Numinous Nonsense

Recently, over at the Dharma Overground, Hokai asked people to describe their current practice in one word:

If you’d have just one word to express your core practice at this point, what would it be? What is the signifier you’d use as the finger pointing for you at this time, at this point on your path? What comes to mind first? Give your word, and then - if you need to, and definitely if you must - elaborate on that.

The word that came to mind was ordinary, and though I didn’t elaborate at the time, I thought it might be fun to explore here. But before I go into ordinariness (ironic huh?) I figured it would be fun to map out the spiritual path in terms of single words. Here are the words I would use to describe the path leading to this moment: excitement, dedication, achievement, immediacy, and now ordinariness.

Excitement came when I first stumbled across the path of contemplation and of vipassana in particular. For the first few months of my practice I was so lit up to be doing it. After that came a long period of dedication, of going on retreats, sticking with it, and going through all sorts of intense ups and downs. After coming out of a big cycle of those ups and downs there was an important shift in my practice, and for the first time I felt I had achieved something important. So much of what I heard was possible was validated. After that the practice continued, and everything I had went through before came at me again and again. Eventually, after learning the same lessons over and over again at deeper levels, another shift took place and the recognition of emptiness became immediate, and accessible in real-time. The phrase, “everything that arises is empty of self-existence” made sense. As time wore on, this understanding both stuck with me and also changed quite a bit. At times it felt as if it were gone (though a lesson I had learned much earlier is that sometimes things seem like they are gone, only because they have become more pervasive and broad). At some point identity was largely stripped away from this sense of “self as empty” and what was left was just this. Even emptiness isn’t an ultimate refuge (at least not for the self)!

And what can one say about just this? Well, not a whole lot. The word ordinary seems to capture quite a bit of it, as does the word subtle. In fact, sometimes I feel that what’s left “to do” is so subtle that it’s difficult to know how to proceed. Then I remember that there is nowhere to proceed to, that it is all right here, and that things are as they are. And that’s the path. In a certain sense, this is a huge let down but in another sense it’s a complete load off. Ironically both remain true, though the one thing I am banking on, is that this will change, evolve, morph, etc. The only thing I trust at this point is the process itself … is reality itself. As one of my teachers pointed out, and which sums it up nicely for now, “The process does you … you don’t do it.”