What Is This Moment, Now, Like?

This spontaneous presence.
It’s ordinary.
It’s special in its ordinariness.

I’ve looked and looked, hoping for something more, something interesting, but no – it is looking and seeing awareness that always stays the same. Good, isn’t it?!

Of course, there could be more, such as clairvoyance and miraculous happenings, but I’ve never met anyone who displayed these accomplishments – or they’ve kept them a secret! However, life is too short to keep looking and hoping for something more. It leaves us hanging around, waiting for something better, in which case, we will only die, not knowing. So we need to make a decision, and have confidence in that decision, until something more profound comes along. Actually, this clarification (and synapses firing and dots joining up) is happening at every moment, in the form of subtle refinements…if we’re looking.

Years ago, I was sitting in the Rabsel tea garden, in the Sechen monastery in Nepal, when a young monk, about 12 years old, sat down at a table on his own. He seemed special. He just sat and looked around in a disinterested way. People came up to him with folded hands to enquire about something or other and then left, and he returned to just sitting, disinterested. While we sat in the tea garden watching him, I wondered what this monk was doing, or thinking, or feeling. How did it feel to be ‘special’?

The answer, so far.

Every morning after meditation – or even during – something occurs in the mind in an abstract way. I then meet up with my wife and we have tea and chat, and discuss what occurred. I sit at the computer and just type. Because of a poor education, my grammar is a little back to front, so Kathie, my wife, corrects it and explains to me why it doesn’t quite make sense that way; I type as I speak.

Anyway, while she reads and asks me questions to clarify in more detail about a particular aspect, I just sit and look around. Oh! I suddenly realised that that is what that ‘monk’ did! He didn’t have angels or deities floating around explaining teachings: he just sat in the moment experiencing emptiness. It is clarity of emptiness that clears unnecessary mental chatter. The chatter is the interesting junk that obscures the clarity. That clarity is ordinariness, our natural being. We just have to trust in our simple ordinariness.

Looking for something ‘special’ and trying to get it ‘right’ causes all the problems. We make everything complicated, whereas appearances, sound and awareness are inseparable from emptiness.

I later recognised that young monk when he came to a retreat in Colorado years later: he was the reincarnation of Dilgo Khyense Rinpoche, Yangsi Rinpoche.