Life as a Sitcom

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

I've been reflecting lately about how 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 loses her wedding ring.  Or George on Seinfeld tells his date that he's a member of Mensa to impress them, something like that.  Some little mistake or white lie, 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 comedy of errors arising.  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 wedding ring, and then all is forgiven and life goes on.

We live this plot in lots of ways.  It's a lot of the drama in our life.  And yet our whole life is also like a sitcom, because we make this really simple mistake: we have this very simple misunderstanding, very innocent 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 that feels, how incomplete, how fake, how not true that feels.  We go through all kinds of crazy machinations just to keep the illusion going, the little white lie going.  Until it starts to wear itself out. Eventually you can't keep yourself fooled or you can't keep other people fooled.

Just like in the sitcom where eventually it's the awareness of the truth is 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 that illusion going.  The antidote is simply awareness.  It's when there is awareness meeting that whole activity.  There's nothing that really needs to be done, it's just when awareness and our experience come together, when there actually is awareness of our experience, then these false structures, these ways that we hide our true nature even from ourselves,  can't withstand that light, that attention  -  and they start to dissolve.

There's no formula for how fast that happens.  It happens whenever there is awareness and experience together.  Awareness and the reality of what actually is present.  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 there's no formula for how long it takes.  Again 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, there's this need to slow down, because our attention, our mind is moving so fast that it's like awareness almost 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 space to happen.

So if you think about it all the spiritual practices in a sense really what they do, they stop us, they 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.  Even the spiritual mindfulness practices, these are all ways of bringing this awareness to the present moment in a way that where it actually touches.  It not only touches, it actually caresses, really tastes the moment, takes a moment to really take in what's happening right now.

A good friend that spent a lot of time at Papaji's said you could sum up Papaji's teaching in one word, and that word was "wait."  If you think about it, he was always telling people, you know, stop, and be quiet. I think he got away with it just because he was this big, this huge guy, and he was an eight on the eneagram.  My teacher described him as a force of nature.  So when he told you to stop, you just stopped.

So very simply that's the invitation.  That's the invitation to Satsang. It's this invitation 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 busyness of mind.  The invitation here is just to slow down, and actually experience that, actually shine some of this light that we call awareness, shine this strange awakeness that's always present, to actually spend some of it on what's happening right now.  The invitation is to just 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.  It doesn't really matter.  The important part is, it turns out we always think the important part is the 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 the tendency is to focus on the content of the experience, to try and evaluate the content of the experience and that is what keeps the balls in the air. Keeps the treadmill speeding up.

And then when there's this recognition of what really matters is just this awareness. What really matters is that strange capacity we have to have bodily sensations, to experience thought, to hear the voices in our head, to know what we're feeling.  How do we do that?  Why is that we're feeling something we know.  It's in that awareness that the juggling dissolves, it's the awareness that heals.  It's the awareness that brings everything to resolution.

So what really matters right now is the awakeness, that's hearing these words and  noticing your thoughts.  It is probably also noticing either the presence or the absence of a feeling.  As far as body sensations go it might still be going kind of fast.  But for a second there there's probably a noticing of 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?  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, or possibly a sense of emptiness?

And it's like ideally the way you would eat chocolate.  You don't -- chomp, chomp, chomp.  Really 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.  It's like really just 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 within that delicacy at the arising patterns and have the willingness to take some time to be with it, as it is.

A lot gets made of the moments or the periods in life when things dissolve dramatically.  There's a wonderful free sense in that.  But you can also develop this appreciation for awareness itself.  Even if it's like a creek carving a canyon where it takes a long time to dissolve something, to release some structure inside of you, or some difficulty, some stuck place inside of you.  It is rich even at the beginning, not just at the 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.