So What?

Philippa is an inspiration. It’s she who almost invariably finds something or someone who gets me thinking outside of my own limitations. What I’m thinking of here is a Dharma teacher called Stephen Bodian - he’s about the same age as me, maybe a bit older, and he has spent his life as a monk, psychotherapist and now as a teacher of non-dual Buddhism. And this is what I want to talk about here but in a very practical way.

One of his meditations visits a common Buddhist insight about time. He asks us the consider our past … where is it now other than as a memory that is actually happening in the present. Answer: obviously it’s nowhere, it can’t actually be found. Then the future … where is it now other than as a thought in our mind, also in the present. So same answer: it’s nowhere. And then the really fun bit … where is the present? Which is the point it all goes weird because if we recognise that ‘the present’ is also a thought we end up in the immediacy of experience that does not exist in time - time really is a thought - as is the idea of there being someone outside of experience who is ‘having’ it. I know, pass the mushrooms.

Now you may be wondering how this may be described as practical? Well, if what Stephen is saying is correct, which experientially I think it is, then this has real implications for those of us who are interested in meditation, particularly those who sometimes practice to gain a glimpse and then stabilise resting within non-dual intrinsic awareness. The problem with this type of meditation - and in fact any meditation which requires we achieve presently unachievable yogic skills - is that it pulls us into fantasies about the future. Ideas about what having such an insight might be like, or if feeling defeated, that it’s all too hard and I might as well give up. What Stephen’s contemplation offers us here is a reminder how these kinds of thoughts are just what they are, just fantasies occurring in the present, and more troubling, that they seduce us into believing we are on some sort of path to a deeper realisation, (or not), when in fact no such path can experientially exist. How could it when path implies time during which we walk along it? So, all rather radical but no less true for it.

I don’t know whether I can communicate the feeling of this insight. For me who has been involved in this quest for my entire adult life, it feels incredibly freeing. Yeah, yeah, I know there is all this stuff about recognising the non-dual nature of mind and all the stages of deepening the initial insight that follow - but really - if I stick with experience this is just a lot of ideas that when sitting have no value at all. In fact they are a distraction because they invite me to compare what is actually happening in the moment with my fantasy of what might or should be happening.

So this kind of leads me back to the man in the patched trousers. He represents simply being where he is. He is free of any pressure to be somewhere else. He’s at ease. Comfortable. I can’t even begin to feel this in my daily life - I’m always caught up in some project that excites me and creates the feeling of being drawn into a new future. However, I’m beginning to get this when sitting. For years and years I have persecuted myself with a fantasy of the awakened, non-dual mind, making each sitting an event where I might or might not glimpse ‘it’. I’ve also read great piles of books about it which all encourage this futile pursuit, turning something that is about absolute freedom into a limiting constraint that persecutes me. So the classic mistake of the golden cage. The phrase that is frequently used to describe this type of awareness, ‘ordinary mind’, I have elevated into something very special masquerading as the mundane. A bit like the Zen master who draws water and chops wood but we all know to read this as a profound expression of his realisation. What I have not done is take it at face value - where to find the awakened mind? Right here, as I’m sitting here, as it is now, whatever it's like.

Blah, blah, blah. I give up trying to talk about it. I’m just sitting. Thoughts come and go and then they calm down and I find myself on my seat. I can feel my bodily sensations, hear the sounds in my lane and garden, see the tiny marks on the white wall in front of me. And then I’m aware of my awareness of this. It just kind of happens, it's a tiny movement. And then how what I am aware of is also awareness. Not something else ‘outside’ of me. And actually ‘me’ is also awareness. It’s all a bit odd and then it changes again. And again. So what?

NW. 28 July 2026