And navigating that means navigating the unprecedented, which means by definition we’ve never been here before. And that feels a whole lot like being lost.

Oh, I’ve been told to mention the Wayfinder’s Compass, which is a summer course that you can register for up until May 22nd. It goes throughout the summer, the community goes all the way through October. Anyway, so that’s that. The Wayfinder’s Compass. Good. Oh, link in the bio. All right, done with that.

So what I wanted to talk to you about is that my family’s been house hunting, and we’ve been getting our house ready to sell because we all had a very strong sort of hunch that we should. This was months ago. We’ve been preparing for it ever since. Busily making our house look like nobody lives here. And then driving to the place where we think we’re meant to be, which is like a two-and-a-half hour drive and looking at houses and then driving back.

And it always seems to be in a spitting, nasty, cold rain. And my whole image of this place we’re moving to is just this frozen wasteland. I know it’s not, but I am a creature that—I’m a hobbit. I like to be in my hobbit hole. I basically have lived much of my life in my bedroom because of health conditions, and it’s like a burrow for me.

And not to know where I live—and I know that I’m excessively privileged. This is nothing like a genuine unhoused situation. I so, so am grateful for my privilege, and yet, selling your place to live and not having another place to live is disconcerting. Especially since—if you’re a coach or you’ve worked with one of my Wayfinder coaches—you know that I have this belief that our inner lives and our living space always reflect each other.

So when you go through a big change in your life—say you fall in love—you start to change things about your living space. Suddenly—you’ll usually change your hairstyle as well—but you start moving furniture around, you paint a wall, maybe you even move. Maybe you move in with the person you’ve fallen in love with, and it absolutely reflects “I have added this person to my life.”

I really think this is so specific that you actually can’t change anything in your living space without making a slight commensurate change in your inner life and vice versa. Any inner life change is reflected in your living space.

So cleaning everything out of the house where I’ve been living, like going into all the drawers that have gathered junk and all the closets that have things pushed back in there that I haven’t looked at for a while, it’s symbolic of the way my psyche is getting cleaned out. And that has been another very weird aspect of life for me recently.

There are all these strange things happening in our political lives. There are strange things happening in our climate. There are all these difficulties. And as you know—you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t at least somewhat agree with me—that I believe we need to experience a radical change of consciousness in order to move forward as a species in love and harmony and care for the planet and each other. And as things go to hell in a handbasket in so many places, in so many ways, I think that transformation of consciousness is happening.

I feel like it’s happening to me. I feel like I’ve had to do all my psychological work all over again. I feel as if I’m surrounded by this loving presence that is insistently shifting the way I see reality, and it’s put me in places that I, where I’m dropping fundamental ideas about how reality is structured.

I’ve been saying for a long time, yes, there’s a quantum reality and things can be shifted by consciousness and everything, but there was always that, “Oh, it’s theoretical, and someday that may happen and you can see hints of it.”

Well, lately it’s like somebody’s moved into my head and has been carting out furniture and cleaning out the clutter and saying, “Oh, that magical consciousness you’ve been talking about for 50 years? It’s on, baby. Here you go.”

And I have a lot of experiences that seem very magical and kind of over-the-line even to me. And so I’m, as I talk to people like you who are kind of on the same wavelength, I’m hearing a lot of the same things I’ve been feeling, like am I still on the path or am I just losing the plot? Is there a path? Am I the only one who feels this way? I don’t really have a space for my psyche to land. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who I am. Does everybody feel this lost?

Because here’s the thing, y’all, when you’re going on a path towards something you’ve never been before, towards something humanity has never been before in large numbers, you’re following a path that has to disappear. It has to become a non-path. Nobody’s been there before. We’ve never been there before.

If we saw the path clear in front of us, we would not be going into something new. We’d be going into something old. No one has ever traveled the path you’re meant to travel forward if you are moving into a transformation. Your way is unique. It lies beyond any maps.

