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You’re listening to Insights At The Edge. Today, my guest is Dorothy Hunt. Dorothy Hunt serves as spiritual director of Moon Mountain Sangha and is the founder of the San Francisco Center For Meditation and Psychotherapy. Inspired by the legendary sage, Ramana Maharshi, and also the contemporary teacher, Adyashanti, Dorothy is the author of Only This and Leaves from Moon Mountain. With Sounds True, she has written a new book called Ending The Search: From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness, where she shares insights from her personal journey along with original poetry, teaching stories, and self-inquiry practices to help us, “find the true identity of this precious and all consuming ‘I’.”
In this episode of Insights At The Edge, Dorothy and I spoke about spiritual awakening and how an authentic awakening always involves a radical shift of identity. We talked about the practice of self-inquiry, and Dorothy led us in a guided session where we dropped into the heart of awareness to reflect on what or who is the seeker. Dorothy also read us a section of her poem, “The Invitation.” We talked about how part of the awakening process often involves a burning in what she calls “love’s fire”. Finally, we talked about the death of her husband of 50 years and how it’s possible to simultaneously dearly miss someone and feel their presence in everything. Here’s my conversation with Dorothy Hunt.
Dorothy, to begin with, I’m wondering if you can share with our listeners a bit about your own spiritual search. When it was hot and heavy, when you were really searching, were you searching for God, for enlightenment? And then of course, what ended the search for you? Was it an event or some kind of experience?
Dorothy Hunt: Sure. I think that I was searching for God from the very beginning. My mom died very suddenly when I was 12, and I was told it was God who took life and gave it away. I was really looking for this God from way back when. I didn’t really call it beginning to search, but when I look back, I can tell that that was really the beginning of asking those existential questions. Not the “Who am I?” question so much, but, “What is God? What is life? What is earth? What is death?” Those kinds of questions. Then I was drawn to meditation as an adult. The church I went to—I was born and raised in a Christian tradition—but the Protestant church I went to had no meditation instruction or anything.
I bought a little book and discovered that you really need to practice meditation. I chose to contemplate on a bible verse and the verse was, “Be still and know that I am God.” For many, many months, maybe over a year, I would just sit in the morning and go over those words. They just became invitations. Be, what is it like to just be, to be still, to be still and know that. That went on for a while and then right in the midst of that, this mantra meditation came. I didn’t know the meaning of the words, they were Hebrew words. It was, “Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu.” I remembered the words, but I didn’t know their meaning, so I called a Rabbi and asked. He said, “Oh, it’s a very common Hebrew prayer, ‘Blessed art thou, Lord of the universe’.”
That was the mantra that just went on and on and on for maybe a dozen years—10 years at least—of just working its way into consciousness. I would sometimes dream it, I would say the mantra on my way to work or in the midst of an anxious moment or whatever. That was not the hot and heavy part, but it was certainly the preliminary aspects of searching for God. Then fast forward a bit, Ramana Maharshi, who was a 20th Century sage, appeared in a dream. And I didn’t know who he was, whether he was dead or alive, what he taught, but I knew I had to find out, because there was such a radiance in his presence and such a love in that being.
I started reading the spiritual teachings of Ramana Maharshi and I just felt like I was in the presence of the deepest truth I had ever encountered up to that point. Ramana’s path was what he called the direct path. It was self-inquiry, you’re just asking your mind to try to find its source. Most practices, most meditations and so forth assume a self that is separate from the god or the enlightenment or the truth that it’s looking for.
But this was turning that looking around and finding out who or what is this self that thinks it’s practicing things, that wants to be enlightened, or find God, or whatever our deep impulse is, to awaken to our true nature. That just began, another kind of practice I guess you’d say, but it wasn’t formal. It was just arising any moment like, who’s sitting here with her client (I work as a psychotherapist) or who’s looking at herself in the mirror? Who’s feeling anxious? Every time, after a bit, at first it started feeling intellectual, but after a bit this interest in trying to find the source of the “I” just began to quiet my mind.
Of course, as any of us know who tried to find that answer to the question, we come to a place of “I don’t know.” That question, “Who am I?”, which can feel intellectual to a lot of folks, is really not meant for an intellectual answer. It has the potential—if we’re interested or if we feel moved to use that particular question—it has the potential to simply quiet the mind and dissolve it this in this mystery. When the mind can’t find its source, it frequently will go elsewhere. It will come back to the known, or go to the memory, or adjust its clothes or whatever it does to stay away from the mystery.
