Isness

Isness is the understanding that everything that exists is not only infinitely alive but also has its own particular vibrancy, vibration, specificity, particularity, and is in a deeply complex, mutually loving, interdependent relationship with every other isness. And all of the isnesses are part of what one might call a non-hierarchical polyexistence which we might name Creation. So not only does everything express and manifest its own particular isness - we know for example that there are no two leaves on a tree that are identical to one another. We also know that there are no two individuals who are also identical to one another. Everyone manifests their own particular energy and their own particularity. [...]

When you begin with isness it’s a very different journey. It’s a very different way of understanding. First of all, isness is created. It is part of an understanding that the Creator has manifested an infinity, or a near infinitude of isnesses all of which are intended to relate to each other in a mutually loving, cooperative and interdependent way. You may be somebody who does not believe in the Creator. That is fine. What you can do is to observe the way the universe is, observe the way the universe functions and you would have to conclude that things are deeply interconnected. Everything is in a complex dance with everything else. 

The glory of isness is that it enables you to avoid wrapping your arms around the categories society has given you as a kind of mirror in which you can discover yourself: in other words a complete identification with social categories. You avoid that because you understand that your isness exceeds those categories. You also avoid the tendency towards wanting to climb up and above - transcend means to climb up and above - humanness in order to get to your true essence. 

Isness enables us to breathe deeply into our isness; to try to find the meaning of life, the meaning of our journey, where we might wish to go, in the process of self-discovering, by attending and paying attention to isness. Now this might sound abstract. But if you think about meditation, what is it that the practice is requesting you to do? Either by following the breath or by watching the mind you quiet yourself down and you become still. Part of the pedagogy is to allow yourself to fall beneath, below, the threshold of perception that you have been operating on. What is it that you fall into? I would say you fall into isness. 

And as you fall into isness you notice things about yourself that exceed those categories, you notice things about yourself that you may or may not have noticed before, and you also notice things about the framework that you have used to comprehend and apprehend the world. When you sit in the stillness of a contemplative practice whatever form that contemplative practice might take, singing a bhajan [devotional song], sitting meditation, undertaking ritual practice, being a karma yogi, what are you doing? You are settling into your isness. And as you settle into your isness you are learning about yourself in an entirely new way. The vibrancy, the vibration that is specifically you is precisely what it is that you would need to get to know in order to say, “Who am I outside of all of this, all that I have been taught to think of myself as being?”[...]

I gradually came to discover that there were aspects to self that I had been completely oblivious of. I had paid no attention to my body. I certainly did not think of my body as a site of intelligence. I had assumed that everything I needed to learn I would learn from the mind. And I also came to discover in this time the third point in the triad, which is the heart. The heart has its own intelligence as well. I had you might say just lived here (pointing to the head) at the very surface. And part of what the accident enabled me to do was to start to sink deeper and deeper and deeper into the heart, into body and in that process, and over a period of ten years start to understand what experience might be like if we were to embrace body, mind and heart as a triadic form of intelligence that is available to us all as humans.