The Perks Are Real
Peter Brown would sometimes talk about the perks of the Yoga of Radiant Presence.
Not often. He seemed a little reluctant to do so.
And perhaps that was sensible. Because the moment you describe how things might feel when something is recognised, people can easily begin using the description as a test.
My experience doesn’t feel like that.
I haven’t reached that.
Something must still be missing.
The thing is, though, the yoga does take some focus and effort, at least initially. And having some sense that there may be a payoff is perhaps no bad thing?
And the perks are real.
Peter could be quite forceful when he did speak about them. At its best, the yoga can bring about a quite decisive recognition that what this is, is completely unlike what we have taken it to be.
And as I consider this, I’m already struggling with the words. Because the recognition is not really that it is something else. It is more that the whole way it has seemed to be arranged begins to loosen.
And I think we know the arrangement I mean.
I am here, inside this body. The world is out there. My life is moving through time. Things are happening to me, and I must somehow manage my way through them.
None of that necessarily disappears, but it begins to lose its central position. It no longer seems to be the only possible reading of what is happening.
And the effect of that can be rather wonderful.
I recently bought a pair of English country boots. If you know this kind of boot, you’ll know they can take an awfully long time to break in.
Discovering what this is can feel a little like taking off those boots after wearing them all day. You hadn’t quite realised how tight they were until they came off.
There is relief. Release. And sometimes a peculiar sense of what we might call home.
The circumstances may be more or less as they were. The same ageing body. The same life, with all its ups and downs and unfinished business.
But the way all of this is being taken has loosened.
The certainty of me, here, in a world, having to navigate it and manage my life within it, is no longer quite so absolute. And with that, the implications loosen too.
The seriousness. The pressure. The capacity of circumstances to squeeze the life out of this moment.
Nothing has been dismissed as unreal. It is more that the familiar reading has been recognised as a reading. Something supplied. Something assembled from what is presenting and made to feel unquestionably true.
And as that certainty eases, there can be a sense that this, just as it is, is already enough.
Not because circumstances have changed.
Life can still be difficult. People can still be awkward. Things can still go wrong. There can be pain, uncertainty, disappointment, all of it.
But none of that seems able to diminish what this is.
What we call our human life begins to show itself as one dimension of something much bigger and much richer. It is still here, with all its urgency and complication, but it no longer quite fills the frame.
The life is still unfinished, of course. There are things to do, things to deal with, all the usual stuff. But somehow that unfinishedness no longer seems to reach into what this is. This feels finished. Complete, perhaps. Not heading anywhere.
And there can be this peculiar sense of continually arriving.
Not arriving once and then remaining there. It doesn’t stick in that way. It doesn’t settle into some fixed spiritual condition.
It is more like arriving home, and then arriving home again.
Oh. I’m here.
This is here.
And because it never appears quite the same way twice, the arriving is always fresh. The home is not a particular appearance, or a feeling that has to be maintained. It is somehow the recognisability of what is here, however it appears.
Again, these are only words. Home. Fullness. Completeness.
We cannot say what this is in any definable way. And yet it is completely knowable.
That sounds like a contradiction, but experientially it doesn’t seem to be one. We may be unable to say what this is, unable to get it into a clean description or explanation, while at the same time knowing it with extraordinary intimacy.
It is not hidden.
And perhaps part of the relief comes from no longer trying quite so hard to work it all out.
Ordinarily, we give thought enormous authority. Thought tells us what is happening, what it means, who we are, what the world is and what needs to be done about it. And we rarely stop to question whether thought is actually capable of determining any of this.
The yoga begins to weaken that authority.
Not by getting rid of thought. Thought continues. It remains useful, clever, irritating, practical, imaginative, limited, personal.
But it no longer seems to be the intelligence responsible for what this is.
Peter sometimes spoke of inherent intelligence.
I find that very difficult to put into words without making it sound like some great cosmic mind behind the appearances. I don’t mean that.
It is more the sense that what is appearing is already known. Already presenting with impossible precision. Already entirely intimate with itself before the human intelligence begins trying to make sense of it.
Colour, sound, sensation, thought, mood, meaning, movement. All of it is already here.
The human intelligence arrives and comments.
But it did not make this happen. It is not sustaining it. It is itself another appearance within it.
And there can be a shift towards this inherent intelligence as the more convincing sense of what I am.
Not the person standing apart and trying to know experience, but this whole known and knowing event.
These words fail too, of course.
But the recognition does not fail.
It can feel exquisitely right. Like home. Like something which had always been obvious, but had been overlooked because we were so occupied with managing the appearances and believing the account we had constructed around them.
Peter could become almost ecstatic when speaking from here. He would use words like fullness, completeness, absolute being. Sometimes he would go further than I can comfortably follow him.
But I understand something of why he did.
The recognition itself can make you want to say outrageous things.
Not because you have finally worked out what reality is, but because what is found is so unlike the cramped situation we had imagined ourselves to be living within.
The perks are real.
And if you are willing to investigate, what you discover may be radically different, and inconceivably better, than anything you had imagined to be the case.
Thanks to everyone who has already signed up for What the Hell Is This?
If you’d like to look more closely at the Yoga of Radiant Presence, the workshop is built around exactly this kind of investigation.
No promises about the perks. But they are real.
You can find the details on my website. thisradiantspace.com
Really Wonderful, Rob. Thank you!