“Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.” – D.T. Suzuki

All mystical spiritual traditions, in some form or fashion, have as their intention to bring a person to stopping.  Whether it is a Zen koan or the variety of forms of meditation and contemplation, whether it is chanting, ecstatic dance, rituals, yoga, chi practice, satsang with a guru, vision quest, or ingesting a psychedelic substance, their purpose is to bring an interruption of our living inside our IDEA of ourself in the world to open us into direct experience of our BEING in the world experiencing its vast possibilities. These practices aim to stop our mind’s running commentary that thinks our limited ego-centered life as the limits of possibility.  Ultimately, they aim to awaken our felt sense as a being inseparable from the true and natural world, and thus, complete in ourself. This makes us beyond identification in egoic ideas, what Zen refers to as being “nobody.”  We realize ourselves as, in a sense, the Universe happening through a human vessel capable of seeing this ultimate Source happening through everyone and everything.  These traditions, in some fashion or other, will always be directing us to the discovery of our “True Self,” the “I Am” beneath the insecure ego-self.

In the Western religious traditions where prayer is central, for the mystic, prayer is quite different from what happens in community churches, temples, and mosques. Prayer takes on much the same purpose as meditation has in the Eastern traditions.  It is surrender of the ego, not obeisance to an all-powerful deity. It is a surrender of separateness.  It is letting go of the ego that praises and petitions God as outside us.  Prayer is the soul touching its source, realizing in the profound silence which is our natural Beingness, that our own and the universe’s center are one. It is here, in this centering silence, that we co-abide with what is named and experienced as God.

We naturally seek this peace, this oneness, in activity which causes transcendence of the ego and preoccupation with our insecure selves.  We hike to beautiful places, we seek oceans, lakes, rivers and streams.  We garden and work with wood and clay, we make and listen to music, create and appreciate art, we exercise our athletic impulses, we fall in love and explore eros – even the high stimulation entertainment of our society has as its purpose to forget ourselves in moments of intense sensory experience which override and stop our compulsive thinking.  And there we are.  We are, in those moments, outside our self-preoccupation, and these are the clearest, sanest moments of our lives, all marked by the stopping of the egoic stream of thought manufacturing the idea, the story, of an insecure person, “me,” in time.  This is what consciousness guru Eckhart Tolle calls “The Power of Now.”

The mystics, however, knew that for lasting personal transformation we ought not seek this “peace that surpasseth understanding” in that which is outside ourselves, for this does not resolve our fundamental problem.  All activity which temporarily causes us to drop our self-absorption is a fleeting visitation to peace, when what is true is that this peace arises within us naturally when we are not transfixed by and mistakenly looking to our neurotic ego as the source of who we are. So, the question is: Who are you?  All the mystery traditions tell us this is the most important of all questions.  And they give us a clue by adding, “you must look to That which looks.” Any idea you may have, any identifier you may assign, is not who you are.  In no-thought, the original thought can be heard – “I am.”  This is Beingness.  Here we are.  We are Beings in Beingness living a human life.  All the figuring, all the doing, all the acquiring leads only to the realization of the transitoriness of all that we may manufacture or do or acquire.  In the fleeting world of all that comes and goes, we must stop all the doing and striving to search out what does not come and go. There we find our true Selves.

Eckhart Tolle tells us, “We are the space of the moment arising in awareness.”  This moment arising in awareness is not anything we do or hold or own or acquire.  All activity and perceived phenomenon happen IN the space of awareness.  Our problem is that we get caught in the forms of the fleeting activity and phenomenon, mesmerized by the idea of “me,” when all along we are that “space of awareness” through which it all arises, exists for a time, and then passes.  Awareness is not an activity, not a thought, not an acquisition. It is our essence. 

All the neurosis, addiction, narcissism, striving, and thinking which overwhelm our peace of mind and seem to control our lives are our attempts to manage our insecure ego, yet none of it works. It only takes us deeper into what Buddhism calls “dukkha,” psychological and spiritual “suffering,” a sense of unmanageability, insufficiency, and unsatisfactoriness to life, caused by all the unstable conditioning sources creating our egoic identity, telling us who we are. It’s an unmanageable tangle of contradictions which never point us to our core self, the I Am – complete and whole.  We don’t know, as the mystics understood intuitively, that arising out of the silence of awareness itself, we are expressions of Creation never separated from our source.

