When we are silent and still, we come in touch with an energetic vibrancy that we might call formless presence, pure consciousness or spirit. No words can capture it. This aware, awake presence feels open, vast, spacious, uncontained, boundless, limitless, empty and immensely alive. It is empty of any place to land or anything to grab onto. It cannot be objectified. It isn’t a “thing” among other things, or an idea to believe in…

This entire phenomenal world is a movement of that radiant darkness, a waving of the great formless ocean… Each wave includes and is a movement of the whole ocean. The ocean can’t be pulled apart or grasped and held onto. Life is like this. Consciousness is like this. We can only be this. And we already are this. This is all there is.

But consciousness can be lost in its own creations, in the very convincing illusion of separate, persisting, independent forms, and in the illusion of being a separate self existing in an apparently outside world. Consciousness can be mesmerized by the narratives and dramas in the ever-changing movies of waking and dreaming life. These movies can be appreciated if we know they are fictions, but when we take them too seriously and become identified as the main character, suffering follows. What to do? …

Maybe simply see what you are doing! Stop, look and listen. Explore what is. See how this living reality actually is, instead of how you think it is. And as I always say, go with whatever works, whatever sets you free. That can change over time, and what helps one person may not help another. You have to find what works for you in THIS moment here and now. And don’t worry about whether it might be “dualistic” or “not advanced enough.” Everything has its time and place. And it’s all happening by itself! It’s all an impersonal movement of the whole. The individual, apparently autonomous author-doer is an illusion. Nothing can ever be other than exactly how it is. You truly can’t get it wrong. The problem is always imaginary…

No metaphor or analogy is ever perfect. The word is not the thing to which it points. The map is not the territory it helps us to navigate. So the invitation in spirituality is always to put the book down and dive deeply into the territory. To be still. To stop, look and listen. To be this vast listening presence without borders or seams.

Not someday. Not forever after. Not “me” being “that.” But right here, right now, noticing that this is how it always already is…

Joan Tollifson, What Really Works

It always comes down to this. There’s no method, no dogma, no set of rules that dictates what we should believe, let alone practice. All the names, all the structures and doctrines – they are only metaphors, ways we have found for a moment to talk about that which is inaccessible to words. Because we have to try – we have to tell each other. We have to try and share what we have seen: this vast and living ground, this utter isness, this no-thing that is before all things.

What we call it – God, rigpa, Being – matters no more than how we get there – shikantaza, Centering Prayer, vipassana – which is to say that it matters to the one practising, matters absolutely in is own time; and yet times change. Tollifson’s wisdom is to see this, “Everything has its time and place. And it’s all happening by itself!” Even the author of the Old Testament book of Proverbs saw it, all those years ago: “All our steps are ordered by the LORD; how then can we understand our own ways?” (Proverbs 20:24 NRSV)

We don’t have to agonise over this, desperately wondering if we’ve made the right choice, taken the right path, subscribed to the right statement of faith. There is no judgement that awaits us. Where we are is where we need to be. All we need is trust, and a place to sit.