On July 4th, 2025, I sat down in the evening to do my meditation practice. Typically, I would settle into my heart center, feel the divine presence there, and repeat the name of “Rama”. This was my most recent configuration of ‘meditation practice’ up until now: feeling into the central channel, bringing awareness into the heart, and feeling into the place where I felt divinity spring forth from within. This would often bring about a deep feeling of peace and bliss in my being, but there was still an element of seeking involved. I was seeking union with the divine and I desired the state of bliss that I had experienced so many times in the past. I wanted that bliss and nothing else. If I did my practice and did not land in the ecstatic realms of bliss I would often become disappointed.
But this all changed on the evening of July 4th. When I sat down that night I immediately knew something was different. There was no impetus or pull to do any practice. To my surprise I found I couldn’t do japa or even think of Rama. Instead, I just sat and stared at the wall. If a thought or impulse came into the mind I instantly witnessed it, and it would vanish. As this went on a light began to build in the room. Or was it inside myself? Inside and outside seemed to have merged, it was hard to tell the difference. The mind no longer appeared in its usual dominate fashion. In fact, there didn’t seem to be a mind at all! I then had an experience of effortless, pure awareness. There was not bliss in the way that the kundalini energies bring bliss to the system when they move through the heart center, but there was an all-pervading peace. There was also a recognition that I did not need to do anything for this peace. It was seeping out of me like a mountain spring. There was nothing to do to attain it, it was just there, pouring out of me. I knew without a doubt that I was this peace, that I am this peace, and have always been this peace.
I am not exactly sure how long this lasted but eventually my ‘mind’ came back online and I returned to a more ‘normal’ state of consciousness an hour or two later, but now with a deep recognition of this true home of clear, effortless awareness. A couple days after this experience I remembered that this way of sitting and observing the mind is called shikantaza, or “themeless sitting”, a practice in zen where the meditator sits facing an empty wall and allows anything and everything to come up on the screen of the mind. As thoughts and visions appear they are simply witnessed. They are not indulged, there is no ‘biting’ into them, and there is no entertaining them. Nor are they turned away. This is a totally neutral observation. What appears on the screen of mind is simply seen. A fascinating thing happens to the mind when it is not engaged with but rather witnessed. It becomes quiet. This can cause the meditator to see that there is something else besides the mind available to them. By abiding in the field of awareness, the mind is totally seen through. Thoughts lose their power when nothing is given to them, and the grasping nature of the mind is dropped.
After recognizing this as shikantaza I was again in meditation a couple days later, staring at the empty wall, and a phrase appeared on the screen of my mind that read ‘Silent Illumination of the Mind’. I plugged that into Google and found that ‘silent illumination’ is another name for shikantaza. It is also part of the title of a book on Zen Master Hongzhi’s teachings. The full title reads Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi. The next day I popped into the used bookstore and found they had a copy, so I brought it home with me. From one of the first pages I read, “The practice of true reality is simply to sit serenely in silent introspection. When you have fathomed this you cannot be turned around by external causes and conditions. This empty, wide open mind is subtly and correctly illuminating. Spacious and content, without confusion from inner thoughts of grasping, effectively overcome habitual behavior and realize the self that is not possessed by emotions.”
A couple days later I was picking up my partner from the bookstore and decided to take a quick glance to see if anything wanted to come home with me. My eyes came to land on a title called Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness. I purchased the book and took it home with me, a little giddy that the universe granted me another gift. It turns out to be written by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher many ages ago by the name Padmasambhava. The language is a little different than zen but it clearly points to the same awareness that Hongzhi was speaking from: “When you look upward into the space of the sky outside yourself, if there are no thoughts occurring that are emanations being projected, and when you look inward at your own mind inside yourself, if there exists no projectionist who projects thoughts by thinking them, then your own subtle mind will become lucidly clear without anything being projected. Since the Clear Light of your own intrinsic awareness is empty, it is the Dharmakaya (Ultimate Reality); And this is like the sun rising in a cloudless illuminated sky. Even though this light cannot be said to possess a particular shape or form, nevertheless, it can be fully known.”