At some point, we may discover that we just stay put at the edge of the known and look into the unknown without an idea of what it is. That really was an intense time of wanting. It wasn’t so much God I was looking for, because Ramana had delivered the message that God, self, and guru were one, but I didn’t know that from the inside out, and yet there were some sense of the truth of that. There was just this intense desire—and who can explain why the desire is so intense—but it just felt like I was willing to die for that knowledge, with no suicidal ideation. I loved my family, my husband, my kids, my work, but there was just this sense, “I would give up my life for this.”
It was, I’m sure, an egoic drama at that point, but there was also something so deep. The desire was so, so deep. I would wake up in the night, most every night for many years and I never felt like it was insomnia. I just felt it was the divine calling me to meditate. There was just intense practice in the middle of the night. Then I would go back to bed and sleep until morning, but that was probably the most intense time of seeking.
The end of seeking came in, I guess you would call it an experience, but it was a moment in time. It was just a moment in time where time and space disappeared and there was just a sense of knowing that I am what I was seeking, that everything is that, that there is no separate one to be enlightened.
That was an amazing discovery, because usually we think, well it’s a person who becomes enlightened or becomes awake or whatever. This was not that. It was just knowing that you were all of it, that what you are was not this separate person. You’ve never been separate from this divine mystery, the presence by whatever name we want to call it. There was a sense of joy, and recognition, and love, and it was in my case, they’re dramatic. Sometimes it’s not at all, it’s very quiet. But for me, it was just there is a sense of knowing, in a sense, that what I had been waiting for was what I really and truly am and it’s always been there. It has always been the truth of my being, our being, your being, life being itself.
I don’t know if you want me to keep going. I hadn’t met Adyashanti yet when this search happened, but that was another whole intense period of realizing that awakening to our true nature, as profound as that is, is just step one in the journey. It’s not a “one experience and done” game even though so many teachings make it appear that that’s the end. It’s actually just the beginning. The next phase, I would say, was just this looking at all the ways that separation wanted to continue to reside in this conditioned mind of ours. There was this sense of unraveling that, and sometimes that’s so painful. There were moments where I just felt there was a fire burning in my being—literally, a great heat—and yet there was that sense of just knowing it was needed.
Adya and I both spoke at the same conference, and the minute he started speaking I knew there was some transmission happening that was needed. Even though I wasn’t looking for a teacher, I was invited very shortly to go on a retreat with him. It was in that first retreat, which was in the Sierra Mountains, I felt just this connection to the Buddhist lineage that seemed to come through him, so powerfully and profoundly at that point anyway. Then I was just exposed to what I would call the post-awakening process, which continues on. It’s never a done deal. There is an end of seeking, but there’s no end to the infinite revealing itself or to our ability to know ourself, and life, and this human expression of life more and more deeply.
TS: Dorothy, so just to be clear, for you, the end of seeking came with that first profound experience, which you said was quite dramatic. I wonder if you could put it under a magnifying glass for me. What actually happened that first experience?
DH: Oh, OK. I was on a private retreat in Olema, California at Vedanta Retreat Center. I was just by myself, there was no teacher involved. That retreat center had in the meditation room pictures of Ramakrishna, and Sarada Devi, and Vivekananda. Now, I was not a disciple, I knew very little about any of those folks, but I was meditating in the meditation room one night. It seemed as though Ramakrishna just came out of his picture and said, “If you stay awake until 10:00, something incredible will happen. Something important is going to happen at 10:00 if you meditate till then.” I thought, “Well, of course, I can meditate till then.”
But in fact, what happened was—I don’t know to this day whether it was a dream, or what happened, whether I was knocked unconscious—but there was this sense of Ramakrishna coming out of the picture and just putting his hand between my eyes, and I was out. Whether that was a dream or something else, I don’t know. It’s not so important, but I was not awake at 10:00, and I woke up about 10:15 or later, I don’t really know. And I was really mad. I felt like I was just set up. Then I just started laughing, because I realized that my desire to be some other place was what really had been holding me back from discovering what was here now, what’s always in the here and now.
It was the next day that I went up to a spot called the temple site, it’s just a circle of trees, and I was just open that day. I felt like my teacher was a divine feminine force, and I said, “What is my lesson for the day?” And what came was time and space. I just sat on a stump and I looked at the top of the trees that were surrounding me, for I don’t know how long. My neck got sore, but I couldn’t stop, just looking. Then just in one sudden recognition it was like time and space were created so you could see your self, and that self was not a separate somebody. That self was the only self there was.
Then it was just in that moment seeing that all the searching has been for what was already here, all the searching is for what we all are. Then there was just such incredible gratitude and joy for that discovery. And humility, because the mind thinks it’s going to get it, thinks its search is going to end the search and it starts looking as though we’re in a class where we want to get an A or something. There had been so much searching, and praying, and meditating, and candle lighting, and sitting with malas and rosaries and so forth. I had many different traditions that seemed to cross before that moment, but then it was just seeing yourself as the opposite, seeing yourself as the blade of grass, as the bird flying across the sky, as the sound of the wind, it was just this sense of oneness.
