The Facet of This Moment

Casting truth into a form destroys it.

“Hi Shiv,

Over the past few years I’ve read a lot of nondual writers and teachers—people like Peter Brown, Rupert Spira, Adyashanti, and others. Although they differ in many ways, they often seem to arrive at a similar conclusion about the nature of reality. There is usually the suggestion that what is most fundamental is also inherently whole, peaceful, radiant, and complete.

Your writing often explores similar territory, but I have this sense that you’re pointing at something slightly different. I can’t quite articulate what it is, but it feels significant—and unusual.

Am I imagining that difference?”

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For me, presence is not fundamentally whole … or peaceful … or radiant. It is not fundamentally anything.

The only thing I can say with any confidence about presence is that it simply is. It shows up as it shows up - from one moment to the next. Suddenly a clarity. Suddenly a fog. One moment an identification. Another an awakening.

This notion that presence is something beyond our experience or interpretation of it must be challenged. It is an error I too have been guilty of many times. This subtle suggestion that there is an unseen realm of meaningfulness, wholeness, perfection, and peace beneath the seeming senselessness, fracture, imperfection, and suffering we are generating through interpretation - needs to be questioned.

This notion, although hope-inducing, also causes a schism between reality and mind - as if mind were some foreign agent outside reality, distorting it. But I see no evidence for such a ‘mind’ and such a ‘reality’ as two fundamentally separate things. Here again, language acts as a convenient shorthand to distinguish between patterns. One pattern called “mind” and another pattern called “reality”. But are those patterns really independent? Again, I do not see them that way.

I am not saying that everything the mind thinks is real. I am not saying every feeling it has about what is happening is accurate. What I am saying is however anything shows up - is not fundamentally true in any way. The only truth lies in the fact of its appearing.

In other words, if a thought arises in my mind that says: “My life is not worth living” - the truth of that thought lies not in its content but in the fact of its existence. We cannot deny that the thought exists. We can only question its logic. Similarly, if a feeling of anger arises within me towards another person - the anger can be investigated, yet its existence is undeniable.

And if I were to experience a moment of unexpected silence - a sudden expansion of awareness in which all the machinations of the mind temporarily cease and a deep oneness and connectedness emerge, an unexplainable peace descends … then it is not the silence, the peace, the oneness or connectedness that are true. The only truth is in the fact that they exist - momentarily.

The isness of the moment can take myriad forms - and yet that isness has no fundamental form or quality. It is truly undefinable and thereby free of even our most lofty descriptions. Calling it ‘beautiful’, ‘miraculous’, ‘radiant’ does it a disservice and limits it - for it prevents it from also being ‘ugly’, ‘mundane’, and ‘dull’.

All forms of spirituality are eventually spiritualities of form. Which is to say that although they concern themselves with the fundamental questions of existence, they eventually settle for beautiful answers. Because that is ultimately what humanity seeks - beautiful answers that generate a feeling of hope, well-being and mastery - over asking relentless questions that often have the opposite effect.

The holistic perspective is no more ‘true’ than the fragmented perspective. Oneness is no more real than separation. All of these are forms of how this moment appears. And privileging one class of forms (wholeness, silence, peace, nonduality) as more true than the other (separation, agitation, suffering, duality) is what drives us to seek, control, and manipulate our experience.

For make no mistake - meditation is manipulation. Every spiritual practice risks privileging one form of experience over another. It is the mind’s attempt to wrangle its perception into one of holism. For what need is there for perception to occur in any way other than how it is already spontaneously occurring in this moment?

There must be some underlying belief in a ‘truer way of seeing’ that drives such an effort. And such a belief implies that truth has a certain preset shape, a specific manifestation, a fundamental structure - that one can perceive with the right desire/effort/willingness.

Casting truth into a form destroys it. The moment we say what existence is, we negate all the other ways it can be.

And yet we know, from experience, that existence rarely ever shows up predictably. It rarely conforms. In one moment a happiness, in another an unexpected depression. In one moment desire, in another an aversion. In one moment, a clarity and wholeness. In another, a confusion and an alienation.

Yet, what is the one constant in all of these various experiences? In all of these myriad forms it takes on?

The fact that it exists. That it is.