This teaching wasn’t exactly new to me. It was essentially what Ed Muzika and Papaji had been telling me for years. Ed’s teachings can be crystallized down to “just shut up and relax” and “become dumb as a rock” (or drop the intellectual/conceptual understandings). When combining those two we have a powerful cocktail for dropping the mind habits and seeing/feeling into ourselves more clearly. Before I met Ed I had fallen in love with Papaji’s teachings and the message was basically the same. Papaji would tell his students to “just keep quiet”, “don’t stir a single thought”, and remain effortlessly in this silence until the Truth announced itself within.
I can even remember back to my ten years practicing zen, sitting three to four sesshin retreats a year, and having run-ins with this luminous awareness, empty mind, spacious bliss-body, but I never recognized it as my true nature. I was so locked into an idea of what awakening was going to be like. I had created from imagination and speculation some image of realization and so far nothing had lived up to that image. And when little glimpses of truth would come to me they were far less glorious than what I thought it would be like. The simple peace of my own Being was too simple and didn’t have the fireworks I thought were appropriate for such an occasion as realizing my self-nature.
Now it’s true that I did experience a light building up within me that evening of the 4th. But it was far from being an explosion of any kind. It was soft and gentle. It came up on me like a whisper. It was secondary to the fact that I was abiding in clear awareness without the added filters of the mind.
I have experienced many phenomena associated with the kundalini energies. This has been going on for years. Visitations from the Hindu God’s and seeing lights of various kinds wasn’t anything new. I’ve experienced countless meetings of this kind. But this was something different. There was nothing to grasp, nowhere to go, and nothing to achieve. Not even a persona to uphold. Just this bright, clear awareness and a peace that seemed to be vibrating up from the ground of my own Self. Ah, so simple! So clear! So luminous! So spacious!
I’ve been laughing a lot since this experience, thinking back to all the years of struggle and efforting. I know everything has its place, including effort and practice. But now I see something else of greater importance. Papaji called it vigilance. In a way it can be seen as effort but it has a different feel for me. Keeping vigilance over the mind is of the greatest importance to me now. Keeping watch over the mind, seeing its tendencies and tricks, seeing through all of the mind’s imaginings, watching how the mind goes quiet when vigilance is upheld and how there is a subtle turning from the fantasy of mind back to the sea of awareness. Then, as the peace, clarity, and inner silence that is intrinsic in our own Self begins to reveal itself as we abide in the awareness, this experience becomes less subtle and more obvious.
The pure awareness is always there. It is a vast sea of luminosity, empty of all mind phenomena. We can dwell in this awareness as awareness itself. We have a choice every day, in every moment, when we find ourselves committed to the imagined heavens and hells of our mind’s own creation, to come back home to this awareness.
I am not at the point of realizing I am always at home. For me I will continue to keep vigilant watch over my mind. But everything has a different flavor now. And the luminous awareness is always shining. Sometimes I just have to take a break from work and sit on the bench in the back of the building under the tree that shades the garden, breathe a few times, slowly, looking at the large rock that someone intentionally placed in the garden, seeing its relationship with the surrounding plant life, how it stands so free and still, and has a deep presence of its own, and then I notice my own shining within the realm that comes prior to the mind. Sometimes that’s all it takes. And sometimes I notice the awareness is with me throughout the whole day, and all my actions spring forth from emptiness to meet the demands of the day. This is another great mystery I am exploring. How we know what to do, perform our duty, and need not employ the mind for any of it!
