Freedom From Things

Imagine a stick of incense burning. As you watch the rising smoke drift toward the sky, it may seem for a moment as if the smoke looks like something. But the smoke never actually assumes any fixed form. It is continuously moving, reshaping itself the very instant it seems to take on a particular shape. Our experience is just like this.

It’s strange because it seems as if there’s something here that’s being encountered, something we seem able to identify. From one perspective, we’re experiencing fixed, identifiable forms, both the supposed objects of the world that we think of as being more or less unmoving and the internal world of subjectivity. But when we feel the flow of experiencing, we can notice that what we’re labeling as and believing to be identifiable things are, like the rising incense, continuously dissolving and in that sense, utterly without form.

The world of experience and circumstance appears as something we can grasp hold of and render with words and concepts. But when we look a little more closely, we can see that this is only half of the story, for all the things we think of as having fixed, identifiable forms do not.

Forms seem to be present and recognizable. Things seem to be a certain way. But when we try to pin down what that way is, it moves away from us, shape-shifting like the rising smoke. Try it right now. Try to keep what you’re calling the present moment from becoming something else. Try to hold it in place long enough to identify and describe it, and you’ll see the absolute impossibility of that.

Thinking we know what things are turns out to be pure fantasy because what we think of as things are actually not things.

It’s strange because we seem to encounter experiences and circumstances that are holding still, at least long enough to partake of them. I mean, you go out to dinner with friends, have a rich conversation, pay the bill, drive home, go to sleep, wake up the next morning. Our lives seem to consist of actual things that we can know and describe. The world shows up with a kind of coherence. Things seem to be holding still, at least long enough to encounter them as things. And yet, they are not. The moment never actually coheres. It never becomes something that can be identified because it is never actually here. What we call the “present moment” cannot be found as some “thing” because of its inherent dynamism. Like the rising smoke of the incense, it never assumes any fixed shape or form owing to its constant movement.

Take what’s happening right now. You might describe the event as “sitting in whatever room or place you are in, reading these words.” OK, so here you are, reading in your room (or at the beach or in a coffee shop or wherever). That’s what you’re experiencing, right? But where are the last five seconds you described as sitting here reading? They’ve vanished, right? What about the last second? It’s gone too. And the last quarter of a second? One one-millionth of a second? Gone.

So ask yourself—exactly how long have you been where you imagine you are, doing whatever you imagine you are doing? There’s absolutely no way to grasp hold of this supposed moment and say anything definitive about it. Why? Because it isn’t here long enough to say a single thing about how or what it is.

It’s interesting, though, because as true as it is that what’s appearing cannot be found as some fixed form or pattern or shape, reality sure does look and feel like something coherent and stable. There seems to be a coherence to reality. We experience this undeniable sense that there are things that actually look like something. After all, we have a whole dictionary filled with words we use to place all this seeming coherence into the descriptive categories that we do.

It appears we can say something about what’s going on. I mean, I can tell you about my day, and you can tell me about yours, right? There’s a beauty and richness to this capacity we have to seemingly know what things are and use language to describe them to ourselves and others.

Yet, beautiful and enjoyable as it can be, we can’t really pull it off. Consider again the burning incense. Can you describe how the smoke looks—its shape, its position, its size, its texture? Or has the way the smoke seems to have shaped itself dissolved in the very instant it seemed to appear?

If I take the phrase, “I am sitting here in my chair, writing these words,” every word in that sentence rests upon the belief that it’s actually possible to resolve what each of those elements—me, the chair, sitting, writing—are. While it may seem as if resolving what things are is possible, when I look at my experience of whatever seems to be present, I am always met with the fact that reality never becomes anything in particular. What we call the arising of the moment is also its vanishing, and, in that sense, there is no definable moment that’s ever here.

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This discovery that reality is here for no time is ultimately liberating. Why? Because our sense of being overwhelmed by or at the mercy of different things rests upon the belief that we can actually know there even is a thing in the first place to be at the mercy of or overwhelmed by, and there literally is not.

While life can no doubt show up as all the seemingly resolvable things it shows up as—things which can in turn be perceived as difficult, lacking, problematic, and so on, like the rising smoke from the incense—what we think of as the problematic aspects of life never actually become any of the things we imagine they’ve become. And therein lies our freedom—the freedom from things.

Adapted from my latest book, Everything Is the Doorway.