The Door Was Always Open
On suffering, seeking, and the peace that was never missing.
Spiritual practice isn’t the final answer. But it might be part of the path towards the answer, if indeed we want to concede a path. But ultimately spiritual practice is subject to the nature of relative existence itself.
If you have a practice of meditation, or letting go, or whatever it might be, then for the duration of that practice you’re relatively free of suffering. But invariably the practice, being transient, passes away — and then you’re in trouble again.
Any practice, or anything at all that needs to be maintained, is itself unsatisfactory. It’s not the ultimate solution to suffering. This is why the proximal causes the Buddha identified — craving, grasping — are just that: proximal, not ultimate. If we address only the proximal causes, we’re caught in the samsaric wheel indefinitely, because we have to do something all the time to temporarily relieve our afflictions. We can never truly rest. The moment we stop doing the things that ameliorate our suffering, our suffering returns.
Can we simply stop grasping, thirsting, seeking? Sure. But as long as the delusion regarding their nature remains unseen, the tendency will return. This is why the ultimate causes must be recognised and uprooted. In the case of suffering, it is ultimately the misapprehension of our true nature, of the true nature of what is.
And importantly, we must discover this — not simply hear about it, not simply accept it as a philosophical truth — we have to see it clearly for ourselves, in order for these tendencies of grasping and craving to cease. The Buddha came with a very profound formula. He really was a physician of the spirit.
There’s an important distinction I want to make here: practice as a means of managing suffering is not the same as practice in service of seeing through it. One is about maintenance, the other, transformation. Practice is the raft that gets us across the river — but we don’t then carry it on our back.
It’s so simple. Simpler than people are willing to accept, perhaps. For a mind that seeks novelty, the simple and repetitive prescriptions of the spiritual path are unacceptable. To the mind that seeks bright lights and exciting sounds and peak experiences, the insistence on the simplicity of letting go through clarity and insight — it’s just too simple.
We are conditioned, habituated to want experiences. Experiences that stand out, experiences that distract from our suffering. And for many, the solution is to daisy chain these experiences as much as possible. Not to seek continuous pleasure — pretty soon we find that’s not available on this level — so we do the next best thing: line up pleasures, line up desirable experiences. Whether we do this through food and drink and drugs and sex and consumptions of all sorts, whether we’re jumping off mountains with parachutes or skiing, surfing, driving fast cars... or seeking heady spiritual bliss, divine visions, the kundalini rising through our spine like an atomic explosion of bliss and light... And like Chesterton’s God as child, we say, again, again! And it might work for a while in this way.
We tentpole peak experiences. We secure a big one, then look forward to the next, and once we’ve had it we get to bask in the memory of it. But after spending lifetimes in the fairground, going on every ride ten thousand times, round and round, again and again — we start to get exhausted.
And since the only way we’ve known to alleviate our suffering has been these peak experiences, these pleasures material or spiritual, when they lose their savour — well, then we’re in trouble. Where do we turn?
When samsara’s wheel is spun and spun and spun, and we are utterly spent, and all that seems to be left is to live with the inescapable condition of suffering — because the peaks, the daisy-chained pleasures, the tent-polled joys, no longer work. To quote the song: the drugs don’t work, they just make me worse. But, believe it or not, that’s a blessed day.
When all our strategies fail, when all the constructed temporary solutions to the problem of suffering fail and there’s nothing left to ameliorate our misery — when we can’t hide from it, or distract from it, or even indulge it. Where do we go from there? What is left for us to do?
Fortunately, the answer has always been here. And ironically, our efforts to chase our wants, our desires, the objects of our indulgence — all that the chasing did was alienate us from what we actually are. To distract us from the peace that is already, always present — if only we stopped chasing it out there.
It is tremendous good fortune that there is nothing actually to get, nothing to acquire, nothing to accumulate, no more peak experiences needed. The peace, the rest, the joy, the fulfilment we’ve been seeking — is found to be the very ground on which we stand, in which we live and have our being. Closer than close. The peace of our very essence. The freedom of our very nature. The uncaused joy of our very being itself.