A few days after this experience I was sitting with my partner and I invited her to meditate with me in the style of shikantaza, or silent illumination, or seeing with naked awareness. I guided her in the simple process of noticing when a thought or imagination was coming from the mind, how we have a choice to not engage with it but to just witness it. How there is the realm of awareness and from that we see the various activities of the mind without indulging them, and how there begins to build within, as an inner recognition, a differentiation between awareness and mind. We become familiar with the terrain of each, and it becomes easier to see when we are caught in the illusion of mind or when we are witnessing mind from awareness without engaging in mind. I said these few things and then we just sat in the silence for 30 minutes or so. When we finished our meditation she reported that she had never experienced that depth of silence in her own self and that she could feel the awareness in her as a type of “shining”.
It’s so easy to start taking dips in this sea of awareness. Maybe, first we put a toe in, then we find ourselves waist deep, then another time we are up to our neck, a later time we are submerged completely and there is a whole ocean beneath us and we’ve yet to explore a fraction of it. Then for the rest of our life we see how far down we can go, effortlessly sinking into ourselves. It’s all effortless now. Resting in my Self with nowhere else to go. Exploring the infinite subtlety of This. What joy! What light! What emptiness! And love, yes love too. But love is something that just happens now. It is self-arising just like awareness. It doesn’t need to be sought. It shines out of us just like gratitude, peace, joy and the openness to be of service to others. This isn’t something which chooses one moment to be present and another moment to be withheld. It does not need to be forcefully conjured up. It is ever-present. This love doesn’t need to be sought, it simply shines out of us from the ground of pure Being.
From my time spent practicing zen, various passages of the chants that we would recite during retreat are starting to emerge within me from time to time, resurfacing, reminding me of their truth:
“From the very beginning all beings are Buddha. Like water and ice, without water no ice, outside us, no Buddhas. Like one in water crying, ‘I thirst!’. Like a child of rich birth wandering poor on this earth, we endlessly circle the six worlds.”
“How vast is the heaven of boundless samadhi! How bright and transparent the moonlight of wisdom! What is there outside us? What is there we lack? Nirvana is openly shown to our eyes. This earth where we stand is the pure lotus land, and this very body the body of Buddha.”
“Cut off all useless thoughts and words and there’s nowhere you cannot go. Returning to the root itself you’ll find the meaning of all things.”
“Just let go now of clinging mind, and all things are just as they are; in essence nothing goes or stays”.
“If mind does not discriminate, all things are as they are, as One. To go to this mysterious Source frees us from all entanglements.”
“All is self-revealing, void and clear, without exerting power of mind.”
Often I do not realize the wisdom of certain teachings that come my way until a much later time. They may become seeds that end up sprouting and then flowering at the appropriate time, when I am relaxed and not seeking anything. The inner relaxation is like preparing the soil so the seed can take root. Keeping the vigilance is like removing the weeds (thoughts) that threaten to choke out the primal seed of Awareness/Beingness. The peace and clarity that comes from abiding in awareness is like the blossom opening and radiating it’s beauty.
It has been such a joy to reconnect with the direct, simple approach of zen. Although I don’t think there is any one tradition that is superior to the rest. I never needed to leave the church for my self-nature to arise and announce itself. And I never needed to leave zen for an Advaita Vedanta teacher. But I did, and that’s just how my story unfolded. Each of those paths held teachings in a particular pattern that I was ready to hear at that time in my life. They also held teachings that would blossom at a later time when I was ready to let them live within me, ready to give up seeking and finally rest in the clear light of awareness.
One of the Christian or Biblical teachings that has come to resurface and sprout just a week ago has to do with the Tree of Life. This is referenced in the book of Genesis in the story of Adam and Eve. In the Garden of Eden there were two trees, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. When Adam and Eve took and ate from the Tree of Knowledge they began the decent into duality, the realm of the mind, and conceptual thinking. This is akin to ‘biting’ into the juicy thoughts that the mind conjures up.
