Joan Tollifson on the groundlessness of reality

Tai Chi, which I've practiced for nineteen years, speaks about being rooted.

Not in the sense of a plant being attached to the earth, but something similar. Being connected to the floor, or ground, in a way that is stable, secure, capable of being the foundation of productive movement (especially important in a martial or self-defense application).

But this root isn't a static thing, because we humans aren't oak trees. It's dynamic, ever-changing, adjusting to circumstances. 

Which fits with a recent essay by Joan Tollifson that arrived in my email inbox yesterday. I've shared the first part of it below, since I liked what she had to say. As noted before, Tollifson has become one of my favorite writers about "spiritual" subjects, though she doesn't use that word very often. 

I agree with her that the search for Ultimate Reality is doomed to failure. I used to believe otherwise. When I'd give talks to members of the guru-centered organization headquartered in India that I belonged to for 35 years, Ultimate Reality was a term that I used a lot, because I considered that the teachings of this organization, Radha Soami Satsang Beas, accurately pointed to the nature of such.

Not any more, though. Like Tollifson, I've become convinced that just as science is nowhere close to grasping the ultimate nature of reality, spirituality, religion, and mysticism are ever farther away. So no one knows what the ground of being is, or even if such a ground exists. Maybe groundlessness will turn out to be the closest approximation to how Ultimate Reality typically is viewed.

Which doesn't mean that awe, wonder, delight, and even a sense of sacredness can't be part of our everyday awareness.

As Tollifson says in her essay below, our experiencing of what is Here/Now is all that we know directly. This means that attention in the present moment is the highest form of worship, to repurpose a religious term for my secular purpose. Of course, we don't really have a choice in this, since past and future only exist for us as concepts, not direct experience.

But our attention can be scattered. When my wife is talking to me, I can be half-listening while checking the news on my iPhone. This is akin to daydreaming while attending to a religious service. While everything is happening Here/Now, that Here and Now can become diluted, spread out, by a lack of attention to what most deserves our awareness. 

This is why mindfulness has come to be my favorite "spiritual" exercise (I don't much like that term, but it's hard to come up with a better word). Since there almost certainly isn't any final ground or bottom to reality, the best we can do is be as fully aware as possible of the ever-changing phenomena that manifest the boundlessness of existence.

Here's the excerpt from Joan Tollifson's essay.

A multi-dimensional extravaganza

All we ever know directly is this here-now aware presence / present experiencing. We don’t really know what this is, why it’s here, where it came from or where it’s going. We have many ideas about all of this—scientific, metaphysical, psychological, political—but all of these ideas can be doubted, and all of them are subject to change, and when we look closely, the apparently real “things” to which they all refer can never actually be pinned down or pulled out of the whole.

Both science and spirituality have been obsessed, each in their own way, with getting to the bottom of things, finding the fundamental ground and nailing down exactly what it is, as if it were something that could be found and nailed down. But as an old Zen koan says in response to a monk searching for this fundamental ground, “It just moved!”

My sense is that this living actuality is bottomless, that there is no end to the unfolding revelations and discoveries, and that there is great freedom in not needing to land anywhere or grasp anything or nail down what this is. Maybe the security and certainty that we long for isn’t about getting hold of some unchanging Ultimate Reality, some final bottom to everything. Maybe it’s simply about being fully alive right here as this one bottomless moment, just as it is.

I’ve noticed, as you probably have too, that experience shows up in a multitude of different dimensions and can be seen from infinitely different perspectives or viewpoints. There is ordinary, everyday life with all its varied facets and dimensions. There are transcendental spiritual experiences of all kinds, psychic experiences, near death experiences, out of body experiences, drug experiences, psychotic experiences, experiences that come from brain injuries and neurological disorders and illnesses.

There is the sense of being a particular person with a history and a lifespan, and there is the sense of being the timeless, impersonal, boundless aware presence being and beholding it all. There is waking life, dreaming and deep sleep. There are all the billions of different human viewing points, and the viewing points of all the other living beings. All of these infinitely diverse viewing points are continuously popping in and out of existence, dying and being born. It’s definitely a shape-shifting multi-dimensional extravaganza that never stays the same while never departing from the ever-present immediacy of Here-Now.

This one bottomless moment includes the whole universe, and yet it’s always just this. This cup of coffee, this taste of tea, this cool breeze touching the skin, this news report on the latest war, this pain in our knee, this train of thought passing through. Each moment is absolutely unique and unrepeatable, and yet the whole is fully present at every point. The ocean contains all the waves, and every wave contains the whole ocean. Nothing is really separate from everything else. It all belongs. It can’t be pulled apart.

To survive, we need to map our experience out in manageable ways. So thought labels, divides, categorizes, interprets and seemingly concretizes this seamless, boundless, centerless, inconceivable, multidimensional, uncontrollable flow of experience, creating the illusion of an apparently separate autonomous controller self encapsulated inside a body and living in an apparently solid and substantial outside world made up of many separate, persisting, observer-independent forms. This phantom self is supposedly authoring our thoughts, making our choices and navigating our life. But none of this holds up to scrutiny.

Every form dissolves as soon as it appears. Exprerience doesn’t hold still. There is no boundary between inside and outside. A person is like a waving of the ocean—an ever-changing movement inseparable from the whole. Our attention moves rapidly and uncontrollably from one thing to another, and however hard we work at controlling and taming it, that endeavor never quite works. It slips away again and again.

Our urges, desires, impulses, intentions, interests, preferences, abilities, talents, thoughts and actions emerge unbidden. Nothing could be other than exactly how it is in this moment. Seeing this is the freedom to be exactly as we are and for everything to be just as it is. It is freedom from blame and guilt and from the belief that anything should or could be different in this moment from exactly how it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t discover ways of healing and transforming ourselves and the world—we can. But it’s all a movement of the whole.

There is no finish-line in life, no formula, no method, nowhere to go, only this ever-fresh aliveness, just as it is.

Comments

[Ron E.]

The Churchless blog of Brians’ has been a good source of some interesting books for me’ not just sci-ence-based books but ones that have a ‘spiritual’ message. The more recent reviews of Joan Tol-lifson’s work led me to buying a couple of her books as well as subscribing to her Substack.

Tollifson’s writings hammer home the point of being here now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the science of the brain/body/mind connection along with the interconnectedness of everything doesn’t some day come up with the acceptance of reality as not being out there or even of being what our fragmented minds try to fit in a small box, but that reality is here-now and no matter where we are, what we believe, or what we are doing/thinking. As Joan puts it: - “Nothing could be other than exactly how it is in this moment. Seeing this is the freedom to be exactly as we are and for everything to be just as it is.”

Which of course, has nothing to do with being a doormat or fatalistic acceptance – if you’re standing in a wasp nest – move!