The recognition that the mystery of it all didn’t really have a name. It was just this unspoken mystery that we can’t really put into words, and yet here it is and we feel it in moments. And that moment was just one of recognizing, remembering, really, it wasn’t anything new, but there was just a memory. Remembering, “Oh my gosh, this is what this life is.” It’s an expression of this. Time and space are so that it can see itself and love itself, and relate to itself.
TS: Now, Dorothy, I think that people have had—and I’m sure many listeners of Insights at the Edge have had—profound experiences. They might call them mystical experiences, peak experiences, moments when there was a subject/object collapse, or time and space dissolved. But then afterwards—maybe it lasted for days or weeks—but there is a sense of reconfiguring into a separate self again and continuing to seek, truth be told. That was this cool something that I reference in the past, that happened during this great sunrise or sunset moment.
DH: Yes, exactly.
TS: It sounds like in your case, there wasn’t quite a reconfiguring into a separate self in the same way. Is that true?
DH: I would say that’s true, but it isn’t as though the separate self didn’t reconfigure, but it was seen from the perspective or the vantage point of this bigger, wider perspective. To me, an authentic awakening always includes a shift of identity. Now, that identity may not stay stable, but that we can’t ever go backwards and pretend like we don’t know what we know. For me, there was that sense of remembering.
For some time, I used self-inquiry to maintain a sense of this absolute. Then after meeting Adyashanti, it was like, “Whoa, just hanging out in the absolute is a way of hiding from our humanness. From how does this want to actually be embodied, what does our realization want to—how does it want to live in our particular expression of life?” That’s where I think we get to really look more deeply into how we unenlighten ourselves, so to speak, how we keep putting back up—as the Buddha used the term “ridgepole”—putting back up the ridgepole that holds up a separate identity.
Those things are dismantled, not all at once for most people. It’s a process that I think is aided by our devotion to truth, our devotion to wanting to live what we realized. Not to denigrate or devalue whatever pace that we’ve had. A lot of people they were all, “Yes, that happened once in retreat, but la, la, la,” and not really honoring the depths of their experience or their knowing, and wanting to see how is it that I’m moving away from what I know.
TS: Now, you’ve used this metaphor from the Buddha of the “ridgepole” that keeps our separate identity intact. Tell me more what you mean by that? Is it true that the ridgepole was removed or dismantled in some sense in this experience that you had of time and space being seen through?
DH: Certainly in that moment. It’s not as though it didn’t try to put itself back up at times. What I mean by that is when the Buddha, he’d done all kinds of meditation. He had been with the best meditation teachers of the day. He’d mastered every single practice and still he didn’t have his heart’s desire. When he sat under the Bodhi tree, he had to confront what I would call our egoic obscurations more and more deeply. The dancing girls that appealed to lust, and the demons that appealed to fear. All of those things are inner things and not outer things. They’re inner conditions of our mind, we all have them.
He sat and said, “I will not be moved.” I think this is what we’re invited to do in what I would call the embodiment process, or a deeper awakening. There are many kinds of awakening. There’s awakening out of identification with the form, but then there’s an awakening of the heart, which is opening to love and compassion. There’s an awakening of the gut, of the hara, which is more of our existential grip can fall away. I’m going a little off the ridgepole, but to get back to that, it’s like we get to see into how we do that. What are the situations? Who are the folks that seem to trigger these re-identifications, reification of a separate somebody?
It’s not that we don’t have a personality, or a particular flavor, or conditioning that will continue on, but the ridgepole holds up this separate identity. If you imagine that there is this, probably many ways that we hold up a separate identity, we begin to look into our mind and discover what they are. The Christian awake guy, Anthony de Mello, he said one time he said, “When you’re looking into your mind, be like a bird watcher and not a dog trainer.” I always loved that, because so often we’ll see something and then we’ll judge it, and then we want to get rid of it. Instead of really looking deeply to see with compassion, what are those places that create the ways that we keep unenlightening ourselves and one moment or another.
If you even imagine that that comes down, the ridgepole comes down that’s holding all that up, then what’s here? Who are we then? I know I invited a meditation once about looking into the ridgepole, and then what’s here when you take it down? What’s it made of? And how does it feel when it’s gone, even for a moment? One man told me, he said, “I saw my ridgepole was just covered with sticky notes from my parents and grandparents, and teachers, and all of those people about how I’m supposed to be. When that ridgepole of how I’m supposed to be was taken down, there was just this incredible freedom to be myself.” I think that’s the freedom of our true nature. It’s not that we should look a particular way, but we’re the expression of something divine, something whole, something that’s total.
