So each one of us is experiencing Total Being in one or another of its presentations all the time. And our practice is simply to find out what it is right now, to inquire into its nature; and, as we inquire into it, the inquiry itself, which feels like an invitation, is Total Being expressing its intelligence and revealing other possibilities as part of actualizing its potential. We experience the gravitational pull of Total Being manifesting further potentialities as our love of discovery. We experience the inexhaustible indeterminacy of Total Being appearing as the featurelessness of consciousness. This is the beginning of the endless journey of freedom.  

As we come to understand that Being can appear in this way, we recognize that this subtle featurelessness is actually implicit in all of the presentations of true nature: in absolute awareness, in primordial nonconceptual awareness, in knowingness and pure presence, in boundless love, in the dynamism of reality, in the qualities of being, and also in the everyday experience of subject and object. This kind of featurelessness is always there, and we don’t recognize it precisely because it is featureless. We are habituated to seek features. We are always identifying with one feature or another. And because there is the view or the position that if there are no features, there will be nothing—which sounds like bad news to most of us—featurelessness might feel like nothing, but it is actually everything. The experience of featureless reality is quite ordinary; everything is simple. Life goes on as usual, except there is no fixation on or stuckness in one view or another—existence or nonexistence, self or no self, dual or nondual, happening or not happening. We are just not concerned about these kinds of determinations. We live our usual life without the Velcro of attaching or fixating in any ultimate way. The total openness of featurelessness is a kind of pure not knowing. The experience is “I know. I know that I know. But I do not know what I know.” Reality is not ultimately determined by any feature, which allows it the freedom to experience all features.

In dual experience, we believe that duality is a permanent feature of reality. That is how most people experience life: “There is me and there is you, and we are really separate, and we can go our own way and never see each other again.” But when we experience nonduality, we see that nothing is separate. We are all an inseparable, indivisible, and formless kind of awareness. That is an important stage of spiritual experience. And total nonconceptuality further shows that even nonduality is a recognizable feature, something that can be isolated and known in contrast to the dual. The experience of total nonconceptuality reveals a featureless consciousness that cannot be experienced by contrasting it with anything else. Thus, for featureless consciousness, whether experience is dual or nondual is irrelevant—it could be either, both, or neither.

The experience of featureless consciousness is timeless and spaceless in the sense that it is not patterned by concepts of either time/no time or space/no space. We perceive the passage of events without having to identify with the concept of time. We experience dimensions of space without any persisting sense of here and there. Our experience has no sense of size or location, quality or color. Featureless true nature reveals a consciousness that is conscious of itself but devoid of thought, differentiation, conceptualization, and recognition. It is a pure and undefined consciousness that is free of the concept of consciousness. By calling it “consciousness,” I am referring to the fact that there is experience, which is so indefinable that we cannot refer to it as either presence or emptiness. How can there be consciousness of something that has no definable features except for consciousness itself? It is a pure and complete absence of mind. Although featurelessness is friendly to features—which can be and ordinarily are present—they do not pattern the featurelessness. Featurelessness is both beyond mind and can coexist easily with mind because it does not have any feature that opposes or negates mind.  

Total nonconceptuality, which is total featureless consciousness, allows us to see everything as an experience, perception, and realization that feels very ordinary. Everything is simple and everything is just itself. If we check to see what “itself” means, whether it means being separate from other things or not, we think, “Well, it’s neither separate nor nonseparate, because those are human concepts.” Reality here is totally nonconceptual and is not the product of individual thinking. Whether things are separate or not, which can both be true at times, is not relevant or necessary for life, not necessary for awareness, and not necessary for being. The fact that there is no concern or no relevance does not mean that there is no appreciation or love. We value all experience, but have no need to attach to any of it in an ongoing way. And in some sense, everything is relevant, because things being relevant or not is yet another polarity that we can be free from. All of the possibilities—things mattering or not mattering, things being relevant or not—are welcome. Featurelessness is the potential for any feature. If the openness is not truly featureless, it will inevitably exclude something. The fact that the openness is a featureless openness is what allows all possibilities of experience.

We can explore freedom in many other ways. It is a profound contemplation because freedom changes meaning as more degrees of freedom are recognized. We discover the freedom of the heart to appear in ways that we haven’t thought possible; the freedom of the mind to perceive, discern, know, and think in new ways; the freedom of acting, communicating, and relating as Total Being. Freedom also becomes connected with maturation. The more mature we are, the more we are able to handle further degrees of freedom. We can include more in our experience, in our sense of who we are and the possibilities of reality. And freedom can also free itself from all these manifestations. It can be simply freedom, independent of everything. Even to call it freedom becomes irrelevant because there is no need for our being or identity to be determined in any way. These are some of the meditations on freedom possible from the view of totality. Freedom emerges as a particular value when we begin to appreciate the featurelessness of our true nature. It is in the bareness of featurelessness that the affect of freedom can be distinguished. Feeling the affect of freedom is very much connected with the sense of featurelessness, of no particular way of being or not being. Because featureless consciousness is not defined in any way, it is open to all possible ways that Total Being can experience itself. This absence of features brings freedom into sharper relief because we can recognize freedom as a particular affect or sense that is independent of any of its contexts. But freedom is not only an affect; it is also the freedom of our capacities—particularly the creative dynamism of our Total Being—to play and appear in whichever way they want.

