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Sadly, we ve had another mass shooting in the gun-crazy USA, where we seem to beli

eve as a nation that violence is the best solution to violence, from our drone a
ttacks overseas to our conviction that everyone should be able to possess assaul
t rifles and semi-automatic weapons with high-capacity magazines. Twenty little
children are dead. I found myself feeling a number of different emotions when th
e news first broke, one of which was rage. My rage was focused on our government
that refuses to stand up to the powerful gun lobby. It felt relieving in some w
ay to be angry at someone, to blame someone, to feel righteous. It was a way to
avoid feeling the deeper, more vulnerable emotions underneath the rage: fear, gr
ief, a sense of powerlessness and of not wanting the world to be the way it is.
But of course, the benefits of being angry are short-lived and very flimsy. It was
instantly obvious that anger is painful, that it is hurtful to me and to the wh
ole world, and that it is off the mark. Still, it carried on for awhile. There w
as an unwillingness or an inability at first to go deeper.I found myself emailin
g friends, writing the president, calling my representatives in Congress, and fi
nally sitting quietly, gradually opening myself to the feelings of fear and grie
f and powerlessness, feeling them, allowing them to be. I began asking a few Byro
n Katie questions and doing the Work on them silently: Can I really know ? And, how d
o I feel when I hold the belief that ? And what would it be like if I didn t have th
e belief that .? The rage slowly gave way to sadness and finally to a kind of peac
e, not without sorrow, and not without a prayer for the families left behind to
face what I can only imagine must be heart-wrenching pain. The phrase, I surrende
r kept coming up, not as an expression of defeat or hopelessness, but as a kind o
f centering prayer, a recognition that surrender is at the heart of letting go a
nd falling into Truth. Do I blame the shooter? No. Not really. I know that no on
e would do this if they had any real sense of having a choice, and I know that t
he shooter s rage is fundamentally no different from my own rage, and that only by
the grace of God (otherwise known as the luck of the draw) has there been great
er mental and emotional stability here, an ability to deal with rage in less des
tructive, less catastrophic ways than those to which the shooter felt irresistib
ly and compulsively drawn. For reasons having to do with my conditioning, I find
it easier to have that kind of compassionate understanding for the shooter than
to have it for those who love their guns and oppose any form of gun control. In
Oregon, where I live, gun sales have gone off the charts since the massacre. Mo
re people are arming themselves with bigger and more powerful weapons. So what d
oes it mean to surrender?
For me, it doesn t mean not caring
or not expressing my opinion. It has to do with discovering, in this moment, whe
ther I feel that same sense that the gun-buyers feel of needing to be armed (not
with a gun, in my case, but with opinions and beliefs, or with self-righteous r
age, or with cynicism and despair), and discovering whether I, too, am seeing en
emies and others who deserve to be wiped out (if only in my mind) in a fit of viol
ent rage designed to take away my pain.
My prayer today is that we may all find the place of acceptance and love, the pl
ace of true compassion, the placeless place Here / Now where all of this can be
here, as it is: the violence, the loss, the sorrow, the rage, the gut-wrenching
pain and grief, the imperfections of our world and of each one of us
where it ca
n all perhaps be transmuted by the fire of awareness into that deep welcoming an
d surrender that sees only God everywhere.
Is that possible?
That s not a question to answer. It s a question to live with. When we speak of givi
ng complete, nonjudgmental attention to the present moment, accepting what is an
d allowing it to be as it is, or when we say everything is perfect as it, this i
s sometimes misunderstood. No one is saying we shouldn t identify problems (a flat
tire, global warming, alcohol addiction, a broken bone), or that we shouldn t ima
gine, seek out, or work to bring about constructive solutions if we are so moved.
ALL of that is part of this seamless and all-inclusive happening. The acceptance
that is being pointed to is absolutely immediate right here, right now, not a sec
ond or a minute from now and the perfection of what is INCLUDES not only the probl
ems but also the noticing of problems, the impulse to fix and heal things, and t
he actions that emerge from those impulses.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but it s actually deeply healing and transformative