So, we must stop being the neurotic, the addict, the narcissist. Stop being the striver.  Stop being what we think to be “me.”  All these states of mind reflect our inability to be our True Self, which is peace, wholeness, completeness in the moment.  The wisdom traditions tell us that truly skillful doing arises out of non-doing, as skillful action arises from non-action and skillful thinking arises from non-thinking.  We, as humans, are meant to do, to think, to create, to interact socially, but when we seek our meaning and purpose through doing, thinking, creating, and interacting socially, we are lost in motion, the motion of seeking meaning, purpose, and standing in these actions of the ego – all of which are really just a stream of thoughts ABOUT being a person.  It is not BEING a natural person who does basic life activity, who does creative and social actions from the wisdom, the peace, the stillness which is their core, the center of their Being.

To fully live this action of being a human skillfully and masterfully therefore requires that we stop living from the insecurity of the ego, this original artificial intelligence which we are now doubling down upon with technology-generated artificial intelligence.  This is so the wrong direction for humanity.  Technological AI doing the bidding of the human egoic AI leads us only deeper and deeper into losing our true selves in faster and faster thinking and scheming and imitating being human, into a society which is hectic and artificial, demanding always more to satisfy the yearning to be enough, a yearning which cannot be filled in this way.

Yet, we are in a society, and technology and commerce are not to be abandoned.  Our problem is that our society and technology and we are out of balance because we are out of touch with our core Beingness.  But we do not have to be lost. The wisdom traditions know the necessary balancing action to bring individuals and society back to sanity in recognizing and guiding us to connection with our core Being.  Since we have been lost in the egoic world of compulsive thinking and doing, always in motion, running against time, the corrective action is to stop this meaningless and compulsive doing and chasing after – it is to practice stopping to recognize Beingness in ourselves, others, and everywhere. Then, we can proceed with doing in a balanced and wise manner.

An entire realm of peaceful presence abides beneath the noisy ego.  It is sensory and intuitive.  It is silent intelligence.  It is The Eternal prior to the temporal.  It is where spirit abides. It is our True-Self.  Only by redirecting awareness out of the insecure egoic dimension of thought and emotion and into silent sensory and intuitive presence can we access this dimension of our natural Being, so the stopping is really a shifting.  It is nearly impossible to stop the egoic mind from holding center space in our consciousness by commanding it to stop, this is just more ego.  We must shift from the eogiic dimension into the dimension of Being. This is done through the senses and through silent present-moment awareness where the space of the moment comes alive.  In this numinous presence, we can feel and experience how the world is alive and conscious, infinitely connected. This is how ego relinquishes being the center of attention naturally.  This is what all the meditative and mystical traditions teach and foster to bring us home to our True-Selves.

What you experience when the beauty of a mountain waterfall or an exquisite piece of music or art catches your attention so completely that the mind stops is what we seek to develop in every moment of our everyday lives.  This is the goal of Zen – what the great Zen chronicler and practitioner, D.T. Suzuki described as “the art of seeing into the nature of one’s being,” which results in freedom from bondage in unsatisfying problematic thought and behavior. You must stop to experience the moment through your senses – through the sensations of your breathing, the sounds and sights of the present moment explored with wonder, appreciation and subtlety. This silent presence opens us into the intuitive realm where it all becomes connected.  Zen directs us to realize the nature of our own Being first, and let it then be the context for all the thinking and doing that living a modern life requires, only now, balanced and effective.  Instead of awareness being unnoticed in the background, we achieve a sense of fullness and completeness that occurs naturally when the silent intuitively intelligent realm of awareness becomes the foreground of our experience within which wise and effective thinking and action can occur while living our everyday lives. The human mind was evolved by the Universe to be an exquisite instrument of the Universe understanding and interacting creatively and spiritually with itself.  We just don’t know how to use it effectively because we don’t know how to stop being run by the insecure ego. We lack the balance of the whole mind. But the good news is that for thousands of years, the mystery traditions have been telling us how to achieve this balance.  It’s time we bring this wisdom out of antiquity and into the present, bringing ourselves and our society back into balance, into wholeness, wisdom, compassion, and true spiritual connection guiding how we think, do, and live. The action that accomplishes this is stopping.  Just stop. Get quiet. Feel your breathing and relax your body.  Realize your True-Self in intelligent silent awareness, here-and-now. You’ll be amazed how much clearer your thinking and doing then becomes.