Excerpt 2: Writing Within Crevices—Exploring the Gaping Holes of Wholeness.

What are these times saying? Many take light as a kind of compass; but deeper in, light seems to wane. We’re asked to extend our sensing and feel our way. This piece is part of that movement.

(Amit Paul & Eric Lichtman)

In Excerpt 1—“Writings in the Cracks: An Experiment in Presence and Becoming”—we peered into the cracks. This Excerpt 2 will take us deeper, into the Crevices.

“Where is the light? Have you seen the light?” (Cris Williamson, The Changer and the Changed, 1975, Olivia Records)

What are these times saying? What routes are open to us—individually and together? Many take light and intuition as a kind of compass; but deeper in, light seems to wane. We’re asked to extend our sensing and feel our way. This piece is part of that movement. What if you read it not as text but as invocation – an invitation to call forth whatever resource you may need right now.

Prologue: Death and destabilization

Eric

Recently, a death ripped through us, tearing the ‘normal’ fabric of my family’s life. With too little warning, our everyday lives were shaken when our uncle died suddenly.

Tears and other intense reactions like upset, shock, fear, incredulity, anger, may inevitably emerge when a beloved family member dies unexpectedly. We say our heart “breaks” when there is this kind of loss. There’s also a tearing apart, a physical separation, and a sense of finality. We’ll never have the same opportunity to be with him and share moments with his presence again in the same way. What remains are memories and stories of our experiences together. In the Jewish tradition, we commonly say when offering condolences to the bereaved: “may their memories be a blessing.” May the memories of these times be a blessing too as we navigate the Crevice, within the bewildering zeitgeist.

When dealing with death, and its shadows, no matter what we say or do, there’s often an awkwardness, accompanied by a chilly familiarity. Tell us the story—we want to know: “What happened?” “How did he die?” “What was the cause of death?” “How old was he?” “Had he been sick?” “When did you last see or talk with him?” “Was he partnered, with children, siblings?” We’re curious, even though we know, on some level: this is the system’s way, the system’s design.

Beneath these first questions, other thoughts bubble up. Hidden behind our breath, with streams of thoughts, carefully unspoken: Thoughts may start off kind and friendly, before going beyond to something like "Geez, I’m sorry for your loss, that’s terrible,” to unfolding into some variation of—“yikes this could happen to me, to a beloved in my family, to a close friend.” In some way, viscerally, we’re touched, no matter how we attempt to place, or compartmentalize the loss. How might we prevent this kind of loss, these kinds of thoughts, this situation from happening to us? After the crack of death appears, we enter the crevice of recognition.

With recognition, comes a larger sense of awe, dread, and possibly a challenge with a hint of excitement. We might say to ourselves—"I know big shifts are bound to happen. We’ll summon our courage to face this. But for now, I’m glad it’s not happening to me in this moment. In spiritual terms, we might intone a version of “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” But the destination, in a way, is already here. We’re in the Crevice. We already sense being touched by the void; with avoidance, we may believe we are controlling the feelings. But through invitations of acceptance and curiosity, the feeling tones may actually increase, quicken and deepen.

Big shifts happen. They are happening now…now…and now. Individually in us, collectively in our families, communities, regions, countries, planet, even universe. Some noticeably, as in my family’s current upset; some happen in a larger context, an extremely long time-span—with more space, appearing imperceptibly, epochally, over eons of time.

“We think that if we just meditated enough or jogged enough or ate perfect food, everything would be perfect. But from the point of view of someone who is awake, that’s death. […] The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought.” – Pema Chödrön “When things fall apart, heart advice for difficult times” (2016)

Seeking security, meditating more frequently, even rejoicing in feeling whole…on the surface, for many of us, this may sound like a good place to be. Yes? To the ‘awake’, however, this kind of ‘security’ becomes a death, inevitably! A certain kind of stability means that there is no “fresh breath” available.

That’s what our work is about: experiencing fresh breaths. There is no single goal. The point is that attention can shift, we may find pleasure, pain, ecstasy, flow, good times and bad. We encourage, like Chödrön, being with the “in-between” states and opening our hearts and minds beyond limits. Our writing, dialogues, workshops, and more – center on feeling, settling in and relaxing amidst chaos, seeing the gaping holes in the fabrics we’re living, and celebrating the wholeness of life.

Navigation by Questions

Amit

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” - R.M. Rilke

This reverberates through Eric’s prologue. In my experience, the “nature of being” is easier to touch through questions. Inquiry holds the potential to put us in contact with the mystery. Questions do not impose; rather, they invite us to explore. They ask for participation. Their incompleteness invites spaciousness and openness. Life longs to fill the space which they create. Death of a loved one may be the ultimate question. What is it all for? Who was I, and who could I have been when I was with you? Who can I be now that you’re no longer here? In this way, we can grow the capacity to learn within each moment.

