What's Next After Now?
Post Spirituality and the Creative Life
B Y   S T E V E N   H A R R I S O N

INTRODUCTION
The seeker set off into the forest to find a yogi of great renown. Eventually he came upon the hermit sitting in silence and sat before him. After some time, hoping to test the master, the seeker said, "Is this a question?"

And the yogi replied, "If that is a question, then this is an answer."

Our search for understanding has been defined for millennia as an ever-expanding construction of more and more complex concepts. Since the beginning of recorded history, we have asked questions suggested by our natural world and the increasingly intricate social structure we have created as human beings. We have mythologized the expansion of understanding as a never-ending quest for the ultimate answers, as if we had the capacity to ask the ultimate questions.

What this myth could not take into account is the possibility that our understanding would come to the end of its own capacity and that understanding itself, not just its content, must undergo a transformation. Expansion is not the only direction of understanding; it just happens to be the quality of our current form of it. An entirely different form of understanding may occur in the shift from one condition of the human potential to another, like an expanse of space collapsing into a black hole and emerging in a new universe. If this is the case, then the understanding we had has no bearing on the completely new kind of knowledge that emerges, and what we know now cannot be of any help in what is next.

The understanding that we have come to accept as knowledge, whether of the so-called material world or the conceptual world, cannot know more than its capacity. Individually and collectively, we are limited in our understanding by the nature of understanding itself. We can train our brains and those of our children to retain increasing amounts of information from gestation to death, we can expand beyond the limitations of our brains by using computers that run at the incredible speeds possible at the molecular level, but in the end we come to the limitation of the known.

Can we face the end of the age of reason, the limits of science, the grand finale of collecting and collating the permutations of category and utility? Can we stand in the dissolution of our mythic religions, our fable of spirituality, and the disconnected questions of our philosophies? Can we understand the boundaries of our understanding?

To do so is to face a universe unmasked, to face the very forces that we avoided by constructing our elaborate virtual world of understanding. We have dived so deeply into the mechanics of the world that we have hit the bottom of the clockwork universe worldview. With that emerges a paradigm of a universe without causality. Newtonian physics makes way for quantum physics, but what comes from the quantum reality? Acausality breeds an unrecognizable world where once there were qualities such as meaning, purpose, and distinct qualities. With cause and effect we have the immense pleasure of an understanding out of which we can build a life worth living, smug in our roots of knowledge.

We have eaten the apple, and while it has cost us paradise, we have the anesthesia of knowledge, so we feel nothing of the loss. When the narcotic wears off, we are overwhelmed by the puniness of our knowing in the face of what it is not. What it is not is totality - an integral knowledge that is unavailable to our understanding and unapproachable through our known realities of time, location, causation, and meaning.

Our understanding takes us to the end of each of these aspects and, with that, to the end of itself, transformed in the loss of these familiar realities. This flameout of the known suggests an entirely different modality, one that emerges from the ashes of our understanding but cannot be characterized as anything we understand.

What is it that emerges, what is that we are living, in the actual, not the imagined? Are we prepared to place the constructions of our life on the fires of transformation - the alchemical forge that destroys, purifies, melds, transforms, and creates what is next?

In what follows is the impossibility of exploring these questions in words. With the expression of that impossibility is the invitation for you to engage the equally impossible task of entering into these words in a new way - not looking for content, information, or knowledge, which you will most assuredly not get here. It will be futile to look for logical consistency or empirical reasoning in an inquiry into acausality. Rather, take in what is expressed as a movement of co-creativity - a catalyst for transformation that comes not from words, or even from a dialog between author and reader, but from the complete abandonment of all that has been for what is next.

PART ONE
Breakdown: The Fires of Transformation

If it is held that there is something to be realized or attained apart from mind, and thereupon, mind is used to seek it, that is failure to understand that mind and the object of search are one.

Mind cannot be used to seek something from mind for, even after the passage of millions of kalpas, the day of success would never come.
- Huang-po

Self-Deception and the Fires of Transformation
Descartes goes into a bar and orders a beer. After he finishes his drink, the bartender asks him if he wants another one. "I think not," Descartes says. Then he disappears.

The fundamental deception we construct is the idea of the self. This prime organizing assumption is the progenitor of all the other deceptions, and it is generated by thought itself as an integral part of the arising of the thought form. By the very architecture of thinking we generate a subject-object reality in which we give automatic existence to an entity called me, a complex virtual character worthy of a classic science fiction novel. Utilizing the tool of thought that both generates the me and seeks to create the circumstance of its survival, we set about a life of thinking and surviving.