And so we get to something that in Zen they call the “pathless path” or the “gateless gate.” They give you a paradoxical—if you went to study as in monastery or whatever, they would give you a strange statement to ponder like, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

And they’d send you off to meditate on that until something in your mind broke through the paradox that was inherent in that statement. And they say you can’t understand the meaning of it until suddenly it’s very clear. And they call that the gateless gate. This place where your mind goes up to something the mind cannot hold, and it stays there without leaving, no matter how much it wants to until something goes [vocalizes] and you see things in a completely different way.

And sometimes this is literal. I’ve talked before on The Gathering Room about how when I was meditating for many hours at a time, I would literally shift between seeing the world as solid and seeing it just as energy. Like I’d be sitting in the forest, it was a forest, then it would go all pixelated, and then it would go to just sparkles. And I was just in this huge, sparkling, no-space and that was cool.

They call it “the time of the city” in Hinduism, I think it is, and The Upanishads where you start to see things that look miraculous. And it was cool and it was like, okay, what should I do about that? And the answer if you go to the sacred texts is: Don’t do anything about it. That’s just what your brain is doing as you get more aware of different aspects of consciousness.

So that was fine if all I had to do is sit on the ground, but now I’m moving to a different place in the world and writing a book that is not like anything I’ve written before. And we basically are all on this path together because nobody knows how we’re going to fix the problems in the world. And if we’re completely aware of them—especially if like typical Wayfinders, you feel a really strong urge to heal the world, to heal other people’s suffering—you set out on this path fueled by faith and courage and guided by the compasses in your body, heart, and soul. That’s how you go. And then you walk into the pathless path, and then it’s like you’re standing on a tightrope over a very, very long distance down and thinking, “Is this nuts? Am I crazy? Why am I—I am actually doing these things? I’m changing my life in these ways because I spiritually felt like I should? This is not familiar to me. I feel lost.”

That is a sign that you are finding the right way forward, that you are trusting the compasses inside your heart, body, and soul, and there’s a time where you feel like you have lost the path. The moment you feel lost, may be the moment your soul has slipped the leash of the conditioned map.

Let me say that again very clearly. The moment you feel like, “I am completely out on a limb, this is insanity, I am lost,” you may have just finally slipped the leash. You’re out of your conditioning. It feels so strange and alienating. But we have to go down the pathless path if we’re going to do something new. You’re not off track—you’re finally unmapped. And the terrain of the soul is trackless, but you can trust it.

So just start to ask yourself slightly different questions. Instead of saying, “Am I falling apart?” Say, “Am I falling open?” If you’re thinking, “This makes no normal sense,” say, “Is this the first time I’ve acted in a way that did not obey my fear?” Because doing things out of fear makes sense to part of the mind. When your mind says, “I’m lost.” See if you can try on the phrase, “I am free. I’m free, I’m freaking out, but I’m free.”

So here’s a practice I want to give you, and then we’ll do our little Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation. And the practice is just, it’s called “Naming the Shape of the Unknown.” It’s where you just allow the unknown to be, and you put words on what you don’t know, and you let the unknown have a name. You don’t have to solve a problem, you just have to make a little space where you can be aware of your own not-knowing and how it makes you feel.

For example, if you’re stuck about your career, instead of running around and working on your resume, take a pause and just see where the pathless path has taken you. “I don’t know what I want. I don’t know whether the life I built still fits me. I don’t know what’s coming next, and I’m terrified.” And then just sit with it. Sit with the terror, sit with the pain. Trust that the river knows where it’s going, even if you don’t.

Another example, say you’re grieving a loss. I have a dear friend who is grieving the death of a loved one. And the questions that come up are things like, “I don’t know how to stop missing this being. I don’t know who I am without them. I don’t know why it’s taking me so long to heal.” If you can sit with those “I don’t know” phrases at a time of loss and grief, it’s painful, but you start to realize that it is also intimacy with the mystery.