Learning in this language does not live well alongside what we conventionally mean as schooling or education. Rather it is what is built into the romantic notion of ‘bildung’- the process of learning with relationships while becoming alive. It is not about conveying information; but discovering the edges of our knowing-abilities. Some call this unlearning.

In many instances, this might happen when trying to obtain a certain level of Awareness, or when “Being in the Moment” can easily become an obstacle. “Nothing is what we thought”—writes Chödrön. Indeed. When the tumultuous waves appear in our zeitgeist’s inner and outer environments, we may get stuck in the Crevice, because we lose our sense of direction. We had calibrated our compass on seemingly permanent objects, not on the mystery. If we can address the world as a field of relations where everything can have relevance, everything is teeming with meaning. Then our job is to find within it, questions that orient us towards or through it. That question, in relationship to the death of a loved one, might simply be: what is it to be alive?

If life is like a large puzzle, then not discarding the pieces that currently seem irrelevant is important. Putting pieces aside will let us complete a part of the puzzle faster for now but throwing them out might leave us with a lot of gaps later. Holding such a diverse set of pieces on the table, however, requires an open minded, non-discriminating, relaxed presence, combined with the courage to zoom in where the pattern is currently calling us. To stay with the section, you are currently working on without thinking –” that’s the whole thing”. Instead, let it go, let yourself focus on the hole so that the whole may emerge. Trust that the other fragments will come back when needed. We are not inert or separate, and neither is knowledge. Leaving a piece or a different section does not make it disappear; it’s simply waiting until attention finds it again. We look at what’s unfolding and let it become part of us so that our ‘being-ness’ can re-call/re-member the experience when the time is right. It is a trusting practice, navigating by questions that can arouse fresh breaths, and fresh experiencing moments.

Questions as Portals

A question is an invitation towards something unknown. Something beyond our control which has an opportunity to pull or orient our being-ness. From a certain perspective, it’s a ‘penetration’ into our habitual movement. From another, it is simply an invitation to go beyond it. As we pose questions, we may deepen into that which is already here.

I recently facilitated a dialogue on regenerative financing and, as we began, I asked: “What have you sacrificed? What are you willing to sacrifice?”. This allowed the participants to reflect on their personal stance in relation to their work. It became an invitation to bring more of one’s fullness’ (depth of self) into a dialogue in a professional context. Women were able to share how their experiences were invalidated, how caring never seemed to fit the bill. One group was moved to tears. Some saw how their internal fight was reproduced in the initiatives they were driving. Others reported that they had debated and decided that they did not like the word “sacrifice”. None of these answers are right or wrong. Although it seems to me, those who allowed the exploration to become close and more intimate, were also the ones that perceived more value.

Questions are potential portals. They give us a sense of agency. They invite us to participate and follow along the path; walking willingly reduces the need and energy wasted in resistance. Figuratively they keep us from banging on doors that have already slammed shut behind us. Questions can keep us moving forward. Until we encounter an obstacle. If we don’t like the odds of what we’re looking at – a new question may let us look another way. Through a new lens, aperture or focal point. The questions we are asking, what we’ve made the experience about, can serve as prompts that guide what we’re seeing and experiencing. Amazing! The death of a loved one may become a discontinuity or a deepening of the relationships still there. It may change the relationship to who we truly are, beyond who we think we are or should be.

Such intensity may reveal how there is a part of ‘our being’ that is figuratively spread out on the couch, watching the movie which is our life with great engagement. We are the main character in the story, but somehow, we’re also a character on the couch. Living from that awareness that whatever life is, it’s not ‘real’ is a path into the non-dual, even when in times of grief or uproar. Explore living as if there is always another movie playing at the same time, told by another narrator, in another genre. Through attention shifting, this may introduce a different kind of focus. We may or may not have easy access to this way of living, but acquiring the capacity to explore the more cinematic, dream-like qualities of our lives, we may discover greater flexibility and creativity, plus be enriched by other benefits. In short, we may become lighter, more flexible, more appreciative, joyful, and relaxed.

Being as Response: Devotion and Participation

Amit & Eric

It seems to us that our world is stuck in habits that have us spending unfathomable amounts of different types of energy. We are trying to address much which relates to ‘being’ by ‘having’—as Eric Fromm might have put it. It takes energy to stave off that kind of entropy. Instead of starting in rest, we start in strife. We strive to acquire markers - that car, the bag, the watch, the membership, the trip, the friends, the spouse. Our lives lack primary satisfactions - eating, sleeping, dancing, playing, being close, and sitting together – so we fill them and give undue emphasis to secondary ones: competing, winning, extracting, measuring, comparing, etc. The system pushes us towards the secondary satisfactions. It is a feedback loop. What you measure is what you get. Primary satisfactions, on the other hand, are cheap, often unquantifiable in monetary terms. They are subtle and qualitative. Primary satisfactions are fleeting, measured in metabolic terms: in feeling or in spirit. Essentially, they are, or re-present, the things we are taught to disregard.