It doesn’t mean that in this form there’s going to be some perfection. Do you know that perfection is in the hole, so we begin to see what I would call the beauty of imperfection. There’s a Japanese aesthetic called wabi-sabi that really honors things that are imperfect, and impermanent, and so forth, like the chipped cup that you love that’s in your cupboard, or the misshapen bowl that seems to have so much beauty. We’re like that. This expression, these human expressions we can feel, we can learn when we know who we are. We can learn that there’s great love, great love for these expressions exactly as they are. That’s really what begins to transform our living and transform our way of viewing ourselves in the world.
TS: Now, I’m wondering, Dorothy, what you would say to someone who’s listening right now who says, “Look, I got to tell you the truth, I’m a seeker. The reason I listen to podcasts like this and read so many spiritual books is because I’m seeking. When I hear about ending the search, I think that sounds great, but I’m not there. I’m desperately seeking, that’s the phase I’m in.”
DH: That’s kind of like what this book is about, Ending the Search: From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness. It really is, in a sense, the first part of the book especially is really about the seeking and how we keep imagining that our egoic consciousness—that consciousness that takes ourselves to be separate—is going to find what’s not separate, that this journey that we think we’re taking in time is going to lead us to the timeless. The invitation is just always to come back to now and to see what’s here when we just stop trying to go there. This is seeking itself, the deep longing of our heart for truth, or love, or whatever. We imagine that we long for something that isn’t here. Otherwise, we wouldn’t long for it, but we don’t long for something we don’t know.
It’s like a food. You might be curious about a food you’ve never tasted, but you wouldn’t long for it unless you knew it. If we follow that longing, that seeking, backwards back to the source and that’s what self-inquiry does, “Who is it that’s seeking?” We really get interested in “What is it that’s seeking?” or “What is it that’s longing? Can I follow the longing back into my own heart?” I think of it sometimes it’s like there’s a fisherman or a fisherwoman in our heart that’s sending out this longing like a fishing bow and it catches this ego that’s darting back and forth in the ocean of awareness. As soon as it catches it, it starts reeling it backwards.
The mind thinks, it’s going to find it out there someplace else, that somebody else is going to be able to give us who we are, but no one can give you what you are. We can’t gain it and we can’t lose it. It’s both the good news and the bad news. It’s really just here, but we’re often looking in the wrong place. We’re looking in the mind of thought instead of in the search for who that is, “Who’s the seeker?” To me, there are lots of wonderful practices and methods that can help the mind quiet down long enough to receive the truth of its being, but the question, “Who’s the seeker?” I think is really relevant, because it begins to turn our looking around to the place where we’re most apt to have it revealed.
TS: Let’s go into that question, “Who’s the seeker, who am I?” The practice of self inquiry.
DH: OK.
TS: I’ve heard from a lot of people that it’s a practice that stays on the surface and they don’t know how to go deeper with it. I know the right answer is “Who am I? I am true nature. I am everything. I am the godhead”, whatever. I know the right answer. My mind throws out the right answer and I haven’t transformed. That practice doesn’t work for me. I’m wondering what you would say to that person to help them go deeper.
DH: I think lots of folks have that experience with self-inquiry, because it seems dry, it seems intellectual, it seems like “Who am I? Who am I?” Nothing comes, so I’m not doing it right. What I would say and maybe we could just do a little meditation in the moment. Would that be fine?
TS: Wonderful.
DH: To see what it’s like maybe to enter into the unknown. Of course the unknown is really this timeless dimension of our being, of our self. In order to enter, however, we have to leave certain things at the door. I just invite you and your listeners to just close your eyes. I want to just invite you into this timeless dimension we’ll call “now.” We have to leave certain things at the door, even for a moment. We’re just invited to leave our thoughts at the door, leave our projects at the door, leave our worries at the door, leave our stories at the door.
We can pick them all up. They’ll be there, not to worry. They’ll be there when we want them again, but we’re just inviting our attention into this space of now, this awake, aware heart space that resides as each one of us. When we feel like we have, to the best of our ability, left those additions to who we are at the door, we step into this deeper dimension of our being. There really aren’t words here, that’s why it’s this that cannot really be spoken—but we feel it. We can feel, we can sense there’s something that’s deeper than our thoughts, our projects, our worries.