The stating, the naming of the unknown—it’s a way to move along the pathless path. Your unknowing, not your knowing but your unknowing, your not-knowing can be the map to this place you’ve never seen, to the person you’re becoming that you’ve never been, to your new home.

So I’m going to read you one of my favorite poems, and then we’ll do our meditation. Yeah? I’ve read this before. I’m pretty sure it’s called “Let this Darkness Be a Bell Tower.” It’s by Rilke, translated by Joanna Macy. And here’s how it goes:

Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water speak: I am.

That’s naming the unknowable. So I’d love you to, I just invite you all to come into whatever you don’t know about what’s happening next—in your own life, in the world’s life, in your mind, in your house—and just, we’re going to do the meditation, and while you do it, just say, “We are not going to resist the fact that we don’t know our way.”

Not resisting not knowing the way is the way!

So let’s do our Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation. So put both feet on the floor if you can. Uncross your arms and legs, so you’ve got free flow of energy. Breathe deeply, slowly straighten your neck so the crown of your head and your sit bones are aligned. And ask yourself the trigger question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Can I imagine the distance between myself and the object I am looking at? My computer, my phone, the wall. Can I imagine the distance between my shoulder blades and my hip bones? Can I imagine the distance between my backbone and my belly? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of this body? Can I imagine the stillness through which all matter moves the imperturbable stillness? Can I imagine, can I hear the silence under every sound? Can I imagine this space, stillness, and silence vibrantly alive, filled with love, filled with intelligence, filled with compassion for me? Can I imagine that for all the universe, the space, stillness, and silence inside me is inestimably precious?

Can I feel the love in the space, silence, and stillness supporting me and going right through the earth to support everyone else who is gathered here? Can I imagine it?

That is how you get to your compass. That is how you move forward on the pathless path to hold in your heart and in your mind the un-things, the things that are spaces, silences, stillnesses. When you pop those into the foreground of your attention, and matter and sound and action go to the back, you find yourself much more aware of the pathless path.

Thanks, lovelies. Now I’m going to do some questions.

First one is, “How do we remain on the fluid path while setting real boundaries in this realm?”

There’s a kind of identity magic that you may have developed if you have children or if you have a job that requires you to move away from something that matters deeply to you and into attention on something you’re making or someone you’re helping. There’s a way you can go into the fluid interaction with the physical world to set the boundaries, to take the actions, to make the plans that you have to make all the time in the back of your mind, knowing that space, silence, and stillness are actually the most real thing in your life.

And if you start to hold that paradox—one of the last stages of recovering from a trauma, for example, is the ability to hold paradox that something horrible happened, something traumatic happened, and that there is great good that could be made of it. And it was still horrible and inexcusable, and it could potentially be the most positive thing that ever happened.

There’s a huge amount of paradox in living as a physical being while having a spiritual consciousness, and holding that is so hard. I mean, when I’m a Zen master, I’ll come back and tell you how to do it. Right now, all I can say is be aware of the contrast and be very, very loving and gentle and forgiving of yourself as you try to hold both at once. And I’m just very sloppy. I do things in the physical world, and I’m terrible at most of them. And then I get really still and go inside and think, “Oh, it’s okay. I’m just stumbling along here. I barely got here myself and nobody’s very good at this.” And then back and forth, back and forth, until they start to be a little bit more melded. That’s how I do it.

So next question: “In this in-between time, as you move from one place to another, how do you channel your new home?”

Ooh! I wish I knew. No, I actually think that you can and do channel the things that are going to happen to you, simply by imagining what’s going to happen. So most of us imagine that what will happen to us in the future is a lot like what happened to us in the past or what happened to our parents or what we see on television or some cultural model. And that will only bring you more of what you’re used to.

If you’re going to a psychological space you’ve never been to before, if you are becoming not just a bigger caterpillar but a butterfly, if this is a true transformation—so this is not just for people moving house, but for anyone who wants to transform into a higher, happier state of consciousness—look for the things that make your spirit soar.