The isness (or suchness as the Buddha called it) is the only truth here. Beyond that - everything is a momentary form … fleeting and impermanent.

To call presence ‘whole’ or ‘radiant’ is misleading.

Because presence is undefinable. It has no fundamental form or essence. And yet, nothing can be said to exist without some form - even if that form is non-corporeal - an energy, a thought, an emotion.

What shape does presence take now?

Now it is the sound of fingers typing on a keyboard…

Now it is a thought…

Now it is a relaxation…

Now it is an expansion…

Now it is a luminous seeing…

Now it is a thought again…

Now it is a feeling of discomfort…

Now it is a sinking sadness…

Now it is a mundaneness…

Now it is a feeling of gratitude…

Now it is a sense of grace…

Now it is a fear…

Now it is a desolation…

Infinite myriad facets of this singular jewel of presence. Some radiant, others dark. Some brilliant, others dull.

We are so conditioned into believing that there is one facet of that jewel above all else that will reveal the whole jewel to us. We are convinced that if we just grasp that facet once and hold on to it - we will no longer find ourselves getting lost in the myriad other facets it has to present.

We call that facet oneness. We call it peace. We call it non-separation.

But there is no such facet. The jewel is always in front of us - in the form of whatever is happening right now. The facet of this moment is the whole jewel.

Fixating on another facet, no matter how spiritual, is a form of delusion. And yet, even that delusion is a facet - it is a perception of the whole.

You who are trying to get closer to the truth cannot see that the reason you will never succeed is because you can never escape the truth. It is front and center in your experience at all times. It is in the fact that anything is. That isness is the glaring elephant in the room that we refuse to acknowledge.

Or if we acknowledge it - we do so only conditionally. We acknowledge it only when it looks like silence, peace, and wholeness. We deny it when it looks like mental noise, agitation, or alienation.

And we create a bizarre and illogical hypothesis - that since we acknowledge the isness only in moments that appear whole, silent, and peaceful - that must mean that being, that isness, is fundamentally whole, silent, and peaceful.

This is known as confirmation bias.

And the vast majority of what constitutes spirituality today is a form of confirmation bias. One that says existence is fundamentally whole, radiant, silent, and peaceful - and that it is only our minds that fail to see it that way.

But what I am saying is that existence is none of those things. It has no fundamental form. It is simply as it appears - and only momentarily. And that includes the mind and how it interprets. Reality and mind are not separate. What happens is a complex interaction of events - physical, mental, sensory, emotional - and we have no way of knowing what is what - or if there is even an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ to experience.

All we know … ALL we know … is that this moment is. And the isness of this moment shows up as a ‘feeling of I’, a sensation, an emotion, a physical environment, an event, a reaction, a contraction, an expansion, a freedom, a fear …

That is what ultimate freedom looks like. Freedom from conforming to any form or format whatsoever - no matter how transcended. Where even wholeness, radiance, and silence become fetters.

For if I am whole, then I am not free to be broken. And if I am radiant, then darkness is lost to me. And if I am silent, then I am not capable of noise and confusion. That is not freedom. That is being locked in an ivory prison of transcendence.

Presence is what is. Unconditionally what is. Not spiritual, not material. Not good, not bad. Not deep, not shallow. Not whole, not separate.

Simply what is.

The wheel of samsara is the world of forms. And we remain on the wheel as long as we believe these forms to be fundamentally real. In which we value one form over another. In which we cling to certain forms and avoid others. Wholeness is another form on this wheel. As are peace, silence, and radiance. These are the forms we cling to in avoidance of the other forms - of agitation, confusion, suffering, and fear.

Getting off the wheel simply means seeing through all forms. Understanding that the moment is a dart flung at a spinning dartboard - and where the dart lands is ultimately irrelevant. It holds only relative significance. Learning to throw the dart more accurately towards the higher scoring regions is only a strategy of gameplay. It has no overarching significance.

Similarly, spiritual practice and meditation - as means of cultivating perspective, silence, spaciousness, and a sense of connectedness - are strategies in the game of human experience. They have no overarching purpose or advantage. Liberation is not ultimately superior to suffering - only more desirable from a human lens.

For the isness of this moment is neither impeded nor supported by any of it.

It shows up as it does for no other reason than that … it does.