The Third Step

The first step seems to be living inside a bubble. We close the dimensions of the sky, and find ourselves buffeted by self-made weather. It is like an echo chamber inside our head. The things I must change, the person I must become, the things I must achieve - the dread and vanity that propel people towards that redemptive moment when some change of circumstances makes us whole. We think a bigger house will do it, or other people’s envious eyes, or just meaningful work, a sense of the power in our own hands. Some of us think some great religious experience will prove our salvation; the same as the others, we hurtle anxiously along.

The second step is not really a step at all. It is a non-step. It is the moment you stop skipping like a salamander across the surface of life, and let yourself sink into it. Eckhart Tolle says to take one breath. Richard Rudd says to take three. Peace always just happens, though sometimes you have to cooperate with it. You make the time to sit down at sunset, you take a pause to sit down with yourself, you put down your phone and look at the sky. Sometimes peace is given, sometimes we are offered the opportunity to find it. Peace widens everything. It is like a sigh. Your body softens, your mind moves more rhythmically. Time dilates. All your problems dissolve. You do not resolve them; they simply cease to be. Perhaps they remain as considerations or conundrums, but the desperation is not there. You have a broader perspective. The urgency we attach to problems is itself the problem. Our urgency frazzles us, tires us, and prevents us from working efficiently. It is self-defeating as well as stupid.

A lot of spirituality, as far as I can see, is about puncturing and punctuating life with moments of peacefulness. You thread your life with a golden thread. It always takes courage to put down your sense of inferiority and longing, and simply arrive where you are. It takes great humility to accept that you are divine, right here and right now. The Earth is paradise, samsara is nirvana, you are the Buddha. With practice, these moments come more often and linger longer; you learn a type of internal jiu-jitsu by which you bring all the things of your life back to peace. You find your breath more, you find your heart. The question ‘Who am I?’ bobs up again and again. You make a relationship with the peace you thought you had lost.

But the process does not end here. I know a lot of people who get bogged down at this point. They learn to alchemise all of life into silence; in the Stillness they become still. But a strange kind of dread emerges then, a kind of once-bitten-twice-shy reticence in the face of life. They cling to non-clinging, and it produces a kind of disequilibrium. Input and output fall out of whack. They try to live without doing anything, because doing takes one away from peace, but this attitude slows the pendulum that powers life, and creates a dead-end which energy cannot flow through. It creates a kind of pent-up feeling, a festering backlog of dreams.

Peace strips our intentions of vanity and urgency. We realise that there is nothing that needs to be done. For a while we bask in the sun. But in time sunlight and water nourish the seed that was at the centre of the original snowball, and the original impulse flourishes anew. This is my understanding of dharma: what we do when there is nothing to do. It is not a romantic concept - it is not dogamtic in any way. It can be anything: it can be becoming an artist; equally, it can be working a job merely to put your children through college. It can be founding a business purely to become rich. It is amoral. The one thing it does not contain is haste to get to the end. It is action for the sake of action, not in the sense that there is no purpose or direction to the action; more in the sense that one is not hoping to achieve some kind of salvation by it. One does not hope to get anything life-changing out of it: this frees one up to approach it creatively. Going for a walk can be creative. Playing with a cat can be creative. Building a search engine can be creative. Writing a book can be creative. But to be creative one must be open.

You would think that one would face the problems of vanity and ego at the second step, but I have found that this is not the case. Rather, one’s whole self-worth becomes wrapped up in the process of achieving peace. One objectifies peace, makes it a goal, and often loses it by looking for it too hard. But there is a sense of one’s righteousness, a specialness that comes from looking in the right places, while everyone else is not. It is a kind of crystallised egotism, and in some people it becomes much more intense.

I think you really start to challenge your sense of superiority and inferiority when you move to the third step. The third step resembles the first step (and sometimes lapses into it); the only difference is the intention. If one is hoping to be saved, either by being special or redeemed, then it is the first step. But if one is working for the sake of working, with no rush towards some mesmerising future, then one is brought into the moment, and works in peace. Some people find their way there by simply loving their work. Of course there are degrees of nobility in our intentions, and it would probably be richer to simply work for selfless love, but I don’t think this can be forced. It certainly is not fruitful to impersonate it. It is much better to simply do what one does, and try to punctuate it with an awareness that now is sufficient to now. Then one works in peace.

Robyn Bauer
Looking out from under the Awning
Art Gallery | Robyn Bauer Studio | Paddington