We apprehend thought as the reflection of life and believe that what we think is in some way accurate. But thought is the projector, not the reflector. It is the creator of our reality, not the mirror of it. Thought is reality, a subjective construction; the actual is something else entirely. While we are the center of this projected universe, the lack of full dimensionality in the flat world of thought suggests to us that there is something fundamentally untrue about everything. This subtle disturbance is the actuality of the universe impinging on our dream world. The awakening from the dream appears from the perspective of the dream as death.

The notion of the self is the denial of the death of our delusion - the self posits itself to itself over and over again, despite the continuous crumbling of reality in each moment. Somehow the self will survive through its contrivances and strategies; it will exist, however it has to.

It's fascinating that this self that doesn't exist appears to function to deny its own death and projects a universe in which it's the center and the interpreter.

No wonder we're confused.

To further the deception, thinking creates time, which has history, future, and continuity - a continuity implied in the structure of the past moving through the present into the future. The self thinks of itself as in time; time, like the notion of a center, is inextricably imbedded in the nature of thought. With time, the logic of thinking and the utility of anticipating, predicting, and measuring become an essential part of the survivability of the mythic self. Without time, the self evaporates.

Our self-deception sees all of this - clever people that we are - and smugly decides to do something about it. Self-deception begins its spiritual search to fix all of this and to connect to the truth. But our "doing" is actually in search of more self-deception, because it is in search of experience. The seeking is in search of enlightenment or love. We are searching for something that we can have that will resolve the fundamental conflict of our fear of death, our nonexistence. We deceive ourselves that this search is going to capture some essential experience that is going to change us forever. But experience is just more thought, more memory imbedded in the imaginary stream of time, described not in what actually occurred, but in what the thinker thought occurred.

The self-deception is keenly aware of these shortcomings and the fragile structure of the self-centered reality. What better remedy than to create God? God can be personal or impersonal, loving or vengeful. The essential self-deception is the same no matter what form we give to our God, in the rather inflated notion that we can know God. The me - the self that doesn't exist, that's afraid of death, that creates the universe through its thinking - has the idea that it knows what's going on and thereby controls it. This is why we love the God of our imagination, because God can be exactly the way we posit God to be. We can animate the animator with our own characteristics, which is a very safe God.

God is not an object. God is not available to the divided world of subject-object that the thinking self creates. Only the idea of God can be found, and the idea of God is not God.

The failure of the spiritual search and the uselessness of any action moving in time in relationship to understanding, devotion, or surrender to the divine, introduces us to the absolute - of being stuck. There is no end to the conceptual self searching in the virtual spiritual reality for the mythic enlightenment. Thought chasing its tail has no exit strategy. There is no escape, and this leaves us immersed in the fires of transformation. In this conundrum, the churning mechanism of thought continues. It has no way out of itself. It can only create experience, however sublime, which creates self, however subtle, which searches for more experience, because there is never enough.

The fires of transformation are the destruction of the elements of reality and the alchemic purification that occur not out of intention, or will, or practice, but entirely without causation, without duration, without any trace of memory or experience, without a me.
The introductory fire of transformation is the moment. In the attention to this moment the whole show of the self is transparent. We can see the actual arising of thought as it creates the self, the fear of death, the search for experience. It is obvious that thought characterizes reality so substantially that it is one and the same, that thought is our reality. This intense flame burns up any notion of an objective world knowable to thought.

In the moment there is no apparent time, and the absence of time is another fire of transformation. Timelessness burns all of our concepts, which are bound in the progression of past, present, and future. The idea of me is bound in process. In timelessness, in this moment, my aspirations - my efforts to improve my spirituality - are burned up. There cannot be any experience to have and none to get to in the future. What are my hopes and dreams if there are no experiences to gather? What kind of spiritual process is there when there is no time? Being in the moment is still being in illusion, still a reference to a world of time in which we can be in or out of a storybook now. If there is no time, there is no now.

Seeing the creation of self in time and process, we enter another fire, which is the fire of interconnectedness. We have been attempting to drive our lives from a center that is nonexistent. The glimpse of no self introduces us to a life lived from the whole of life, not just from an aspect. Thought keeps arising - the world of subject-object continues to arise with each thought - but this is not the organizing principle; it is rather an expression of that whole. Yet this glimpse is not enough to transform our life.

There is the fire of surrender. We no longer maintain the illusion of control of our life through the idea of free will. If thought is directing life, then what is directing thought? We recognize the mechanical and conditioned nature of thought, the fact that it's secondhand, and that its relentless arising and passing away is acausal. The fire of surrender is of particular intensity; it is remorseless in its demand that we accept what is and step fully into what is next.