We step into this dimension and we notice, we can ask, “What’s still here?” Is perception still here? Yes, it is. Are our senses still here? Well, yes, they are. However, are worries here? Are fears here? It’s up to you to find out, but there is this dimension that’s still here, even when we’ve left so many of the things we identify with outside the door. As we become a little bit more in touch with this dimension, what’s here? What is here? Who is here? Who am I? If even for a moment I’m not identifying with all those things I’ve temporarily left outside the door. The “Who am I?” question can lead us to this quiet space, to this silence of our own being, simply by getting curious about what is here when I’m not continually taking up my identity in all those things.
It doesn’t mean they’re not here. It doesn’t mean thoughts will ever completely vanish for a long period of time. They might, they might not. That’s not important. There’s something that’s aware of thoughts. There’s something that’s aware of stories. There’s something that’s aware of your life from the get-go. This that’s aware is also compassionately aware. That’s what I call it the heart of awareness, the true self. It doesn’t come and go. It’s our presence, our deeper presence. It’s only available now. It’s just available here. You might say very simply, it’s just here for what’s here.
We can use inquiry in lots of different ways. It doesn’t have to be just “Who am I?” but, “What is true?”, “What is love?” Whatever our question is that is an existential question that really has some juice. If it’s not “Who am I?” then find your own question, but eventually you’re going to be invited into this unknown space where words just dissolve and now where are we? Now what’s true?
TS: One of the things you write Dorothy is that “what” questions when you’re practicing self-inquiry are more helpful than “how” or “why” questions.
DH: Yes.
TS: I’m not going to say, “Why is that?” What will I say? Can you help me understand?
DH: Can you comment on that?
TS: Yes.
DH: Because the “why” questions always engage our mind. The mind wants to know why, in large part, so it can control something. It’s fine for issues of science or cooking or whatever, but when we’re coming to investigate who or what we deeply are, the “what” question can lead to an experience of it, whereas the “why” question just engages our mind. Something like, “Why can’t I wake up?” or you can ask yourself, “What does awakeness feel like right now in my feet?” Let’s start there. What does awakeness feel like in my feet? Many people almost immediately will have a response, of energy or something that will seem like it comes alive just from the question of “What is it?” not “Why?”
We can say, “What does awakeness feel like in my mind, in my heart, in my body?” Rather than, “Why do I have this contraction?” I’m not saying that’s never an interesting question or perhaps useful, but when we get interested in the what is it, what is this experience called contraction? Can I be that energy even for a moment so that I’m not separating myself from it? That’s why to me it’s so much more productive to get interested in the “what” of our experience rather than the “why” of it.
TS: That’s very helpful. Now, you also write, “In a true question, the answer is already present.” I was curious to know what makes a question a true question?
DH: Yes, that is a good question. I think it’s the sincerity of the intention behind the question. That’s the best I could do. If we’re devoted to truth, if we truly want to know the truth of our being, and not just, How do I look a different way?” or “How do I feel a different way?”, that we’re really interested in the truth of who we are, then the question will arise from the knowing. What is love? Then turn it around, love is what? Then we let it be revealed. Who am I? I am who? or What? What is it? It guides us, we might say, back to the answer, but the answer is not going to be an intellectual thing. It’s going to be an experience, maybe of who we’ve taken ourselves to be to disappear momentarily, which of course for many people is a frightening thing.
It also leads to a deep freedom to know that you’re empty of a separate self. Even at the same time you have this unique expression of yourself. It’s unlike any other expression. There’s just such a beauty in realizing that each of us, if that were the wholeness of being, expressing itself as of this moment this feeling, this body, this experience. I don’t know if that answers the question, but it’s the best I can do at the moment.
TS: Now, Dorothy, the subtitle of your book is “From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness”. Even as you were describing this practice of self-inquiry, moving into the heart of awareness as we ask questions, and you write in the book that this is a journey into “the heart’s cave”. I thought that was such an interesting image—the heart’s cave. What do you mean by that?
DH: Because initially, it feels like it’s dark and hidden. We’ve often—or maybe most of us in one way or another—we’ve put walls around the heart to try to protect something precious. We felt like we were hurt, or we weren’t seen, or we weren’t understood as little kids, or we’ve been hurt in love later on in life. These walls get built up around the heart. And we lose touch with what’s hidden in every moment, which is this heart of awareness. It’s not just an awareness on high that stays detached. It’s totally intimate, and compassionate, and loving of its own expressions. We have to go into the unknown—and I guess that’s why I call it a cave or why in that moment I called it a cave in the writing.
It’s beckoning us to its emptiness and its fullness simultaneously, its emptiness of self and its fullness of love, its emptiness of concepts and yet full of truth. To enter the heart’s cave is to go into that deepest dimension of our being without knowing what we’re going to find, and it takes a little courage for most people. As soon as we hit the unknown, the mind feels a little squirrelly, it doesn’t quite like being there. Here’s where the true spiritual seeker will at some point or another have the courage to continue, you might say, into those deeper dimensions of the unknown. When we do, something may reveal itself in a moment of grace.