to simply attend to and fully accept the way things are right now in this momen
t (the tire is flat, the ice caps are melting, I was unable to resist having thi
s 4th drink, my leg is in pain and I can t walk). That doesn t mean life won t move us
to seek a solution in the next moment. It means that right now, in this instant
, we re simply seeing and acknowledging the reality of how life actually IS. And w
hen there is simply awareness without thought, we can t even say that the tire is fla
t or the ice caps are melting, because even that is an abstraction and a story the ba
re actuality is prior to thought. It is pure sensation energy vibration not those word
s, but the living actuality to which they point. That living actuality has no pl
otline, no central character, no past or future. And out of that simple awarenes
s or nonjudgmental acceptance, intelligent action (or non-action) arises. We may
change the tire, join a movement to stop climate change, go into a recovery pro
gram, or go to the hospital to have our broken leg attended to. (Or we might do
something completely different there is no single, correct intelligent action ).
If we pay attention, we can perhaps notice the difference between the bare awari
ng of what is simple, open, nonjudgmental attention and the movement of thought (lab
eling, evaluating, judging, analyzing, story-telling). We re not saying thought is
bad or suggesting that we should strive to be entirely free of thinking thought h
as its place we re simply noticing the difference between thinking and awaring. Awar
eness isn t seeking a solution or passing judgment it is simply AWARE. It accepts ev
erything and resists nothing. It beholds everything equally. It has no agenda. I
t is nondual, meaning that in awareness, there is no separation between awarenes
s and content we have different words for purposes of communicating, but EXPERIENT
IALLY (in awareness without thought), awareness/content is one whole, undivided,
seamless happening. There is no separation. Dualism is a creation of thought. I
t only exists notionally or conceptually. Thought divides, reifies, categorizes,
compares, evaluates and strategizes. It creates the illusory (conceptual) divis
ion between me and my problem. (Or between subject and object, or awareness and cont
ent). If we re trying to be aware, or doing acceptance or being aware SO THAT THE PROBL
EM WILL GO AWAY, that s not bare awareness, that s the movement of thought, operating
from an agenda. At the center of that agenda is the thought-sense of me, the one
with a problem. Bare awareness is undivided, whole, empty of self. It simply SEE
S what is, without separation. There is no owner of awareness.
Awareness has an intelligence that thought does not have. Awareness is alive and
unconditioned, whereas thought is mechanical and conditioned. When there is res
istance to how life actually is, when we are caught up in idealistic notions of
how it should and should not be, the actions that arise from those habitual patterns
of thought tend to repeat the same old grooves again and again. (Of course, tha
t too is all the happening of life itself and in that moment could not be otherw
ise). If we think about all this, it may get confusing, but if we rely on actual
, direct experience awareness rather than thought everything clarifies itself.
Thought is a story-teller. It creates narratives. It comes up with stories and t
hen forgets they are fictional. It tells stories like, "I m a hopeless case becaus
e of my traumatic past, doomed to a life of addiction and depression, and I ll nev
er be able to have the spiritual experiences other people have because I m too tra
umatized, and we BELIEVE these stories that the mind has concocted out of thin ai
r. They SEEM very believable just the way the story and the characters in a movie
seem real. We think there really IS a me who has been traumatized and who is now h
opelessly doomed as a result. But the truth is, this me and the whole story of my l
ife is a creation of smoke and mirrors. And it doesn t really matter whether what a
ppears Here / Now is expanded or contracted, tense or relaxed, bright or dull, p
leasant or unpleasant. None of it is personal it has no owner, no author and ALL of
it is the happening of life.
Taking the things in our lives that appe
ar problematic personally, turning them into an identity and giving them meaning
is a form of suffering, as is fighting them and trying to get rid of them. With
my fingerbiting compulsion that still flares up, for example, I no longer belie
ve this compulsion means something about me that "I'm a spiritual failure" or a rea
l loser, as I used to believe. I've come to genuinely accept that this compulsion

may continue to show up periodically for the rest of my life, and I'm at peace
with that possibility. It might end forever in the next instant. But it doesn t ma
tter either way. Yes, if it ended, that would be more pleasant for me, but life
is not always pleasant. And I notice that when there is AWARENESS of fingerbitin
g awareness without any overlay of thought, which could also be called total accep
tance that it isn t even fingerbiting anymore. It is simply energy, movement, sensatio
n no-thing in particular. When the compulsion happens, it is a tense, unpleasant,
contracted experience. But I no longer have some idea that I (this character) must
be perpetually relaxed and open and blissful. The true I, which is Life Itself,
has no problem with contraction, tension, depression, anxiety or dis-ease. It i
ncludes everything.
There's always only this ever-present, ever-changing Here / Now, however it is.
And the more desire and push there is to have special or different or better exp
eriences, or the more regret and hopelessness over not having them, the more lik
ely they are to evade us...sort of like what happens when we try really hard to
fall asleep while simultaneously thinking about all the ways a sleepless night w
ill ruin our life. In the end, experiences are just experiences...whether it is
an experience of contraction or an experience of expansion. And no experience is
there all the time. Magnificent experiences pass away and really don t mean anyth
ing.
Life can only appear in polarities, but the polar opposites (contraction and ex
pansion, tension and relaxation, agony and bliss, light and dark, enlightenment
and delusion, good and bad, birth and death) are not opposing forces in conflict
with each other a conflict in which one will eventually defeat the other, as we o
ften tend to think but rather, they are interrelated and interdependent aspects of
one whole harmonious arising. Enlightenment is not about me being permanently exp
anded, relaxed and blissed out. It is the recognition that nothing is separate,
that everything is included, that there is only THIS and that no thing (including m
e ) has any actual substance. There is only impermanence, which sounds scary if we
still think there are things that are impermanent. But this impermanence is so th
orough-going that no-thing ever even forms to be impermanent. Can you sense the
freedom, the joy, the cosmic giggle? (If you can't, don't worry, it doesn't matt
er).
Every apparent person is an ever-changing dance inseparable from everything else
in the universe. And no two dances are exactly alike. We each have a totally un
ique part to play in the Great Dance of Life. At times, our different roles seem
to clash and conflict (those on the political left vs. those on the political r
ight, the so-called 1% vs. the so-called 99%, investment bankers vs. spiritual r
enunciates, vegetarians vs. carnivores, Buddhists vs. Advaitans, radical feminis
ts vs. religious fundamentalists, soldiers vs. pacifists). But the apparent clas
h and conflict is all in perfect, interdependent harmony at a deeper level. Libe
ration might be described as the ability to play our particular part dance our uni
que dance to the fullest while not losing sight of the larger context, the unicity
that includes it all. Then we can express our opinions and do whatever life mov
es us to do, but without imagining that the whole drama (or the whole universe)
is quite as serious (or as substantial and permanent) as it often seems to be, o
r that the forces of good should (or will) eventually triumph over the forces of
evil. We see that no-thing is really happening in the way we think it is. We ma
y still experience pain, illness, disability, loss, contraction, compulsion, dep
ression or anxiety but it no longer seems like a personal insult or a personal fai
ling. It is simply the ever-changing texture of life an inexplicable, unavoidable,
ungraspable, indivisible, fluid happening.

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