I went to collect him from University. He needed some time to finish up his life so a moment opened up for me. I visited the Chaplaincy on campus. A ‘welcoming and engaging place for people of all faiths and none’. I found a room with a mat and cushion and sat for a while. Then these words, that have been close to consciousness for a while arrived.
What do you lack?
Perhaps it is something that doesn’t exist anywhere that you can perceive. If you want it you must invent it. More likely it is something that does exist but not in your experience. Like a particular job, or house, or relationship or better health, more time, safety, dignity, belonging or spiritual awakening.
What is your approach to resolving this lack?
Whatever it is that is missing, it is absent. It is an emptiness. It has no form, scale, structure or substance. It takes no space, endures no time and you literally, cannot, get hold of it. In any way. We cannot work with what is absent. It is unavailable to us. Yet it is often the focus of our efforts. What we focus on is most often what transpires and persists. If we focus on absence, then absence will most likely be present. This, we might call the approach of absence. Our action here is pursuit.
We directly pursue that which we believe to be missing and in doing so we place it elsewhere and immediately and, while we continue to pursue it, unchangeably beyond our reach.
What happens if we work with what is present?
Although it is not that which we consider ourselves to lack, we can work with what is already in our lives and within reach. We can arrange what is, to create what isn’t. We influence what we are able to interact with in such a way that creates space that is the shape, size, duration and process of what we are missing. This we might call the approach of presence. Our action here is appreciation.
Without direct reference to that which we lack we exercise appreciation as we apply what influence we can to circumstances and allow them to become such that what is lacking becomes present.
There are many advantages to this approach. The main one being practicality because we literally can’t work with what doesn’t exist.
There are also challenges. The main one is overcoming our natural focus on what we long for rather than what we already have.
Both approaches involve action but the place from which the action originates differs. You may find that you have only ever been living the approach of presence because the approach of absence isn’t actually possible, but you have been doing so from pursuit rather than appreciation.
What if the absence you feel is the absence of presence?
When we feel a lack of presence in our own lives, the approach of presence and the action of appreciation become indomitable. We cannot pursue a felt sense of presence in our own lives. The action of pursuit makes our aspiration impossible. Only if we stop pursuing can we be in the presence of what we lack. Better to forget the imagined lack and perhaps that will be enough on its own.
This is the reason that there is one singular instruction when practicing ‘Zazen’ or Zen Buddhist sitting meditation. Just sit. The instruction is to just sit. This includes the cessation of pursuit. Even the cessation of the idea of ceasing pursuit. Letting go while harbouring even the smallest part of us that hangs on is not letting go. It is quite easy to hold onto such a part and hope that the rest of us doesn’t notice. So, in this practice, we very literally, just sit. It also includes the idea of acceptance of what is. Appreciation of being with what is.
Of course none of us, even Zen monks, can just sit all day. We need to meet the needs of our bodies and relationships. So we get up and we attend to our lives and we live into each moment with fullness and abandon and a willingness to let that be enough. This creates the circumstances that allow the presence of what we thought we lack. We live as an expression of what is present not the pursuit of what we believe to be absent. In this way we become pursuitless.
What comes after pursuitlessness?
If presence and appreciation dissolve the sense of lack that we may have had, we can become quite content. It may be that nothing matters because everything matters. Nothing needs doing because it is all being done. No action is better than any other so we just act without expectation. We cease discerning a self separate to any other so our identity falls away. Perhaps we are now one who has no identity, takes no needless action, craves nothing and pursues nothing.
In time, with days lived and the friction of relationships a new identity can form without our noticing. Our relationship with our own lives can change and we might find our presence and appreciation have been replaced by the pursuit of being such a person. We may have gently fallen out of ourselves and carried out the move of replacing the original pursuit of presence and appreciation with the pursuit of being a person who is present and appreciative.
This deft, delusional, deference might be final and complete but more likely it is transient and partial. It is each breath in and out, it is noticing the breeze on your face, it is the giggle of a child, it is lips touching, it is the moment of remembering when sunlight scatters through branches and brings you back to yourself. It isn’t apart from or separate to pursuitlessness. If we can let it go, it is pursuitlessness.