But it’s only found when we are ready to accept it. It doesn’t make a loud noise or sing a song. It doesn’t dance before our eyes to grab our attention. It doesn’t seek to entertain us. And yet it fulfils us completely. It is our own nature — forgotten, or perhaps simply ignored.
Like the prodigal son, it doesn’t matter how long one has been chasing experiences in the field of form. It doesn’t matter how long one has been away, how long one has forgotten or turned away, denied the truth of one’s being. It doesn’t matter how many lifetimes we’ve spent spinning our wheels. Like the welcoming father, the moment we show up at the Dharma gate of our true nature, we are welcomed — and welcomed deeply. The fullness of that recognition, that understanding, that realisation. The experience of the experiencer. We finally rest, we are home. Always the door was open. We had just turned our back to it.
The Buddha’s teaching on the Four Noble Truths matters because the nature of suffering, as experienced by most people, is poorly understood. Ask a thousand people why they suffer and you’ll get a thousand different answers. And yet the Buddha diagnosed a common origin: thirsting, grasping, seeking, striving — born from ignorance, from non-clarity as to the true nature of what is.
What are we grasping onto? What are we desperately pushing away? What are we craving, thirsting, wanting, needing? At the heart of it all is a misapprehension of what is true, what is actual. The Buddha points to the three marks of existence: impermanence, not-self, suffering.
The big one we crave is stable identity — stable existence. And yet in the field of conditioned life, nothing is stable, nothing is permanent. The observable nature of phenomenal existence is transient, ephemeral, interdependent — contingent. So we feel vulnerable. We try to bolster ourselves, supplement ourselves, inflate ourselves, all the while knowing somewhere, if perhaps unconsciously, that none of these parts last. None of the pieces we’re trying to construct ourselves from will last. Fear is fundamental to that view.
Fortunately, it’s a false view. The conditioned field is impermanent. There is no fixed self to be found within it. Not recognising this results in suffering. Recognising it — truly, directly — is liberation.
Our true nature is unconditioned. Ever the same. Open, awake, aware, formless, boundless. We don’t even have to accept the premise of a capital-S Self. The ineffable doesn’t require affirmative descriptions. Simply by gaining true insight, the grasping and thirsting that arise from the futile attempt to build a permanent identity out of impermanent parts — that suffering dissolves in the light of recognition. Peace and joy born of liberating insight.
The Fourth Noble Truth is the path. And the fourth truth tells us that freedom requires practice, participation. We participate in direct apprehension. We participate in insight and understanding. There is a path to walk — and it is not merely an intellectual understanding. One has to walk the walk. There is no bypassing option. The Fourth Noble Truth is a call to action: a description of what reclaiming our freedom actually requires.
The Buddha laid out the Eightfold Path — I won’t enumerate it here, and it varies somewhat from school to school. But it addresses every aspect of life, every level of understanding, so that the truth of suffering and the possibility of its extinction could reach us in the deepest, most complete way. It is the path of practice, of reflection, of understanding. We meditate. We inquire. We reflect. We expose ourselves to wisdom in order to understand what we’re looking at.
As I’ve said before – it’s not a path from one place to another, or from now to some future time. It is the path from ignorance to clarity. Realisation.
So time and again, we return to what is essential rather than what is passing. As we continue to return to recognition of the formless, unconditioned ground, we become established as That. The knowledge and experience of this level of life becomes unshakable. All forms can come and go. We don’t need them to fulfil us or to identify with.
As the Mahavakhyas state — Tat Tvam Asi. That Thou Art.
But we must walk the pathless path. The path of discovery, and of the permanent establishment of our true nature. And we re-discover that this reality has always been here, always been the case. We awaken from the sleep of ignorance and delusion.
Thou art that. I am that. All this is that. That is all there is.