TS: Now, there’s several things I want to talk to you about, Dorothy, but two questions have occurred to me about what we’ve talked about so far that I want to make sure we cover. One is, in your telling of your own personal story, you talked about how you had a dream of Ramana Maharshi and you never even knew who he was as a teacher before the dream. You talked about Ramakrishna in a photo and the experience you had—whether you dreamed, or made up, or whatever—of him reaching out from the photo and impacting you in some way. I’m curious, what do you make of this? What do you make of these teachers from India in the past impacting your life in such profound ways?
DH: There are a lot of ways I could describe it. In a sense, life is a mystery so we don’t go wrong by invoking the mystery. Beyond that, I think that all of us have a mind stream of consciousness that’s running through our particular expression, and that mind stream carries karmic impulses and from the past—that from my perspective are not personal. Karma is not personal, it’s impersonal. But nonetheless there are these currents, we might say, they don’t just start with our birth. There are lots of different currents, aren’t there? They’re the lineage of our forefathers and foremothers and there can be a spiritual lineage.
Look in the Tibetan tradition and you see it so potently, but other traditions as well, that seemed to continue on what we might call an evolutionary journey. To me, it feels like that journey is always toward wholeness. Whatever these karmic knots are or moments, places where we feel the separation and we feel pain, we feel suffering, these are not because we’re doing life wrong, often, but because something is coming into consciousness because it wants to be liberated. It wants to come back into the wholeness of being. It doesn’t want to stay in the closet, hidden. And we carry whatever we carry.
I think we carry a spiritual lineage with us and it’s not always just one. We’ve lived as everything. If there’s only one, then what we are has been everything, the saint, the sinner, the Buddhist priest, and the agnostic, and the atheist, and anyway, everything. We may have a number of different dimensions, we might say, that move as the mind stream in our own experience that somehow function in terms of who or what we’re resonant with. My sense is that, and what I would call past life dreams, which have sometimes come into consciousness, in my experience, there definitely was a connection to both the realm of Shiva and Shakti in ancient times, and in Buddhist tradition in Asia and so forth. That these dreams are not of a me that’s separate, but they come as memories that are carried in the mind stream.
TS: OK. Then the second question that’s occurred to me, and I notice I feel a little cautious asking it, because in a certain sense we’re talking about this sense of not being separate from anything or anybody else, but yet I want to ask you a question about being a woman, being in a gendered body—
DH: In the “me too” era.
TS: Yes. If you have any sense that as a woman, spiritual awakening has expressed itself differently in you because you’re a woman.
DH: I think so.
TS: And in what way?
DH: The ultimate truth is not different. There is no gender to the ultimate truth at all. But as it’s expressed, we know if we’ve read any history at all and we don’t even have to go to history, how the feminine has often been denigrated in our spiritual traditions, has been devalued. I feel like the feminine phase of awakening often does have a different dimension in that it is so much more inclusive of our human experience, so much more earth-oriented and not just oriented to the sky energy, but the earth energy. I remember having a conversation with some other so-called spiritual teachers and the men felt like when they were teaching, they were getting a download from above into down. The women felt like the energy was coming up from the ground as it was beginning to speak.
I’m not sure that that holds for everyone, but I do feel like our gender does play a role in how this is expressed. I think there was an ancient story of a Buddhist woman who had experienced great depth of awakening and one of the monks or priests or whatever and said, “Oh, it’s just such a shame you’re not born a man, maybe in your next life you’ll be a man and then you could really become important. It’s a legend, I think, but she said something like, “No. Every lifetime from here on, I will incarnate as a woman”, in a sense just to show that to be awake doesn’t have a gender. There is no gender to what’s awaking us.
Simultaneously, it wants to express itself however it does. I think that the feminine, the yin energy that receives—that isn’t just going out and getting something or doing something as a straight line out—but this yin energy of the feminine, whether we’re men or women, it has an incredible power to receive life and to receive each other and to receive our human expression. It births children and it births spirit. It’s not male or female, but just that energy of, we could say the divine mother, but it’s also divine father. That energy of yin that is open to receiving, there’s a great power there. A lot of times I think it has been devalued and hopefully it’s coming into its own.
