In her ‘Daily Nonduality‘ newsletter this morning, ‘We never walk alone‘, Kat van Oudheusden touches on very much the point I was groping after yesterday, in her typically direct and no-nonsense way:

Waking up to our nondual nature is never a solo affair, even if it convincingly seems that way.

There is no lone hero (or anti-hero) on a journey to their awakening. Once there is recognition of no-self, the whole concept of individual awakening stops making sense.

Awakening is collective because we’re not separate.

There is only everything all at once. And whatever is going on, is going on as all of it: an intertwining, interacting, and interbeing of apparent things that are not even separate.

We are completely embedded in THIS. There is no boundary between what I have learned to call me and reality. It’s only that our learned thoughts — now fixed beliefs — convincingly uphold this illusion of separation.

It’s not the human body that awakens. Nor is there a separate mind, soul, or self to whom awakening can happen.

The movement of awakening (if we can even call it that) is the movement of one Being, expressed as endless shapes and forms.

The Ocean is waving us.

It is waving us while we believe ourselves to be separate waves, waving us as we wake up to the illusion of it, waving us as we try to communicate it …

Meanwhile, we are all already that, whether we realize it or not.

Kat van Oudheusden’s words here are an almost uncanny echo  – certainly a synchronicity – of a post entitled ‘Hopeless?‘ that I wrote back in 2021, when the COVID-19 pandemic was still a daily threat. I fully intended merely to quote from it here, but I see that it pretty much says everything I would want to say again – perhaps with more immediacy and conviction than I could summon now – so I shall take the liberty of reproducing it in full below:

—

In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön writes,

Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness…

It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope…

Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or the hope that there’s anywhere to hide.

This brings us close to what has become for me a key issue in practice and in experience. Chödrön goes on to point out that this sense of hopelessness, of “nowhere to turn” and no one to turn to, lies at the heart of non-theism. There is no cosmic babysitter, she explains: “In a non-theistic state of mind, abandoning hope is an affirmation, the beginning of the beginning.”

Now, there is a decided attraction in such a point of view. For all the relinquishment of the sense of “a solid, separate self” it is fatally easy, down this road, to see oneself as some kind of Raymond Chandler anti-hero, hat pulled low, collar turned to the rainy night, face starkly outlined by the light of a match held in cupped hands. “There’s no hope now, baby. And y’know, that’s okay…” The End.

The Buddhist opposite, I guess, is shinjin. Here the practitioner is giving up not hope, but self-reliance. She abandons her self to the tariki, the “other-power” of Amida Buddha inherent in the nembutsu, the core practice of Pureland Buddhism. As Jeff Wilson points out,

The nembutsu that we say, that others can hear, is only the tip of the shinjin iceberg; the nembutsu we recite is only the most visible sign of the working of Other Power within the shadowy ego-self. That inner working of shinjin may show through as nembutsu, but it can also show through in a hug, a gift, a kind word, laughter.

Nembutsu is a vital avenue for expressing our faith, but it need not be taken for the whole iceberg. There’s really no limit to the possibilities of expression of the trusting heart….

Humility and trust go hand in hand, forming the second part of the true trusting mind. Shinjin is another name for this development of humility-entrusting.

Jeff Wilson, Buddhism of the Heart: Reflections on Shin Buddhism and Inner Togetherness [p.85]

The issue of humility is one, of course, with which I had continually to struggle during my long years as a Christian contemplative. My practice was always the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” – a prayer repeated in very much the same manner as the nembutsu, formally for regular periods each day, and spontaneously from time to time for the rest of the day – and night, too, given the way it tends to pop up whenever one turns over in the night, or half-wakes to look at the clock.

The Nembutsu and the Jesus Prayer are both ways of abandonment: not of the abandonment of hope so much as the abandonment of self-will, of giving up not hope but self-reliance, of giving up oneself into the continuum of something not other but utterly interpenetrating. Jean Pierre de Caussade puts it solidly (in Christian terms of course) in his title Abandonment to Divine Providence or The Sacrament of the Present Moment. The fall out of self is the fall into now, into the ground of being, that isness that is always now and in which all beings rest.

The more I go on, the more fundamental this abandonment seems to be for me. However threadbare devotional practice can be, however compromised and compromising the religions we humans build around our moments of clarity and truth, there is no way past the frailty and limitation of the self, its littleness and its bombu imperfection. All its struggles for self-validation will sooner or later have to be given up in death anyway. To let it dissolve in light is no loss, but limitless grace.

[Hopeless? originally published on September 13, 2021]