Look for those, and if you don’t see any way those could ever happen to you, I will tell you everything that is best in my life happened to me after I said, “It probably could never ever happen,” or “It absolutely could never ever happen.” And I would give up on it, but it couldn’t stop yearning for it. And then I would let the yearning go into imagining something wonderful, simply because—it was like I would tell myself, “I’m going to give myself 15 minutes or half an hour or whatever, I’m just going to pretend that the most wonderful things in the world have happened to me, and I know they can’t, but at least this will be a break from my yearning.”

And I think that in doing that, in imagining my yearning fulfilled, I actually channeled what was coming. And now that seems really obvious to me looking back, but it was not obvious when I was 20, 30, 40 years old.

Someone else asked, “Is that surrender to the One?”

I think so. It’s surrender to the unknowing, and certainly we can’t completely know the One inside these limited social primate brains. So surrendering what you want to have happen, to go into the yearning, to imagine it fully, and to then just collapse into the space where you are? Yeah, that’s pretty much how it goes.

And it’s not all fun and games. I cried for two solid days last week. It was a great clean-out of my psychological self, and it was an opening to a much, much more amazing view of what is real in the world. But oh my God, it hurt to let those selves die. It hurt to let my concepts die, my expectations, my sense of identity. It truly did dissolve completely on many occasions. And as it dissolved, I wept and wept and wept. I was grieving the death of my selves. And it was, as they say in South Africa, “That’s not for ants.” That’s not for little things. That’s a pretty big thing. And yet the surrender catches us.

Someone says, “Would you be able to tell us a little about the painting behind you? Thank you.”

Yeah. This is a painting that I did for the cover of the one fiction book I’ve ever written. I thought of it as an allegory, not a novel. It’s called Diana Herself. And it’s about a woman who gets lost in the woods of California where I was living when I painted this. And she meets a special animal that has things to tell her about waking up.

And so I wrote that book, I published it myself, nobody else would want to, and I painted the cover. And that’s that. It’s this woman and her special animal moving toward light through an unknown space because I’m obsessed with that. And if you don’t know that about me yet, just keep coming to The Gathering Room. You will learn. So everything I paint, everything I write, everything I think, everything I do is drawn by this intimation of awakening that I think is meant happen during my lifetime to me, to you, to a whole lot of people if we’re going to pull this thing out of the fire. So thanks for asking.

Question: “If you’re just waiting, are the tools and practices that got you there still the tools to keep you waiting for guidance? Or is there another way?”

Yeah, one of the worst, hardest things is to wait. And it’s that T.S. Elliot poem I always quote, “Wait without love for it would be love of the wrong thing. Wait without hope for it would be hope with the wrong thing. Wait without thought for you are not ready for thought.”

So many, many times in my life I’ve bumped up against the limits of my perceptions, knowing that there had to be more because I wasn’t out of suffering. So then nothing would happen, and I would have to wait. And it took a long, long time for me to realize that those waiting times are the pathless path, that it’s an opportunity to go deep within yourself and find this peace that is so.

It’s like the Biblical phrase, that “spring of living water.” There is a place that is so nourishing, so quenching deep inside you, but you have to be left with nothing to do, nothing to see before most of us will look away. We live in such a distracted society.

But if you are waiting and there’s nothing happening, start to look inward, start to use the practice I just said. Name the things you’re feeling, name the unknown. And just sit with it. And it will take you down, down, down, down, down into the heart of yourself. Because infinity goes inward as well as outward. And you can find God as much in the infinite inward as you can in the infinite outward. And I think that’s one of the things we have to do that our culture does not teach us about, and it makes it so hard. But it’s actually a wonderful thing when you just have to wait.

Okay, someone says, “The silence and space has vibrational sound now rather than the void I once thought it was. Is this also true for you?”