TS: Yes. Now Dorothy, I wanted to ask you to read a bit from a poem you’ve written called, “The Invitation.” It’s a beautiful poem that many people I’ve heard quote different parts of the poem when they’ve been talking about the awakening process, and aspects of the awakening process that perhaps they were surprised by. There’s a section of your book called, “Burning in Love’s Fire,” and you share two paragraphs from “The Invitation”. “The Invitation” in its entirety is quite a long poem, but I wonder if you could just share these two paragraphs with our listeners.
DH: Sure. Sometimes, she and I’m using she as the divine here. “Sometimes she cleans your house gently, dismantling it room by room. But often she just comes in with a torch, and you feel in your gut the fire burn in the center of your separate comfort, and you watch the contents of your house melt and turn to ash, and the roof blow off. Just when you think there’s nothing more that she could take, she opens the ground beneath the barely intact shell of your house, and all the levels of your being fall into this space that has no name; and you are left alone in all the world, without a map, without a path, without a point of view.”
TS: I love that sentence, “she opens the ground beneath the barely intact shell of your house.” It’s beautiful.
DH: Sometimes that’s exactly the experience, something that you took yourself to be just falls through the bottom. In Buddhism, it’s called “the bottom falling out of the bucket.” Then what you are is what’s looking out, and what you’re looking at is the whole world of being. It doesn’t mean our particularly unique expression isn’t doing its thing. Of course it is, but there’s that deeper knowing. Yes, and it’s not always comfortable as these two paragraphs point.
TS: Yes.
DH: Sometimes it’s quite uncomfortable as our illusions are being dismantled or worn away.
TS: You write in this chapter that the best advice you have for people in this phase of the awakening process is to “become the burning.” Tell us what you mean by that, “become the burning.”
DH: Sometimes there’s an experience of actual heat in the body of burning. It feels uncomfortable. The mind will want to get rid of it, but when we’re being anything that is arising, we’re not separate from it. We can be the discomfort, we can be the fear. We can be the fire that feels like it’s burning in your gut. Because our awareness has no boundaries whatsoever. This is boundless, timeless awareness. It can go anywhere and it is not separate from any experience or any moment. We’re just inviting that which we are, this heart of awareness that both is aware but also compassionate into the center of this discomfort or this feeling. It could be a feeling of rage, or jealousy, or fear. It could be lots of things that come up, not to be judged, but they come up to be seen and to be liberated back into the wholeness of our being.
When we’re not separating ourselves from them, we’ll feel there’s a softening that happens. There’s a deeper acceptance that what’s here is just what’s here. It’s not a judgment about a self. It’s just an expression. We’re not the victims of life necessarily, we’re its expressions, and so often we feel like a feeling or even bad weather or whatever that we become victims of life. I’m not saying there aren’t moments where we truly have felt victimized, but that’s on the relative plane. In the deeper dimension, we’re not victims of life, we’re expressions of it.
TS: There is a part of the book, Dorothy, that I think might have been the part of the book that touched me the most, which is when you were writing about your husband’s death, your husband of nearly five decades. What that was like for you and I’m wondering if we can talk some about that, because I think sometimes people have this myth that somebody who’s had an authentic awakening experience might not have sorrow or loss and you described the many different aspects of this experience quite beautifully. I wonder if you could share some of that?
DH: Sure. One of the things that happens in this awake, aware beingness that we truly are is that there is just an acceptance of the moment being what it is. When we’re moving more and more from that dimension, we’re not trying to get away from what’s here. It doesn’t mean we’re going to stand in front of a bus if it’s coming at us, but there’s just an acceptance of life as it is. If we experience a loss of a loved one, the natural human response to that is grief.
Even the great Tibetan teacher, Marpa, his son had died, and he was I think behind the barn or whatever and one of his students saw him weeping and asked, “Beloved teacher, you tell us that all of this life is an illusion yet here you are weeping. Why?” He said, “Yes, all of life is an illusion and the death of a child is the greatest of all.” It doesn’t mean we don’t have our human experience.
After my husband died, there was just this depth of grief, that I’m not sure I’d ever felt in my life, would just sweep through, but nothing tried to stop it and then it would just end as quickly as it started. That would be very surprising that almost archetypal feeling that would wash through and then it would be gone, when there was no attempt to manage it or stop it or start it or whatever.
There was just this sense of at some point, I could speak more specifically, but of knowing that his presence was the presence that’s in everything. And realizing that even though a transformation had happened, death isn’t an end, we’re just transformed. This transformation had happened out of the form that I loved as form, but that who and what he was is who and what we all are, and have always been. There’s just this sense of seeing that in the clouds, in the sky, in the flowers, in the trees, in the birds. That that which he is is that which you and I are. It doesn’t go away and even in death it doesn’t go away, and certainly the love doesn’t go away.