When we are faced with the fires of transformation, the wholeness of life, the actuality-just-as-it-is, the surety of mind crumbles, leaving us with the apparent acausality of the moment. Yet, this is the ultimate self-deception: the idea that something profound is happening. We have the idea that we are going through some kind of spiritual transformation. Self-deception can even create a conceptual reality about wholeness - a world within a world that is bigger than what we were, but still contained within thought.

The world of thought is the world of experience, in which this moment of stillness becomes captured by memory. It's now incorporated into me. I just had that moment of stillness, of reflection, and that makes me better. It improves my situation, makes me more whole. It might even make me happier. The world of experience is an approximation and nothing more. Whatever we come to, today or ever, is not "it." Whatever we find we will have to discard. Whatever we come to is gone. Even this moment must be discarded.

This means that the experiencer, the central organizing principal of our life, has no function when it comes to understanding wholeness. The me can't have it. It can have a telephone number, it can have an address, it can have the knowledge of how to run a computer program, it can have a lot of things. But it cannot have wholeness. Thought cannot contain the whole, only the thought of the whole.

This brings us to what appears to be the final fire of transformation, which is nonexistence. There is nothing to experience and no experiencer. There is no fragment, no whole, no relative, no absolute. There is no self-deception and no fire of transformation. There is nothing and not nothing. We cannot approach this fire and we cannot escape it.

Thought continues to arise, more intensely in the face of nonexistence. But thought cannot describe accurately, nor can it direct us meaningfully, in the flow of the actuality of life. Will we live from that fragment called thought, although it is not actual? Thought appears to be something we can rely on because it is mechanical, but it is only an aspect. Do we live from the idea of wholeness - what is often called spirituality, but is still in the realm of ideas? Are we content with the collection of concepts, memories, experiences, or is the wild, unfettered, unpredictable, unbelievable, uncontrollable energy of life calling? Do we live from the dynamic whole, which is not necessarily from our preferences, doesn't necessarily bring us what we desire, and can be anything at any time?

As children we liked to ride on the mechanical horse at the shopping center. We put in a penny and the horse rocked back and forth, something like a real horse. For all we knew as children, it was probably pretty close to an actual horse. But it is not the same thing as riding a horse, let alone a wild horse. Once we know this, is it enough to put in a penny and know that the pretend horse will rock us back and forth in a predictable way and that we are not likely to fall off? We can pretend excitement; we can imagine the wind against our faces, the fear, the energy, and the wildness of the unknown ride. Is that pretend world enough? And if it is not enough, could we make do with the memory that we once rode a real horse and remember that past as we rock on the mechanical one? Or how about a movie or book on riding wild horses? At what point do we need the actual so intensely that we abandon all replications, outer and inner?

Is it satisfactory to have the occasional experience of stillness to which we can then refer? Is it enough to read about the pathways to transformation of others? It is a pleasant kind of self-deception. The fires of transformation burn just at the edges of this illusion.

Is it self-deception or the fires of transformation? The fires are unlimited. They burn every moment in a different way. They are not predictable. They are not knowable. We don't know if there will be extreme pleasure, extreme pain, something in between, or nothing.

Where do we find the answer to the fundamental question of what we want? We know the spiritually correct answer is to want transformation, but that right answer is also a concept. Where do we find the full answer to the whole question?

There is a deep feeling in us that is not concept and not emotion - something that is actually living, dynamic, moving, changing - that lives in us and through us. This is the final fire, emerging out of the abyss of nonexistence and flaming through the ever-arising thought world and all that is non-thought.

This is the fire of the heart. Love is the quality that we fear the most, because it has nothing to do with this me. It is the death that we feared when we began constructing the whole world of mind. It is ironic that it is not really death we fear; it is love, it is life, it is connection. But the love, the life, the connection does not need the boundaries of our constructs. This energy can use our mind, our body, our being, but it doesn't need it. It is not me-centric; it has no center. It is the final fire, because it is in fact the death of the entire construct out of which we have been living. Yet it is fully alive in that death, and the fire is no longer destructive but immensely creative. From this creativity emerges what is next.

When we start to see this we want to know how to continue in the process. But are we going to continue to work on seeing it, or are we going to give expression to what we see? We see the structures of mind create a self-centered universe, but we want that self-deception because it's comfortable and apparently safe. Certainly the self-deception has a little bit of pain built into it with the idea of death, but we can utilize our spirituality to create more time while we're working on it. If we have seen all of this, what's next? Or do we go back to see it again just to be sure? Does the seeing it now become a habit in itself?

