Joan Tollifson's "awakening" seems to be mindfulness, basically

I'm continuing to enjoy Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp. As noted before, she has an approach to spirituality, and life, that resonates with me. Simple. Clear. Non-dogmatic. 

But I'm coming to believe that as distinctive as her views are, they seem to boil down to a familiar subject: mindfulness.

Since Tollifson doesn't use this term in her writing and speaking -- at least, I haven't come across it yet -- at first I thought that her worldview was founded in the disciplines mentioned on the back cover of Nothing to Grasp in an "About the Author" section: 

Joan Tollifson has an affinity with Advaita, Buddhism and radical nonduality, but she belongs to no tradition.

(By the way, her web site says that she currently lives in southern Oregon, my state. Good choice, Joan.)

However, Tollifson's favorite notion is Here/Now. That's decidedly mindful. She also favors sensory experience and action over thinking as much as possible. That's decidedly mindful. And she says that everything Here/Now is to be embraced, pain as well as pleasure, sadness as well as happiness, and so on. That's decidedly mindful.

This passage illustrates what I'm talking about. It's more flowery than most writings on mindfulness, but Tollifson has a poetic sensibility.

The so-called journey of spiritual awakening is not about arriving somewhere else or acquiring anything new. It is about recognizing what is most obvious, and seeing through (or waking up from) the false ideas and mirage-like imaginations that seemingly obscure what is right in front of us most intimate, closer than our breath, impossible to actually avoid or overlook. 

When we hear words like awakening or enlightenment, we tend to imagine that "I" might one day cross some magic line in the sand and become an "awakened person," forever after established in some perfect (and hopefully permanently pleasant) state. This is fantasy and illusion. This way of thinking is precisely what awakening wakes up from.

In fact, awakening or enlightenment is always only about Here/Now. This is the jewel beyond all price. This jewel is inconceivable and unimaginable not because it is something mysterious and esoteric and far away, but because it is so close, so all-inclusive, and so seemingly ordinary.  Although this aware presence is invisible, it is visible everywhere! It is the whole universe, and it is what remains when the whole universe disappears.

Is the mind trying to grasp what that is? Is there a thought that "I don't get it"?

To awaken is to see through this movement of the thinking mind, and to simply be awake here and now, hearing the traffic sounds and the bird songs, breathing, seeing the colors and shapes of this moment. This is effortless because we can't not be here, present and aware, doing whatever we are doing.

But thought has the ability to convince us that we are separate from our experience, that we are a fragment lost in an alien world, a ship on the ocean in danger of sinking. One very common way of seemingly overlooking the jewel is by searching for it "out there" somewhere. 

Thus they say in Buddhism that if you see the Buddha on the road, kill it. In other words, if you imagine that Ultimate Reality is something outside of you, something you can objectify, something you find or lose -- a person, an event, an experience, a state, a memory, an idea, an understanding, a belief -- then you must kill it.

You must wake up. When you wake up, there is nothing outside of you. You are no-thing and everything.

If you try to pay attention to awareness or to the One Immutable Self, you objectify it -- you make it into something outside of you. Whatever you imagine you see or find or experience is some subtle conceptual object. This same thing happens if you try to identify "yourself" with awareness. You objectify both "yourself" and "awareness," divide them (mentally) into two, and then try to merge these two (imaginary) objects and make them identical.

This takes lots of mental efforting and imagination. And whatever experience of unity and expansion you manage to have, it inevitably disappears, leaving you with the belief that you've lost it and then the frustrating task of trying to recapture it.

On the other hand, if you stop all such convoluted efforts and simply relax to what is effortlessly occurring -- hearing, seeing, sensing, breathing, awaking, being -- then you realize you already are present as this whole undivided happening Here/Now. 

So instead of trying to get this, or do this, or identify as this, simply be this, which actually you can't not be. Even if a train of thought captures your attention and a mental movie unfolds in the imagination, this too is simply another movement of this undivided happening.

Comments

[Appreciative Reader]

Great post, enjoyed reading.

Reminds me how negligent I've been with my practice. You realize how ultimately pointless it all is, and yet you end up getting all caught up in the whole hundred and ten issues that keep urgently clamoring for your time and attention, until you find yourself up to your neck in this nonsense, and quietude, and disinterested practice, get thrown out the window.

I'd liked to have started off new year with a long, hard-core retreat, to get my mindfulness gears back in place. But no way I can do that this month, or the next either; and after that, who knows what'll come up.

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Although: I'm a bit skeptical about "awakening" per se. I'm skeptical there's such a thing at all. Mindfulness, sure; intellectual understanding of what the mind is, and what the self is, sure. But a direct understanding of that reality, a direct understanding that the earth goes around the sun, I'm skeptical that's even a thing. I kind of suspect she's merely channeling what she's read and been taught, is all.

Maybe I'm wrong. In fact, I hope, very much, that I'm wrong. I'm treading the same path, after all; and maybe, if I'm wrong, then I'll one day know, at first hand, what she's talking about exactly, this thing that's clearly beyond merely the exercise of everyday mindfulness and an intellectual understanding of what all of this amounts to, maybe I'll one day end up understanding and experiencing what his "awakening" thing really is. Maybe, God willing, Buddha willing, The Mighty Flying Spaghetti Monster willing.

