More-ness & Other-ness as Gateways to God
Go to the fresh-ness.
To paraphrase Peter Brown:
“Reality is always more and other than what you are holding it to be.”
I love Peter Brown.
You can find nearly 77 hours of his talks on Spotify here.
He passed away about a ~year ago, yet he left us an absolute treasure trove of wisdom.
He is one of my greatest teachers, and I have been freshly immersing in his words lately.
More-ness and Other-ness
Peter often points out that reality is always more and other than what we are holding it to be.
He urges us to go to the more-ness.
Go to the other-ness.
That is, direct your attention away from whatever habitual story or reality-tunnel you are presently locked into…
And notice everything else that is going on within your current field of experience.
In each moment, there is a literal infinity of detail and information showing up in/as your field of experience.
Even simply staring at a wall or a tree or the sky opens up into a literal bottomless unending richness if you can simply stop everything else and focus for a few minutes.
Most of us spend 99.9% of our time living inside of stories that dramatically reduce and compress experience into tiny concept-boxes that our minds can grasp.
Even the most magnificent story about experience captures not even 0.00000000000001% of what is going on, though.
Experience is *so much more* and *other* than what we think.
So much more and other than *what can possibly *be* thought*.
Stopping and Noticing
If you stop and look closely, every single aspect of your experience is continuously morphing and shifting.
Do you ever stop and notice the continuous ‘flickering’ and ‘micro-flashes of light’ continuously occurring in/as the full field of your experience?
Do you ever stop and notice that moving your head even one micrometer completely alters the full field of experience?
Such questions gesture toward potential access-points and entryways to a more naked engagement with the raw fact of experience itself.
I recommend getting curious about the *fact* of *experiencing* itself.
What is it?
Where is it?
What is it made of?
How long does it last?
Unimaginable Weirdness
Such investigations open up into direct contact with the unimaginable weirdness of our actual present experience.
One begins to notice things like:
Experience is always here-now. Everything you have ever known has always been experienced here-now.
Yet, when you look closely, there is no ‘here’ and there is no ‘now.’ These are conceptual overlays—fabrications.
When you look closely, you can’t find anything that can be truthfully described, defined, or pinned down into any conceptual box.
All that you find is an undivided continuum of raw, uninterpreted ‘sensory data’—a kind of seamless ‘stew’ of unsayable flavors and textures.
And yet all of these textures and flavors have absolutely zero duration. Every phenomenon instantaneously vanishes in the same moment it appears. If you look very closely, you notice that this is so. No two instants are even remotely the same if you really pay attention. There is a continuous, instantaneous morphing.
And yet even though this morphing is always going on, you can also notice that experience never departs from itself. The full field always *is* simply what it is. It is not an object. Yet it nonetheless *is*. And its essential nature remains constant. It is always this naked openness.
You notice that all of this also applies to ‘you.’ What I call ‘Jordan Bates’ is actually an endlessly varied, ever-shifting eruption of unknowable textures—always experienced ‘here-now’; never the same from one ‘instant’ to the ‘next’—which cannot truly be ‘separated out’ from the full field of experience—the field of naked openness that never fundamentally departs from itself.
When you look closely, you also notice that experience itself is unfindable. You cannot locate, define, or pin down ‘experience.’ It too is a conceptual overlay. The same is true of words such as ‘consciousness,’ ‘awareness,’ ‘Love,’ ‘God,’ ‘Truth,’ ‘Brahman,’ ‘Tao,’ ‘Source,’ ‘radiance,’ ‘changelessness,’ ‘totality,’ ‘finality,’ ‘emptiness,’ ‘Buddha-nature,’ ‘openness,’ etc. It turns out that nothing solid or graspable can be found whatsoever.
What we are then left with is a wholly mysterious, unsayable, self-existent, self-gyrating, unitary ‘hyper-tapestry’ of non-finite texture and dimensionality, eternally dancing itself in/as a timeless, space-less here-now-ness.
What we are left with is a preposterously strange, trans-spatiotemporal ‘energy event’—self-executing with unfathomable precision, artistry, and intelligence—that never fundamentally departs from its essential, all-present nature.
And yet neither this ‘nature’—nor any attribute of this ‘nature’—can truly be found, labeled, pinned down, defined, or otherwise captured or concretized.
There is only this utter slipperiness free-falling through itself.
And this slipperiness is all.
It is the all-inclusive totality of being.
Nothing whatsoever can be found that is not this ‘slipperiness.’
(And ‘slipperiness’ itself cannot be found, of course.)
Boom.
This is a remarkably odd state of affairs.
Lol.
Like, what?!
“You’re telling me that ‘life’ is something completely different from what everyone commonly thinks it is, and that I can discover this directly for myself simply by investigating the ‘more-ness’ and ‘other-ness’ of my immediate naked experience?!”