We may say that we want our life to be an expression of love. We certainly love our concepts. We don't want to let go of them. We like what we have while we pretend that we don't. Apparently we accept what accompanies this me - the pain that is inherent in the construction of a self, the divided world that it creates, and the unreality of the projected mind and all the illusion that spins from it.

We think we can choose not to be in the conceptual world; that idea is still within the conceptual. We can give up the whole idea of choice by seeing that it has no function at all; it is disconnected from the actual, which is without causation. The whole "choosing" show is in the mind as an entertainment feature that keeps us occupied while we maintain a separate existence and the sense of survivability. That realm has nothing to do with what is actual. Mind cannot choose to find the fire of love; love does the choosing. Our life of separation was constructed out of the thinking and choosing mechanism. If we see its lack of actuality, that whole life that we've been living unravels. We certainly don't want that, which is why self-deception is very handy. Through the mechanisms of self-deception, we can get up out of our chair, go someplace, and have something to do that is meaningful. We can have our pain and our conflict that goes with it. That is a fine byproduct so long as we have meaning.

We believe that our life would not work without the endless churning of decision-making and characterizing, focused on the survivability of this particular self. The actuality of life is unfathomable to this particular mind, yet we are convinced that life cannot work without our comprehension of it. This is absurd.

The consideration that life is not operated by the thinking mechanism is a little terrifying. We can see that life utilizes the thinking mechanism, but life does not require the thinking mechanism to animate it. This is radical in this respect: we are living in the unknown, whether we are thinking about it or not. Thankfully, not knowing is the portal to possibility.

The personal aspect becomes largely dysfunctional in this light unless it can intertwine with the whole. We cannot continue to organize ourselves in a divided way, because the quality we metaphorically call love is now permeating our life.

The identification with thought-as-me will try to reassert itself over and over again, because that is what it does. The me of the mechanism does not want to do anything about that, other than create the spiritual process, which creates time. When we recognize the endless corrective process of the mind structure and its non-utility, we have stepped into another world. The unknown is the animating and we are the animated. We can no longer inquire into it from the perspective of the conceptual, because we've recognized that we are not that. We are left inquiring from the non-located perspective. The psychological self will attempt to return to the self-centered, psychological inquiry. If we find ourselves in the loop of spirituality, let's recognize that is what we are doing to occupy ourselves with apparent meaning.

The normal life is the result of this conditioned circumstance we have all found ourselves in. We are not discarding the normal or reacting to it. Rather, there is a merger of the conditioning and the awareness of it into something that is new. If our life is completely available to the movement of unindividuated consciousness, it is not a normal life anymore, and at the same time it is nothing special at all. We can no longer say that we are aware, because we cannot stand outside of awareness to claim it.

There is not a choice there, not two possible worlds. In actuality, there is not awareness and a normal life; these are words. There is only one thing. And that one thing is completely alive and contains all possibilities in it. We have merged with life - completely dynamic and fluid.

Everything that we can apprehend is self-deceiving. Start with that, and we won't miss any self-deception. Everything that we know, everything that we can characterize, everything that we can judge, everything that we can express, is self-deception.

We may suppose that it is a process of catching the creation of thought through awareness and that the more we catch it, the less the conceptual framework seems attractive. Process is part of the self-deception - even the process of becoming more aware. We forge our relationship and construct our life around the immediacy of the fires of transformation, not the more and more of getting better. This is not necessarily a comfortable relationship - it is not the gauzy love of a romantic movie - but it burns with authenticity.

This is why we bounce off so many relationships. The initial part is the attraction, then we find the place that doesn't feel good, and off we go looking for what feels better. It is the same thing with our gods, our religions, and our spirituality. Once we hit that point of challenge, we follow the reaction that gets us out of there. We didn't come for transformation. We came to feel good.

Can we stand still in every relationship, in everything we touch? Can we surrender to the actual qualities that are occurring and let them do their work on us? All those qualities will pass through our system, sandblasting, and take away all the veneer. It doesn't feel good or bad if you are still. It just is. It is when you try to fix it, or to characterize it, or to understand it, or to conceptualize it that it starts to feel good or bad. If it's good, you'll want more of it, and over-consume. If it's bad, you'll run from it, missing the contact.

We construct conceptual frameworks to locate ourselves so we don't experience the fear of what is implied in having no location. Do we have any interest in finding out what happens if we don't construct this center? Or are we just looking for a more sophisticated layer because the old one wore off? We have to get stronger and stronger conceptual drugs to keep us located.

