In November 2022, I was sitting in the second story Baker’s café on the Mahatma Gandhi Marg in Gangtok, Sikkim, nursing a cappuccino and idly gazing out the window at the walking street below. I had been in Gangtok and points west for better than two weeks, to the foothills of Kanchenjunga, Darjeeling and back, sampling cities, the countryside, small villages climbing up impossible mountainsides, roadside waterfalls, temples, restaurants, shrines, tea plantations and general culture.
There had been both benevolent and adverse circumstances at every turn, it seemed, beginning with the hair-raising white knuckled 4-hour mountainous drive from the airport in Bagdogra, Bengal State. I had been tested in many ways. Throwing myself into radically different and unfamiliar circumstances, my attachment to my usual comforts and the systems of life was tested. My physical capacity was tested. My patience and resilience, my tolerance for unpredictability and adversity (like when my return taxi to the airport never showed up), my western centrism, my spiritual principles, and my health were all tested.
I had been sick from hotel food, had an encounter with the local health care system, outlasted a respiratory virus, an unsatisfactory and truncated tour experience to western Sikkim and returned to my hotel in a city tumbling across multiple hills in what must surely be the greenest and wettest part of India. As I segued into a less challenging portion of that journey and my discomforts eased, I looked back and viewed it all as if it had been the fulfillment of some karmic destiny. Here I was, practically as far from home as one could be, having the same inner experiences I’d probably be having regardless of location, and suddenly realizing the absolute humor, folly, and poignancy of it all.
The physical and cultural landscape of India is known for its density, its extremes of poverty and opulence, the intensity of its activity, its traffic, its cacophonous commerce, and the ubiquitous signs of devotion. A persistent mystery, at least to western eyes, is that it works at all. Add a factor of Himalayan culture and Sikkim becomes an enhanced version of the gulf between a superficial (Western) pursuit of permanence and the pervasive local signs of ever advancing decay. Here, with inadequate resources to address that creeping conspiracy of decay, economics, cultural practice, and climate extremes are all in play. The effect is to see impermanence everywhere, every view a challenge to Western habituation, every moment a cause to reflect on our dualistic fantasies, infused with a multitude of signs of devotion.
Even to be able to distinguish differences between unfinished business, poorly conceived business, and decay is not automatic. Appearances are that constructions stall for any number of reasons and thereafter simply succumb to the laws of nature. The forces of nature intrude at every turn, but there’s also a poetry to joining the conspiracy of decay. Maybe it’s a recognition that living with nature is immeasurably saner than continuing the losing battle of stealing the future to fuel our insatiable pursuit of permanence and pleasure. So, the reminders of impermanence are everywhere, in contrast with my home culture, where all incentives are to control, delay or avoid such decay altogether.
Here, the vulnerability to flash floods or landslides is a powerful reminder that the presumption of managing the world is delusional. The Western project of reducing chaos, unpredictability and randomness may be appealing from afar, but at some point, that culture begins to look brittle, as we are now discovering. The increasing incidence of climate extremes globally reveals the fragility of nature, life, and human endeavor. The proximity of impermanence, witnessing the breakdown of life systems, the ongoing presence of endings, loss, and adaptation, draws our attention more deeply to matters of community, and the sacred nature of existence.
Being in this relatively remote part of India was another reminder that every place is every place. All the rules and patterns of life are operative here as anywhere. The human drama appears in different disguises, forever struggling to overcome suffering, seeking permanence in small acts, adhering to the universal perpetual primitive and precarious struggle against ever-advancing collapse. This place, as much as any other I had visited, seemed to embody that drama. Impermanence was more apparent in every moment as were the symbols of devotion. They seem to arise together. Being surrounded by evidence of impermanence is somehow coupled with an imperative to awaken to the immanence of every spiritual path and to life itself.
From my perch in the Baker’s Café, not that it had never occurred to me before, it seemed I had to encounter again every extreme condition, every adversity, to see this truth fresh again. It appeared in the hardscrabble lives carved out of a mountainside, the incomplete, broken, or neglected infrastructure, the innumerable near misses with catastrophe on narrow mountain roads. Amidst a virtual absence of environmental consciousness, the half-realized, humble, and entirely recognizable common aspirations of this land and people rest on some of the oldest and most enduring stories known to humanity: the absolute truth and ultimate benevolence of continuous unstoppable creation and destruction. I say benevolence because it is only our limited view, being entranced by the appeal of external sources of happiness, that colors our perception of the so-called events of our lives. We remain in the sway of polarities when really, all phenomena have never been anything other than positive. In the grand sweep of time and in the micro-events of daily life, we are the only ones creating our inner world.
If there is a commonality to the inner experience, the feeling world of all this creation and destruction, it is yearning. A perpetual presence of the smallest waves, wave upon wave, kissing at the shore of the heart, always letting me know of the uncertainties of life, the universally shared aspiration to relax and know with indestructible certainty that all will be well, that there is no satisfaction to be found in dissatisfaction. Beyond that inner subtlety, I was being passively engulfed and progressively assimilated into Himalayan culture with all its variety, beauty, and hardscrabble reality. I reminded myself that even naming adversity exposes my western bias. Perhaps none of it was adversity for those living there. It was all part of the flow of life. I thought I was prepared for anything. But once I’d been there for a week, I realized I wasn’t ever able to completely relax into familiarity with anything. At the same time, that realization brought an awakening of its own: nothing is guaranteed. It is just that subtle softening, relaxing into the ultimate neutrality of all events that makes all the difference.