[Ron E]

I tend to agree with Joan that enlightenment is grossly exaggerated and misunderstood and more to do with the realization that we are already know this yet covered over with habitual abstract and self-perpetual thinking.

[Appreciative Reader]

Realization intellectually, do you mean, Ron? If that's what you mean, and what you think she means, then that's reasonable, sure.

But that "realization" can be had without ever having meditated, ever. ...And nor would that correspond with the Buddha's "awakening", which, per lore, was definitely a direct, experiential seeing of suchness, not merely intellectual understanding. ...And if the awakening she alludes to is intellectual understanding, then I'm awake too, wide awake! Which is cool, I guess. if that is what you meant, and she meant, even if different than what the Buddha taught.

Or do you mean --- or think she means --- an experiential realization, of the kind the Buddha allegedly experienced? There we're on less sure ground, I'm afraid. Maybe true; but maybe woo.

[Ron E]

A.R. From my studies and enquiry through Chan/Zen, it seems that there is no 'big bang' experience, just the gradual or sudden realization - a sense perhaps - that comes from a quiet awareness.
Would write more, but am traveling.

[Appreciative Reader]

Yup, when you’re traveling, and have twenty other things you should be doing instead, then posting compulsively about arcane philosophy is probably not what one should be doing much of! And particularly so if you aren’t a teenager --- all teenagers are mutants, and are endowed with the superpower of being able to tap out text on phones at miraculous rates that us normies can only marvel at! --- and if you’re not lugging your laptop around, and and are reduced to fatfingering away on your phone. …Absolutely no rush, Ron, get back on this whenever you’re comfortably able to, whenever that might be!

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Actually, though, I wasn’t so much wondering about whether this “realization” is instantaneous and dramatic, as opposed to gradual and incremental. What I was wondering about is whether this “realization” is simply an intellectual appreciation of this idea, or if it necessarily involves an experiential “realization” of it.

If it is simply an intellectual appreciation of the no-self idea, and everything it entails, basis science, well then in that case:
(a) That’s perfectly reasonable! Clearly no woo involved.
(b) It doesn’t actually require any meditation. Whether or not one mediates is completely tangential to whether or not one “realizes” this --- albeit there might be an incidental correlation maybe, given that there’s likely to be significant overlap between those interested in this subject and so studying this intellectually, and those interested in this subject and so trying out the meditation thing.
(c) It means yours truly is a fully realized being, awake, enlightened. Yep, that’s right. AR’s attained to Buddha-hood, already!
(d) That’s also most emphatically NOT what the Buddha taught. This enlightenment is most emphatically, and without a shadow of doubt, not the Buddhistic enlightenment. (Which is cool. We aren’t Buddhistic, or Buddha-ic, fanboys, and are fine with not doing the Buddha thing precisely. But, just to be clear, this is apples to oranges, two different things, this thing and what the Buddha spoke of.)

But if it is a question of experiential realization, then in that case:
(a) That’s kind of …tilting into potential-woo territory. Which isn’t to say it’s wrong, it might well be perfectly valid. But it’s …something else, something …fantastic?, that might turn out to be true, but might, on the other hand, turn out to be superstitious nonsense, aka woo.
(b) This is exactly what the Buddha did teach.
(c) In general it requires meditation, although atypically you might see cases of completely spontaneous enlightenment. Basis lore. Particularly Zen-ic lore.
(d) Unfortunately AR will need to turn away the worshipful hordes that might line up to pay obeisance to him, and also will, very sadly, have to turn away the hot girls lining up to throw themselves at him. Because basis this criterion, he isn’t enlightened, nope. Not yet.
(e) I’m skeptical this might even be a thing. That is, it would be cool, very cool, if it is. But of *course* I’m skeptical about this thing, until I see evidence that it’s a thing, why wouldn’t I be?

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Finally, I was asking not so much about what different traditions teach!

You mention Zen. I’m not that closely familiar with Zen, but I do know and understand Theravada, and without a doubt Theravada alludes to experiential understanding, and scorns intellectualization empty of actual experience. And it is my impression that Zen does that, as well.

In any case, like I said, what I was asking about is not what Zen teaches; but about what Joan Tollifson’s talking about when she speaks of this “realization”.

And if it is the case that she’s alluding not merely to intellectual understanding but to experiential realization --- IF --- then the obvious question that further suggests itself is: Does she speak from her own personal experience, from her own experiential realization? Or is she merely parroting teachings, from Zen, and/or Theravada, or whatever other tradition/s?

I’m enjoying browsing her website, and going through her essays particularly, those “Outpourings” --- and knowing this about her might be key to understanding where she’s coming from.

And yes: obviously, I realize you don’t speak for the lady, and can’t be expected to read her mind, or speak authoritatively on her behalf! Just, given you said what you did about her, up there, I was wondering what is your impression about what she means exactly, when she speaks of this “realization”, in the particular terms I’ve just now discussed.