shakertown Kentucky, which was a major shaker village, and of course the shakers died off because they didn't believe in having sexual intercourse.
Speaker 2:
Oh, I didn't know that about them.
Speaker 1:
Oh, and they couldn't recruit enough to keep up. But there's that wonderful shaker song that they sang about t, a gift to be Simple t, A Gift to be Free TA Gift to Come round where you ought to be. And they had a little dance that went along with it. They liked to dance and shake
Speaker 2:
Almost as good as sex. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. So our culture is so, we've got so many gadgets and things and everything now, and I mean, you and I have lived through so many changes in that regard, but I look at these young people who are just staring at their phones all the time, and it's like, I want to say, wake up. Wake up. There's a world here.
Speaker 1:
I want to say that to myself. Sometimes I get just as lost as they are.
Speaker 2:
But of course, from the non-dual perspective, that too is just what is just what's happening. And there's really no world here. Again, that's just a thought. There's just this, whatever.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Well, Joan, I want to thank you for coming on the podcast. I've learned a lot, and I have no doubt that our listeners have learned something as well. If the listeners were challenged or stimulated by something Joan has shared, I'll include her website in the show notes. You can go there, check out her books. She's also on Facebook book and periodically share some teachings there, which I always enjoy. And Jim, I just want to say you're a delight. I think one of the things that attracted me to you, and it was first through your writings, you just seem to have a delightful spirit about you, and certainly that has shown through very clearly here on the podcast today. So keep that happy spirit going. Thank you. I know you will.
Speaker 2:
I feel the same way about you. It's been really a delight being here with you and getting a chance to talk with you. So thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1:
Thank you. And thank all the listeners for tuning in today, and I wish you peace, and I'll see you down the road. And with that, this episode of All Things Contemplative comes to a close. I hope you found it interesting and informative and will join me for the next episode piece. I.