Interlude. A provoking thought experiment; let’s blame Celsius for global warming. Consider that if we had not been measuring temperature, we’d have no global warming. We’re not saying that the challenges we’re facing, nor that the cascading systemic effects would necessarily be different. We are, however, saying that the definition of the problem could look radically different. If we had used a different denominator to represent what is happening in our world. Instead of chasing °C or ppms, then what would we have attended to?

Sometimes what we need is a pattern break. A “Hail Mary”. A play sometimes used in American football. A team might attempt this near the end of the game when they’re behind. This end-of-game-changing strategy is an all-out effort calculated to turn the game around in one dramatic action. The point we’re making here: sometimes it’s necessary to break the pattern of our play. What might decisive, game-changing activity, that penetrate our not-so-helpful habits, look like? Perhaps like, enlisting destabilization as an ally. Shifting attention in unexpected ways may be needed to see into what isn’t obvious or easily noticeable.

To get there, we need to move underneath our habits. What does safety vs change, continuity vs destabilization, evoke? Does one word in those pairs ring like something you’d want? The other then, being something to avoid? Unexamined doing is what often perpetuates ‘what Is’. What would happen if we were to live into the possibility that stability and continuity are the antidotes of life? From a certain perspective they are.

We know that life depends on change. Decomposition. Evolution. Even death. The opposite of life is not death; the opposite is the synthetic, the plastic, the unchanging. And yet, somehow the unchanging is what we strive for.

Eric’s uncle’s death is painful. His demise propagates a flurry of movement. Conversations and happenings that would not have happened while he lived. This is not making small out of the grief and the depth of pain death can bring. But it is not the antithesis of life. Death is the ultimate other, or negative. Being with it is a cultivation of negative capacity. We begin seeing the constellations not as connected stars, for example, but as the darkness they frame. We are so often convinced that events are what shape us. Yet there are good grounds for saying that what shapes us most is what we're unable to feel. The omitted. That which the algorithmic hum of our habits hide. That invisibly pulls us, and it is what we’re defenseless against. When we truly invite the ingredients for the ‘Practice of Presence’, we also invite destabilization. Examined being is a genuine response, not merely a reaction.

This all fits. Intimate participation does not require seeing. The darkness of the Crevice does not impede it. Each of us is the center of our life. A center is not an inert object. It influences and is influenced by its context; it depends on it. Ubuntu says: I am because we are. Christopher Alexander speaks of centers and fields. Mystic and spiritual traditions speak of entanglement with life or a world-soul that we each received a part of to care for. Allowing ourselves to go off our habitual instrumentation and feel our way, welcoming that which we have told ourselves we need to avoid, opens possibilities of becoming different. Let’s ground these concepts in a story. 

Effort as Gauge

Amit

I am a person who tends to thrive in effort and pain. That is the cluster of sensations that I’ve learned to associate with ‘doing a good job’. And, therefore, when I am ‘good’, I feel like I deserve to live. Yes — up until now, being and living was something I had to deserve. Indirectly, I surmised from both my Lutheran and more capitalistic context, as well as from my native family, that simply existing was ‘not enough’. My entire instrumentation for some 35 years was about gauging how much I was exerting myself. More effort served as a placeholder for doing better.

Then something changed. As I came into more contact with the “regenerative” paradigm almost a decade ago, I became exposed to something new. Pain and effort were no longer an unquestioned good. Not that it was necessarily effortless or free of pain, but it no longer served as a reliable marker of ‘doing the right thing’. It was simply information, consequences of my doing. This was destabilizing. I imagined that if I did not ‘make things happen’, I’d simply cease to exist and fall into a void of nothingness. So deeply were the hooks planted in me around my self-worth (or lack thereof), that I was unable to allow myself pleasure. I could not see how I could possibly deserve pleasure that I had not worked for.

Responding or working with life is neither passive waiting nor strenuous effort. It requires a certain relaxation. It is about moving with power within right relationship, rhythm and pace. We need to move and engage to be in the dance. Otherwise, life dances by. But to dance well, we need to listen, work with the song that is currently playing. Too much focus on our internal rhythm and the lessons pass us by. The lesson is curious. It is one of participation. Of unconditional trust. We seem to be invited onto the field of life to practice devotion. The point of devotion is not to be rewarded; devotion is boundless and immeasurable. Unfettered (and untethered) by made up boundaries of identity. It too is a spacious orientation to learn, to freshly experience, no matter what.