When Ramana Maharshi was dying he said, “People say I’m leaving, but where would I go? I am here.” That’s exactly the feeling I’ve had with my husband over all these years that he’s been gone in terms of the form. Every time I would ask, “Where are you?” The answer was always this, “I’m here.” Then you knew it was true. Whoever it is that we’ve loved, that we were connected with, they’re here in our heart, the heart that we share and the heart that doesn’t come and go. It’s the thing that doesn’t come and go just by all the experiences—some of joy, some of suffering, some of grief, some of excitement.
There was a gift in the realization of seeing what we are, even after the moment of so-called death, as being present in all of life. That doesn’t mean that as human beings we aren’t going to feel sorrow or grief. I miss him. I miss my husband. I love the life we had together. But on another level, he’s not gone, so that’s the paradox.
TS: I just have two final questions for you, Dorothy. One is that you write in the book, “Having even a very authentic awakening does not necessarily guarantee maturity.” My question to you is, OK, even an authentic awakening does not guarantee maturity. I can testify to this, because I’ve talked to a lot of Sounds True authors who seem to have had genuine awakenings, but there are some maturity gaps. My question is what does create maturity in your view? What do you mean by that word and what creates it?
DH: Part of it is our willingness to grow up, to take responsibility even as we know that life itself is moving as a whole, it’s still moving as us. The desire to see as clearly as we can the moments of untruth that arise within each of us, we all have conditioned places. We all have, we might say, little children knocking at the door waiting to be let into our heart that we say, “Oh no, not you again,” and slam the door in their face. We have those, but when our intention is to awaken as deeply as we can and to see into those places that where we’re not grown up yet, where we’re still operating from egoic contractions or innocent misunderstandings or that sort of thing.
When we have that moment, the truth in us will see the untruth. When you awaken, then that dimension of your being is engaged in more fully, more consciously. We could say the truth in us sees untruth. How are we going to respond? Are we going to pretend that since we’ve had an awakening that that isn’t here? To me, that’s not being mature. It’s not really seeing from the depth of our being the places that are yet to be liberated back into wholeness. We can all have our blind spots and life will show us. Life will give us mirrors for them if we’re willing to look into the mirror.
TS: OK, finally a last question. This program is called Insights at the Edge, and one of the things I’m often curious about is what someone’s growing edges in their life, what challenge or inner work they might be doing right now in their life. I’m wondering if you could share that with us, your current growing edge?
DH: This may sound funny, but my physical being is a growing edge. I’ve never been particularly interested in working out, though I did run a marathon once. But as I grow older, there’s a wisdom here that the body really needs to move a little bit more. I’ve tried gyms and it doesn’t have any appeal, but I love watching the Warriors basketball team, especially Steph Curry—who, anyway for basketball fans out there, you all know who I’m talking about, but others might not. I was really sitting with what could inspire the desire to become more physically active? I wasn’t saying, “Why? Why can’t I do it?” and, “I just have to buck up and be more disciplined about this.” Because if you don’t enjoy something, you’re probably not going to do it.
I was just opening myself to the edge, the edge of the physical body not being particularly exercised or moved around too much. I have a rather sedentary life. And then this master class by Steph Curry online came onto my computer and I thought, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know anything about the actual playing of basketball. I love watching the Warriors, because it’s like a ballet. There’s such a flow when things are going.”
Anyway, so I signed up for this class and I said I’m sure. The first class online, this was the first class said, “Why are you taking this class?” I said in my little blog saying, “I’m probably the oldest person ever to take this class. I’m 74 years old. I’m a grandmother. I’ve never played basketball, but I really have an interest in watching it. I’d love to know more, and I’m hoping I get a basketball for Christmas.”
Lo and behold, I did get a basketball for Christmas and I’ve started to do these exercises of playing basketball. I’m never going to be on the team, but just learning how to dribble and how to shoot is amazing. You work up a sweat, and it’s so much fun. It was like there’s an edge, but there was an openness to see if there was something that could come. There was a receptivity. If there’s something that could come here, that could be really inspiring to care for the body that wants to move more. And so this is my current fun, playing basketball is the best.
TS: Well, Dorothy, we’re going to have to play some one on one when I come out to California.
DH: Did you play basketball?
TS: I did, but that’s such a surprising answer from you. I love it. Wonderful.
DH: I know. It’s surprising to me and my kids as well, but it’s quite fun and it’s doing the job at the moment. We’ll see.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Dorothy Hunt. It’s been a great delight. She’s the author of the new book Ending the Search: From Spiritual Ambition to the Heart of Awareness. Dorothy, you get out there and play hard! And thank you so much for the beautiful conversation. Thank you.
DH: Thank you, Tami. Enjoyed it. Thanks so much.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