For us in the Global North, the deepening awareness of the precarity of life, realizing the proximity of climate chaos, is also instigating a rise in devotion. It is a natural response to times of conflict and the looming collapse of natural rhythms and life support systems, amidst profound change and uncertainty, to renew our attention to what does not change. We turn toward devotional practices in community as a mass response to the uncertainty, anxiety, polarization, and splintering going on. Devotion generates cultural cohesion and spiritual alignment; it acknowledges the sacred nature of life, a counterpoint to the hyper-rationalism of the West. It reminds us of the necessity of ritual to process change, to pass through all manner of transitions, to praise what we still have and restore our commitment to each other. Devotion is the blood of community, the restoration of mutual care, especially as it has sustained indigenous economies of rural and less developed cultures for centuries. They know something we have forgotten and are only now beginning to revisit. Humanity is wholly owned subsidiary of Gaia.
Since I wrote in 2022, ‘The human drama [appears] in a different disguise, forever struggling to overcome suffering,’ that sense of the drama of how our daily awareness and subliminal ongoing micro and macro-efforts to allay suffering did not soften or disappear. Since my return, it has only become more enhanced. And my own inexorable aging contributes further to the sense that any urgency, any persistent need to know more, accomplish more, become more, continues to settle beneath what thoroughly engulfed me as I gazed outward and inward in Baker’s Café that afternoon. I was overcome by an old and a new clarity: the end of seeking.
I reached an end. It was so surprising and welcome and familiar and settled, this deep shedding and relaxation, like a thick skin dropping away, like a record of all my so-called spiritual attainments, my merit badges dissolving into nothing. I felt lighter, clearer, resting in a new realm of already having everything I needed. The urge to know more, or of not yet being able to relax with what already is, seemed so deep and so old. Its release opened to a welcome new freedom. Truth was not beyond our grasp. We just need to be present with what is, what never changes. No further investigation is required. Moreover, it wasn’t just letting go of a need to know, but settling into clarity with what was already surrounding me, connecting everything with everything: impermanence, interdependence, and the essence of everything: emptiness. This is the appetizer, the main course, and the dessert. Everything is bound together in a single seamless reality, living, and dying. There is no solidity to be found anywhere. That is the simple bedrock truth, comforting, pure, deeply and endlessly benevolent, the seamless unity of now.
There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality. We think that there is something hiding reality and that this must be destroyed before reality is gained. How ridiculous! A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts. That which will be the day you laugh is also here and now.
--Ramana Maharshi
The principle of seeking implies that there remains something hidden from view. The very idea of seeking imposes (or assumes) a dualistic frame on the journey to ‘enlightenment,’ as if there’s any journey at all, as if there’s something yet to be known, revealed, or altered about oneself. This framing ensures that we will feel separate from reality until that dilemma is resolved. Andrew Holocek names (p.136) this condition of insufficiency or striving as a lack of transparency; we are less than transparent to ourselves and thus we gaze upon reality through a grimy window. As long as we feel stuck or separate or less than whole, that lack of transparency remains. That stuckness is not what keeps the grime on our windshield. It is the grime. We are the ones sustaining it. No one else can perform this trick of blinding ourselves to the truth of nature, our nature, sending us into seemingly interminable investigations, looking for the perfect streak-free window cleaner.
So really, the erroneous view is that the journey we identify as seeking has something to do with becomingconnected to everything, most of all to ourselves, when the truth is much simpler than that. When we feel separate, we seek transparency to ourselves, which is another way of saying we are seeking access to our own innermost level of awareness, the common awareness at the heart of reality we share with all beings. What we refer to or regard as ourselves under any circumstances is a misnomer, a misconception about our true nature, as if we are separate from any other aspect of reality. Yes, we are materially identifiable. We seem to have a separate mind, a separate body, separate speech. But reinforcing the separate self is not the path to transparency. Only in revealing the illusory nature of self do we discover the heart of reality.
When we really get it, that there is no such thing as a path to ultimate union, no such thing as an outcome we can claim, or for that matter no such thing as enlightenment per se, when we can release ourselves from every remnant of relative consciousness, separation, and especially from the illusion of time, then the brilliance of timeless awareness, the delusional reliance on rationality, the unreality of seeking, the fundamental and inseverable nature of our connection with everything is revealed. As we can no longer be separable from anything else, so we can no longer be separable from any aspect of our own nature, because at that moment, the very idea of ‘ours’ dissolves. ‘Our’ nature no longer exists. Transparency of self is revealed as the transparency (and unity) of everything, that there is no such thing as things at all. That is the revelation of emptiness, the timeless, immutable, and infinitely creative unity of all appearances.
The idea that there is a goal…is wrong. We are the goal; we are always at peace. To get rid of the idea that we are not at peace is all that is required.
---Ramana Maharshi