' LIFE DEMANDS A RESPONSE '...

None of us ever knows what’s going to happen from one moment to the next. we never know what’s going to be demanded of us in any given moment. we really don’t know anything other than this moment, right here, right now. But one thing we can be fairly certain of is that the next moment is going to be a little bit different than this moment, that life undulates and moves and is very unpredictable. Like an ocean, sometimes in life the waves are calm and easy, while at other times they’re rough and challenging.

Because the nature of life is uncertain and changing, not subject to our own needs for predictability and control, we can’t imagine how we could actually live from this deep space of awareness. Our minds can’t imagine living life in a way that is this open and groundless. what often happens is that we’ll begin to touch this deeper ground of being and then something happens, and we get pulled out of it. The kids are crying. You have to go to work. Someone calls you on the phone and it’s an emergency. You find that a friend or co-worker is agitated and you get lured into an argument. If we lose our awareness in these types of situations, if we become unconscious, then we get pulled from the ground of being. we tend to go right up into our minds, and we start to relate to the world from the standpoint of thinking. Life can be very challenging and it therefore demands something from each of us. It demands a response.

I want to introduce a phrase, said by an old Zen master, which I really like. he called this space of not knowing “doing nothing.” In this space, there’s “no doing happening,” which means we’re not leaping back into the mind and starting to do—creating beliefs, ideas, and opinions. To clarify, he emphasized the word “doing,” rather than the word “nothing,” to make a point that there is a way that this field of being can actually manifest as action, as doing. Doing nothing does not refer to just sitting in a cave all day or on the couch avoiding what is happening in our lives. But it is pointing to a very fresh and creative way of responding to our lives, to the spontaneous action that arises directly from the reality of not-knowing.

So how do we begin to respond to life from this state of unknowing? how do we respond without going back into the matrix of the mind? how do we respond without being caught, once again, in old habits of action and reaction? That is a very deep question: how do we “do” the doing of nothing? how do we be, as a verb, the depth of our being?

~ Adyashanti ~
Falling Into Grace