From the perspective of total nonconceptuality, the challenge is not that emptiness does not exist; rather, it is that whether things are empty or not, whether they exist or not, is simply not relevant to this type of realization. Here the recognition and experience of the realization of true nature is that things neither exist nor don’t exist, and there is no concern either way, because we are not operating with the concept of existence. This way of experiencing true nature is Total Being manifesting its featurelessness—a featurelessness that is not characterized by the feature of existence. To say that existence is a feature is also to say that nonexistence is a feature. And yet both existence and nonexistence are valid ways of experiencing reality. They are polar opposites that annul each other. When we experience featurelessness, it is as if we were a creature from a parallel universe and never heard of the concepts of existence or nonexistence. We continue to live, reality keeps happening, and the question of whether things exist or not does not occur to us. These concepts are neither denied nor negated, but are simply recognized as irrelevant. We can observe a similar dynamic in the realization of selflessness, which is an important realization in most spiritual teachings. Most traditions agree that if you don’t get to a place of selflessness, you are still stuck with a self. That is also true on this path, but we see that, at some point, as realization reveals more of its freedom, it also frees itself from the position of selflessness. We can recognize that selflessness already implies some kind of memory of a self, whether as a knowing that it is possible to be a self or as an awareness that there was a self that is now gone. Either way, we are still referring to the concept of self.

Another thing that we begin to see through in the featurelessness of our true nature is the relationship between stillness and dynamism. One of the boundless dimensions that we haven’t talked about much yet accounts for the fact that things change, things happen and move. From the perspective of this nondual dimension of creative dynamism, everything is created anew every single moment and everything simply appears and disappears instantaneously. This is the recognition that reality is in constant flow and that this flow is how things happen. From the perspective of total nonconceptuality, we can see that this flow and dynamism are quite a recognizable feature. So movement, flow, and creativity are separate from stillness, silence, and rest. From the perspective of this dimension of dynamism, which we call the logos, all of reality is always occurring at the same time, all of it is a constant happening or constant flow, and all of it—including our thoughts, our feelings, our movement, our life—is always occurring. But from the perspective of total nonconceptuality, that occurrence is a feature that is contrasted with nonoccurrence. Here the question of whether things occur or don’t occur is irrelevant. The experience is more like this: We see things happening, but we feel that nothing is actually occurring, that nothing ever occurs even though it appears as if it is always occurring. We can recognize that occurring and not occurring is another conceptual dichotomy.  

Featureless consciousness challenges all dichotomies and reveals other ways of experiencing reality. One of the features of ordinary experience is the dichotomy between subject and object; this is usually referred to as dualistic experience. We have seen that in deeper levels of realization, especially realization from the perspective of the boundlessness of true nature, the sense of duality disappears. The self and the object are not separate, and the ground and its manifestation are not separate. Reality appears here as nondual experience—it is all one fabric. But from the perspective of total nonconceptuality, both dual and nondual are features of experience; they can be isolated and can be recognized and known. When our experience is featureless, we think, “Nonduality is wonderful, but what does that have to do with me? Dual, nondual—neither of them applies to me. My experience is neither dual nor nondual.”

We can observe a similar dynamic in the realization of selflessness, which is an important realization in most spiritual teachings. Most traditions agree that if you don’t get to a place of selflessness, you are still stuck with a self. That is also true on this path, but we see that, at some point, as realization reveals more of its freedom, it also frees itself from the position of selflessness. We can recognize that selflessness already implies some kind of memory of a self, whether as a knowing that it is possible to be a self or as an awareness that there was a self that is now gone. Either way, we are still referring to the concept of self. The mind is still thinking of its experience in terms of self or no self. But when reality manifests its featurelessness, the consciousness or the beingness is not thinking of itself in terms of self or no self. Not only are we not thinking in those terms, but those categories are extraneous to our experience. And even though these categories don’t apply and are not necessary, it doesn’t mean that the experiences of self and no self are completely gone. With total openness, sometimes it seems as if there were no self, and at other times it seems as if there is a self. So there is a fluidity and openness to experience that reveals that these are different ways that Total Being manifests itself.