Life as a Sitcom

(An edited transcript of the mp3 entitled Life as a Sitcom on the Listen to Satsang page)

Life is really like a sitcom. If you think about it almost every sitcom basically has one plot. You can have many versions of this one plot, but basically the plot is that at the beginning of the show someone does or says something foolish. Someone tells a white lie, makes a mistake or doesn't tell somebody something that they should have told them. That's the setup.

Lucy on I Love Lucy loses her wedding ring. Or George on Seinfeld tells his date that he's a member of Mensa to impress them. Someone makes a little mistake or tells a little white lie, or causes some misunderstanding. And most of the half hour is taken up with the main character trying to cover up, hide or make up for this mistake. They have to sort of fake it to keep everybody fooled. And then of course it gets more and more ridiculous as it progresses, and then eventually they can no longer keep up the pretence. They have too many lies going, too many balls in the air, they can't keep it up, and the truth comes out. Finally, Ricky turns to Lucy and says, "Lucy, Tell me what's really going on."  And Lucy starts to cry and admits that she lost her wedding ring, and then all is forgiven and life goes on.

We live this plot in lots of ways. It's the form a lot of the drama in our life takes on. You might even say our whole life is like a sitcom, because we make this really simple mistake at the beginning: we have this very simple misunderstanding that we are this body, we are this mind, and we are the personality that is generated by that misidentification.

And then because it's not real, because it's not true, we spend our whole life trying to cover up how unreal it feels to believe we are this body, how incomplete, how fake, how not true that feels. We go through all kinds of crazy machinations just to keep the illusion going, to keep the little white lie going. Until it starts to wear itself out. Eventually you can't keep yourself fooled and/or you can't keep other people fooled.

Just like in the sitcom, eventually awareness of the truth becomes too much for the cover-up to continue. So awareness of the truth is the antidote to all of our struggles, all of the effort that we go through to try to keep our illusions going. The antidote is simply when awareness touches and dissolves our misunderstandings and illusions. There's nothing that really needs to be done, it's just when awareness and our misunderstanding come together, when there actually is awareness of our mistake, then these false structures can't withstand that light and attention, and they start to dissolve.

There's no formula for how fast that happens. It happens whenever there is awareness of the reality of what actually is present and true beyond the mistaken conclusions we hold onto. But whether that happens suddenly in a big flash of awakening or whether it happens gradually there's no formula for it.

And so in a sense a lot of the teaching, a lot of the practices directs us towards this possibility, towards this opportunity to bring awareness to our experience. A lot really boils down to just slowing down and noticing what is actually happening. Again, there's no formula for how long it takes. The dissolving is not something we do. It's not a further activity of our mind. It's simply bringing awareness to our mind.

But in order to actually do that, it helps to slow down, because our attention, our mind is moving so fast that it's like awareness can't keep up. It actually always keeps up but just barely. When our mind is going a mile a minute, when our lives are going a mile a minute, there's very little opportunity for this dissolving to have the time and space to happen.

So if you think about it all the spiritual practices in a sense really what they do is slow us down. They bring us to a pause in our experience. The most obvious one is meditation, just sitting. Whether you use a meditative technique or you just sit. It slows things down quite a bit. It allows awareness to start to actually touch what's here, what's happening right now.

Of course often the first thing it touches is all that activity of the mind. And so spiritual practices are all ways of bringing this awareness to the present moment in a way that it not only touches, it actually caresses and really tastes the moment. When we slow down, awareness takes a moment to really take in what's happening right now. And if what is happening is a busy mind, then we really taste or experience how busy our mind is.

The invitation in satsang is to slow down, to actually start to touch your present moment experience with awareness, whether it's a thought, whether it's a feeling, whether it's the body sensations that you're having, whether it's a strange yearning, or a sense of lack, or emptiness, or whether it is a thought or overall busyness of mind. The invitation here is just to slow down, and actually experience what is happening now, actually shine some of this light that we call awareness, to actually spend some of it on what's happening right now. The invitation is to take a moment with that busyness of mind, or with your emotions, or with that yearning, or with a bodily sensation.

The good news is that it doesn't really matter where you start. The important part is never the particular content of our experience. We think what's important is what we're thinking, what's happening. Is it working? Am I getting there?  Is this spiritual? Is this getting me something?  So our tendency is to focus on the content of the experience, to try and evaluate the content of the experience and that is what keeps us going faster and faster. Slowing down means giving awareness to the experience you are having no matter what that is.

What really matters is the awareness itself. What really matters is the strange capacity we have to register bodily sensations, to experience thought, to hear the voices in our head, to know what we're feeling. How do we do that?  What happens when awareness fully touches the thought, feeling or sensation?  Awareness can fully illuminate our experience, and in so doing it uncovers any misunderstandings or misconceptions. Ultimately it can uncover the misconception that "I am this body" and show us that this is a limited and incomplete understanding.

So what really matters right now is the awareness that's hearing these words and  noticing your thoughts. It might be noticing the presence of an emotion or feeling. or it might be noticing one or more sensations:  something about the chair that you're sitting on or the temperature of the air, or just the sounds in the room.

I mean what happens right now if you just slow down and experience whatever is happening right now?  It doesn't matter if it's a thought. What happens if you just slow down and really experience not so much the content of thought, but the arising of thought, the strangeness of thought?  What happens if you slow down and notice if there is emotional flavor or if there's a relative absence of emotional energy. What happens if you stay with that, either stay with the flavor of this moment or stay with the kind of neutrality, or the absence of a strong emotion?

You can do this the way you would eat chocolate. Ideally if you're eating chocolate, you put it in your mouth and you see how long you can hold out before you have to swallow. You want to let the taste buds touch every piece, every layer as it melts. What happens right now if you just touch your thoughts that way?  If you just look with that same delicacy at the arising patterns of your thoughts and have the willingness to take some time to be with them just as they are.

A lot gets made of the moments or the periods in life when things dissolve dramatically such as when there is a profound spiritual awakening. There's obviously a wonderful sense of freedom in an experience like that. But you can also develop an appreciation for everyday awareness, even when the dissolving capacity of awareness is like a creek carving a canyon where it takes a long time to dissolve the rock and form the canyon. It can take a long time to release some of the structures inside of you, or some difficulty, some stuck place inside of you. But this uncovering of the truth is rich even at the beginning, not just at moments where there is a big break through, but right from the beginning, once there's this willingness to actually hang out in awareness.

All of the richness that comes in big waves in a moment of break though is actually there at all times. It is ever present. The actual thing that satisfies is the awareness -- even when it comes to chocolate. Even then, what actually is providing the satisfaction?  It's probably why chocolate is so satisfying is because we slow down and actually experience it. It's probably why all the things we take the greatest pleasure in are so satisfying. Because when something like that is happening we tend to slow down. And in that slowing down, life reveals itself as this pure rich flow of awareness.