Yeah, I used to hear it off and on. Now I hear it almost all the time. And for example, I’ll get off The Gathering Room and hear this sound, and I just thought, “Okay, my ears are going wrong.” And I was going to go to the doctor and something in me said, “Do you want us to turn it down?” I told you I was getting weird. And I was like, “Yes, please.” And it went down.

And that makes me think it’s either psychogenic or something that has to do with spirit. And we had a wonderful couple over to dinner and one of the people I’d never met, he’s a wonderful therapist, brilliant man. And he said, “Oh, yeah, that sound is part of spiritual awakening.” And he told me the Hindi name for it and everything.

So yeah, it’s becoming more and more resonant with sound, and that’s just one of those things that I look at and go, “Huh, interesting. Get back to your meditation.”

Okay, so someone says, “This is me. I have a few more questions. This is me for a year, that totally lost. Is there a way we as liquidity of consciousness, at least in this beautiful group, united in energy of healing the planet as a whole?”

Yes. I love the word liquidity. The book I’m writing now is called The Pyramid and the Pool. I put out a little video by that name online so you can check it out. The way we’ve always lived as humans has been pyramid-shaped, rigid structures that oppress the masses and exalt the few. And the new consciousness—I call it “pool consciousness”—it is fluid, it is clear, it seeks a level and it dissolves what is rigid.

So I think we are all headed for something like that. That’s an analogy of course, but clearly you’re tuning in to it too. So at least it’s the two of us.

All right, one thing says, the next question says, “How do you feel home as an immigrant and not feel as an outsider?”

Wow, especially if you’re in the US right now as an immigrant, as my partner Ro is, as so many of you might be, I think you need to know yourself as the beloved child of consciousness, of the universe. I think you need to know that what is not physical is insanely in love with you and is holding you, and you will always be home. Otherwise you’re going to be a stranger in a strange land pretty much all your life because this place is not ultimately our spirit’s home. And I think—in The Tao de Ching it says, “The master can travel all day without ever leaving home.”

And I think if you find that home here, you can deal with the very horrible pressures of the outside world in a way that is calmer and more compassionate to yourself. Good question.

Okay, someone says, “Definitely not all fun and games. How do you comfort yourself?”

Well, rocking in a fetal position worked as a child, still works today. Talking to people like you about it, reading the books by people who have gone through stuff like this, even looking online. My other partner Karen gave me a video of someone with a list of things that said, “Here’s why spiritual awakening can be painful.” And the video is just this guy crying, but not in a sick victim-y way. It’s such a pure grief. I’ll see if I can find it and post it in something. I don’t know how these things work.

Anyway, let yourself cry. Let yourself fall apart. Let yourself seek the company of people alive and bygone who have walked this pathless path and felt themselves dissolving. And when you see the horrors in the news and hear about it from people who are suffering, surrender to the grief of it and allow yourself to dissolve. Yeah, dissolve, dissolve, dissolve.

The last question says, “I’m in year nine of this. How long does it go on?”

I don’t know for you, sweetheart. I’m in year like 50 of it. But what I will say is that there’s a meta skill, the skill of going through the transformation because it has—like most things in nature it takes the form a vortex or a spiral. It moves you around through stages of pain and change, but it’s also moving you. So it goes around in a circle, but it’s also moving you forward each time.

So that’s the way we look at change in the Wayfinder program, the coach training program. And that’s the way I see this, that yeah, it’ll never end as long as you’re alive, but it will get so much sweeter and easier and more familiar, and you’ll become more and more of a light to others. So I’m very, very grateful you’ve hung in there for nine years. It does get wonderful. I have to say wondrous.

So I have kept you too long. I’ll let you get back to the pathless path. And do remember that The Gathering Room is not a room with walls. It is a clearing where lost ones find each other and remember they were never alone.

So if you’re lost, be lost with us, and we’ll find each other in a place none of us has ever known before. I love you. Thanks for showing up.