Yes, amigo, that is what I’m telling you.
We are living in/as an eternal, unknowable, self-unfolding, continuously-morphing Rorschach Blot.
Don’t take my word for it.
Look and see for yourself.
How COOL is THIS?!
Like, man, damn, bro, I don’t know, like, WOW.
I get so excited about THIS!
This nameless all-mystery!
It turns out that true curiosity about immediate, naked experience leads to the discovery of…
MIRACULOUSNESS.
And “miraculousness” still doesn’t even begin to capture it.
I mean, THIS is astonishing beyond our wildest imaginings.
*THIS*.
What reality *actually* *is*—turns out to be the mother lode.
Eureka!
Jackpot!
We’ve struck gold, boys!
It was right in front of us the whole time!
Pretending to be llamas and pizza and poinsettias and grandma and an old pair of sneakers!
*THIS*.
Like, HOW. IN. THE. ACTUAL. FURRRRK. IS. THIS. HERE?!?!!!!
How is THIS here?!
How is it doing what it’s doing?!
How is it seemingly writing these words on this seeming wizard-portal preparing to launch these signals into cyberspace?!
How is it generating and living inside of the totally-reductive story of a ‘guy’ ‘named’ ‘JB’ supposedly ‘writing’ ‘some’ ‘words’ ‘on’ ‘a’ ‘computer’?!
How is it doing that when what is truly going on is *so much* MORE and OTHER than that?!
And how is it possible that *ALL OF IT* is only *ever* occurring ‘here-now’ as an all-morphing, ever-present light show?!
WHAT. IS. GOING. ON?!?!!!!?
Lol.
Truly, though.
Truly.
I’m getting worked up right now.
I’m not even caffeinated.
‘Sober as a bird.’
What the F@$# is going on here?!!!!?
No one knows!!!!
LMAO.
NOBODY KNOWS!!!!
There is no one *TO* know.
No findable person exists.
Total emptiness is volcanically exploding forth as an utterly funky FULLNESS and you can’t say a damn word about it.
Like, WHAT?!
WHAT?!!!!
THIS is what we get down to?!!!!?
THIS is where the dedicated inquiry leads?!!!!?
THIS is where the true scientist finds himself?!!!!?
As NO ONE WHATSOEVER floating through/as a self-maintaining, ghost-like, artistically-orgiastic NO MAN’S LAND?!!!!?
LOL.
LIKE.
DAWG.
DAWG.
NAH.
NAH.
NAH, BRO.
NAH.
Lmao!!!!
Man.
What in the actual.
I’m lost right now.
Gone.
Lost.
Sky-diving through the abyss.
The process of scribing these hieroglyphs has seemingly erased all sense of self and normalcy.
Afterword
Phew, that was something.
One of the most ‘psycho-tropical’ writing experiences I’ve had.
My daughter woke up from a nap, which pulled me out of it.
I then proceeded to play with her for a while and we had tons of fun.
I got super silly.
Pretending to be Santa Claus and such. (She loves Santa Claus.)
And I was deeply in touch with the nature of reality while we played.
I was seeing my daughter Lila as an expression of the full field.
As a continuously-morphing, un-pin-down-able, inseparable emanation of the full field.
That was cool.
Her radiance was so clear and wonderful.
Reality is all-inclusive.
Our habitual reality-tunnels are not negated by the discovery of the naked actuality.
They are included.
The stories are still there. Our human lives are still there.
They’re like one segment of bandwidth or dimensionality occurring within this infinite-dimensional totality.
They are God being with God in exquisite intimacy.
They are pure poetry.
They are Love.
It’s all Love.
And yes, I know, ‘Love’ is unfindable too.
And yet still I tell you…
It’s all Love.
Peace,
JB
“The trick is not to extricate yourself from what is not true. The trick is to notice what is true, and it will do the heavy lifting. It will do the extricating so you don’t need to extricate yourself.
You don’t need to pull back your attention from the details of your life or whatever you’re emotionally invested in. Simply let yourself become a little more aware of being, of fullness, of this immediate absolute relaxation of the completely finished condition of the presence of reality. It’s completely here. It’s entirely here, rock solid, and it doesn’t have to be bolstered up or little gaps filled in or polished up or improved or brought to some sort of final condition. THIS is it. THIS is the final condition, this being, this existence, this fullness of your presence, this Radiant Presence.
Notice that. Let yourself feel that. Once you become a little skilled at that, it becomes pure pleasure, pure joy. It’s like drinking the absolute finest wine or eating the most spectacular food or having the most incredible sensual experience. The juiciness and fullness of this being will seduce you as it draws you to it.”
— Peter Brown, This That Is
Author bio:
Jordan Bates is a dad, husband, space holder, men’s coach, rapper, course creator, blogger, truth lover, co-creator of Apotheosis, and author of four books.
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