When you observe children, provided that they are not inundated by concepts, you see that they participate in life very naturally and fully. In a way, children are fluid because they don't really have a set idea yet of who they are or of what they are supposed to be. They just have the movement of energy through them. You can see them try on all kinds of personalities in a day, in an hour, in a moment. They can go everywhere, from the most sublime sweetness to the most terrible rage. For them, nothing says this is good or bad until we, the adults in their world, say this is good and this is bad. Then they begin forming their relationship to that.

But, we aren't children, nor can we to return to a child-like state. Then what? We think that maybe it's a matter of eliminating ideas, rather than the acquisition of them. Let's get rid of all the ideas. They're gone. Now what?

We reach a place where there is just nothing. It seems that in a moment it accidentally happened. Then the next moment there is something.

Let's find out about nothing, then. We don't need concepts. Nothing is required. No action is required. Shall we figure out how to make that accident happen all the time?

We could say that accidental moment was pleasurable, it was expansive, it was open. What follows that open moment is closed or restricted, less pleasurable.

There is something going on in the background all the time that qualifies the pleasurable as we want it and the unpleasant as we don't. Judgment threads through those two kinds of experiences, constructing your life. It is trying to find more of that accidental pleasure and less of that mechanical pain. It apprehends the likes and dislikes and constructs around them. You don't need to know it's there; it's just operating in the background. Judgment is pushing us forward, pulling us back.

But now it's been revealed, and here's the conundrum: what does judgment do with itself? Does it pull back from itself, or push into itself? Is the organizing principle pleasurable or painful? Can it answer the question of whether it is, itself, pleasurable or painful?

Take this into your sense of the moment, not as a philosophical stance, not as a conceptual idea. What is the direct experience, now? Can you feel the pressure of the floor on your feet? The sounds around you? The tensions in the body? Is the experience qualified or bare? Do you characterize what occurs, or is it simply the actuality without commentary?

We have the sensate experience of the body and the analysis of that. We have the attempt to stop analyzing that and some dissatisfaction or irritation. There is something aware of that whole bundle of activity.

What if we don't follow that process? Can we see directly what our experience is without trying to modify it, improve it, change it, condition it - without searching for the pleasure, pushing away the pain?

We constantly generate descriptions by which we live. We know that life is not contained within the conceptual realm, it's not described accurately by those ideas, yet we still live in relationship to those descriptions.

We have the challenge to express the unknown - an impossible challenge. All we know about it is what it's not; we don't know a thing about what it is. There is no way of knowing now, or at any point in the future, what the expression of the unknown is. This is why from the conceptual perspective, which is designed to know, it's frightening and futile.

This is the moment of transformation. At every moment we have the capacity to fall back into the defended space of the known and we have the ability to abandon the moment and enter into the unknown of what is next.

Let us face the full range of the human potential by engaging the fear of a negative expression and the attraction of a positive expression, both of which are terrifying. We are as afraid of our love as we are of our anger.

The expression is a deep feeling - not feeling in terms of emotion, which is also conditioned, just like thought is - but feeling that is the totality of the energetic movement in the system, expressing itself through some aspect.

That is a radical life. While it is fresh and alive, it may be totally unrecognizable to us to be completely authentic in every moment.

We don't want to break down into an unfettered expression. We always want to recognize me in the world. We always want to know where we are. We don't have any interest in the unconditioned. Our interest is to have a location at all times, know where we are, be in control, and make sure we don't take any risks with each other.

Is that enough in life? That's a dangerous question, and we avoid that question as much as possible. We have developed extensive philosophies around that, including the notion of a selfless universe that animates us. Because as the stakes get higher and higher we must develop greater and greater defenses.

We are just not interested in that place where the me cannot go. We will go to any level of realization, any way we need to, including the weirdest religions and spirituality, as long as we are still there in the end. But if we are not going to be there, we are not going, and no one can convince us or take us there.

We have created these logical, emotional, and interpersonal systems that are impenetrable. There is no way out of that. Spirituality won't help. We work toward having the Zen experience, the rebirth experience, the enlightenment experience. Working toward that spiritual ideal of a world without me could fill up our whole life. Before that, we were stuck with just me - all that repetitive noise, feeling dense and painful, without meaning or purpose. Now that we have become spiritual, we know the me is a terrible illusion, but we certainly don't want a world without me. A world that doesn't have me in it is a very dangerous world. It's the most dangerous of all worlds, from my perspective. From your perspective, the most dangerous world is a world without you. But from my perspective a world without you is fine.

©2005, Steven Harrison