This all resurfaced when my partner and I watched the movie “The Fountain” the other night. Without sharing too many details from that movie I’ll just say that the Tree of Life is involved. One of the main take-aways for me was the theme of letting go of the desire for immortality, or to conquer death from an intellectual standpoint, because that can never work. The end of the body/mind is the end of life, from the ego point of view. When the body goes, that’s it, end of story for the mind. And no matter how much the mind works at trying to achieve immortality it can never succeed. That is not the realm of the mind. The mind cannot touch it.
Here immortality is synonymous with the pursuit of enlightenment, another ‘thing’ the mind cannot touch. The awakened self is immortal, not in a physical sense but from the point of view of our indestructible self-nature. The Tree of Life represents the Clear Light of our own Self, this ‘empty field of luminous awareness’ as some of the Buddhist teachers refer to it. The Tree of Life is unity consciousness, wholeness, oneness, Buddha-nature, uncontrived awareness, the realm prior to the mind. Each of us has the Tree of Life within us. In fact we ARE the Tree of Life, it lives through us as we abide in the clear light of awareness.
The day after we watched this movie my partner comes home with a large tapestry that was gifted to her. She unfolds it and there is an image of a large tree. On this tree are various flowers in full bloom, and various birds and animals. In the center of the tree is a basket hanging from one of the branches with flowers bursting out of it. This beautiful Tree of Life now adorns the wall where we once hung pictures of all the saints, Gods and Goddesses that were major influences in our life. We had been wondering what was going to go up on the wall several days before when we had taken all the images down. In a meditation my partner had a vision of the wall being naked, bare (also another pointer at our ‘naked awareness’!). So we took all the images down. Our question was answered brilliantly by the universe in the gift of the Tree of Life tapestry.
About a month prior to my experience on July 4th I had been gifted a picture of Papaji. A day before that I had an experience in meditation where I saw Papaji in the heart center on the right side of my chest. I made no mention of this to my friend who gifted me the beautiful, framed image until after he presented it to me. This was a bit of foreshadowing from the universe. Papaji loved the Buddha. Even on his deathbed he was continually pointing to true nature, responding to his devotees’ inquiries into how he was feeling by asking them, “Where is the Buddha? Where is the Buddha?”. Papaji was the guide who ultimately pointed me back to the Buddha, to simplicity, to the direct clear light of my own awareness. The way that unfolded is still a mystery to me. I feel such a deep gratitude to all my teachers and guides: Papaji, Ed Muzika, Robert Adams, Ramana, Shakyamuni, and to all my zen teachers who watched me fail time after time at answering my koan.
Nothing is hidden. It is always in plain sight. What is revealed in the absence of mind-clinging is the immaculate shining of your own Self. It is self-arising, self-evident, and self-shining. This Self has always been shining. It is a radiant sun, a wide-open sky. Self-perfected, what could we possibly do to improve this radiance? It is Simplicity. It is resting in your own Self with nothing to do to make strides towards any spiritual goal. As mind activity drops away you see how radiant your ‘original face’ has always been.
I ask within, “now what?”. Immediately, “just stay here!”. Dwell in this endlessly. Stay here in the ‘natural state’, as the Tibetan Buddhists call it, or ‘ordinary mind’ in zen. Where else is there to go? Garab Dorje, Tibetan Master, says, “In this, the simplest of approaches, without thought, naturally relaxed and with nothing to contemplate or do, we merely abide. We are not peering into the beyond or hankering for special feelings or visions. We refrain from grasping at what is ineffable or conceptualizing what is by its very nature inconceivable.”
As one of my teachers, Ed Muzika, often says, “Nothing to do, nowhere to go, no-one to be”. I’ve ruminated over those words and felt the depth of their truth for many years now, but only recently am I realizing the joy inherent in those words. What a relief! One time, in satsang, Ed said to all of us, something like this, “I’m giving you all a permission slip to roam the halls during class. You’re free.”
Anytime you like, you can write yourself a permission slip to exit the mind and roam the halls of your own Being. You need not consult with anyone. Your own Self holds the master key to open the door and let you out of class. You’re free.
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