Epilogue: Devotion and Destabilization

Amit and Eric

What are we protecting that we’re not devoted to? This is a question that we have brought to groups of men and women. It is a question that holds significant potential in these secular times. Even the word devotion seems to spark resistance in some. It seems to spark the sense that we are no longer worthy. As if we don’t trust our ability to adhere to the vows we make. It is uncomfortable to deal with a world where there is something bigger than us.

Trust is a close cousin, but no less challenging. We convince ourselves that we trust all the time, but somehow the motion stops short. For many of us, when we are in actual movement, it might reveal that it is more important to make the decision than to see how far we could go. Control is the enemy of the fresh. If you let go of control, you might find yourself lost, in a place you’ve never been. The question then is, so what? If you can feel into the moving waves, and fresh experiencing, you may still find the way. If the movement is primary, then are you ever really lost if you keep going?

Often, this means going beyond who we think we are. In a sense, we destabilize to become. That is the start of living into our potential. Destabilization is the radical resistance to the deadness of security, the stickiness of stability, and the fixation on looking and acting in conforming ways. This includes our notions of meditation, of what being in the present should be, and of the storytelling that tends to limit the potential of our lives.

In the Crevice we may search for footholds on which to stand, handholds on which to pull ourselves (and one another) as we try to lift ourselves and our communities from the situations that tend to pull downward. We reach inward and outward for the natural impulse for ‘fresh air’. Can we trust our “light-compass”, regardless of what our eyes may be able to see? There are gaping holes in the fabric, as we discussed in the Prologue. We’re bound to find ourselves in ‘impossible’ situations, in over our head with challenges, in the most intimate as well as the most systemic; as systems collapse, we’re bound to lose our individual and collective balance. And that might be exactly what’s needed for us to find our way, and to reach out to one another.

Composting Pause: Invitation to Stay Within the Unfinished

Before moving on, let’s linger here.

Not to analyze or summarize—but to notice. And consider some questions:

What stirred in you as you read? What felt warm, what felt jagged, what asked you to pause?

Is there one or more questions that have stayed with you—not to be solved, but questions to live?

You don’t need to act. Just notice what shifted. What softened? What resisted? What surprised you? What destabilized you?

This is the essential compost. The slow turning-over. The digestion beneath the surface. The un-becoming.

We’re offering two practices below that readers may want to experiment with.

Practice #1: This too is I

We wish to share now a practice that we’ve adapted from the text, Time, Space, and Knowledge by Tarthang Tulku (Dharma Publishing 1977): With whatever object of our attention appears–—invite all thoughts, sensations (especially those unwanted), and any appearances – we say to ourselves –” This too is ‘I’ .“

We literally become multitudes. We can learn from every situation that appears in our awareness. Eventually, ‘we’ may discover an intimacy “which involves neither a self nor an object” (p, 190). In fact, what would it be like if our identity appears and disappears in relation to whatever appears and disappears? How liberating to feel into the ways in which we confine ourselves based on habits, biases, perceptions with notions of being separate selves with boundaries. What if we no longer are separate or continuous selves? What if we challenge the image that we stay the “same person” or same identity from moment to moment? What if the nature of change, ‘changes us’ – moment to moment. Amazing!

Sounds strange, doesn’t it? In truth, this can be very freeing. Yet, it’s not so easy to experience at first. Ironically, this may really reflect a more natural and genuine way to be within the flow of time and appearance as they present.

Practice #2: Destabilizing questions

Borrowed from Carol Sanford’s book, No More Gold Stars. She calls forth the capacity of humans to be stewards or agents for systems actualization. But only after we have first established a firm posture or orientation towards the expansion of self; thereafter, we can come into a capacity for learning to orient towards systems actualization. By living into the timelines that are beyond our own, using those to discover what is here, we have the potential to unfold a larger whole which includes ourselves. It means drawing on what has been consciously or subconsciously omitted as part of a practice of re-imaging.

Consider:

• Where am I asked to unfold? Show up differently? 

• What have I edited out of my own story? What do I consistently omit?

• What parts of me whisper, this too is I, that I resist or refuse? Why will I not let them play along? What would happen if I let them into the dance? Who would I become if I let the omission be part of me?

• ​What am I being asked to respond to—not with answers, but with presence? What destabilization would deepen my connectedness?

Let these questions root. Let them decompose what no longer serves. Now we’re making soil. We’ll grow from here.

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This is an excerpt of a larger work. Perhaps a book that Eric Lichtman and Amit Paul is and has been working on. This is our invitation for you to participate in our making of it. What caught you? Feel free to share in comments or in an e-mail. As we move through the fall there will be more of these. To stay up to date. Subscribe.