To Allow, or Not to Allow

The below was offered as a talk for Wisdom Wednesday at Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico; January 29, 2025

Today I want to talk a little more specifically about practice itself, although certainly intertwined with philosophy and metaphysics. Philosophy is after all the ‘love of wisdom,’ and wisdom is not simply an intellectual exercise, but can be skillfully employed to circumvent delusion.

Lately—since Rohatsu in early December, I suppose—I’ve been sitting with and considering ‘allowing’ as part of practice and life. It seems that we encounter this word, or its sibling—‘letting go’—quite often through teachings; simple enough, in theory, and yet expressing quite a significant instruction. I want to dig into this and really explore this invitation to ‘allow.’ Specifically, is it a help, or potentially a hindrance? I hope this might add a little kindling to the fire.

First, what is meant by ‘allowing’? In the context of practice, it’s invoked as a permissive perspective; a non-judgmental attitude toward whatever is arising. In some sense, it’s akin to the ‘second arrow’ metaphor that Valerie touched on last week, whereby, when a negative event happens—the first arrow—our reaction to that event, often filled with self-blame, worry, or excessive judgement, is like shooting a second arrow into ourselves, causing further suffering that is largely avoidable. ‘Allowing,’ therefore, is suggested to lead to equanimity; not pushing away, not pulling toward. If we’re having a ‘bad’ meditation, with difficult thoughts and feelings, we simply allow it to be exactly as it is. If we’re confronted with challenging life circumstances, we allow those to be as they are. All sounds good, so far.

Ultimately, what’s invoked is giving yourself permission to let go. It’s herein where we might be able to start identifying the potential pitfall. It’s the same challenge we encounter with ‘effort’ and the invocation of ‘effortlessness’ in practice. That is, we’re calling on yet another ‘doer’; meaning, in the context of meditation, we’re reifying the notion of a meditator doing meditation. We’re establishing another, albeit subtle, layer of delusion, one that appears to offer control; one that can solve the problem of resisting or ‘not allowing.’

So, again, from one point of view a help, as a gentle input to our determined system, but from another point of view, just more wrapping around the simple fact of what’s really going on.

It does seem, then, that there is, perhaps, a beginning stage and an ending stage of allowing. Not in terms of progression, but rather, where the permissiveness of the practice moves into the recognition that allowing is itself Dogen’s Circle of the Way; always already complete. And in one sense, we’re closer to the furthest point through a single backwards step. Here, that backwards step being the recognition that you don’t have to allow, to let go, because there’s never been anything to hold onto. And, beyond that, just as the eyes can’t see themselves, the teeth can’t bite themselves, and the sun doesn’t illumine itself, ‘we’ can’t allow ourselves, because we are the totality of what’s going on.

It’s like attempting to do nothing. You can’t; it’s another trap. It sets up insoluble double-bind in which there’s a conceptual doer striving for non-doing. It’s like saying ‘You are required to do that which is acceptable only if you do it voluntarily.’ And so it doesn’t do you any good to allow and it doesn’t do you any good to not allow. So, what’s to be done?

Well, it’s this unexamined conceptual ‘doer,’ this ‘allower,’ that is in the way of thing itself. So much of our experience, and, certainly, conception of reality, is caught up in our heads, quite literally, so much so that we don’t recognize our actual experience; we misperceive reality through delusion. That is the ultimate delusion: experiencing the world one way, yet believing it to be another way altogether. We conceive of this ‘doer’ that exists—from the Latin existere, meaning ‘to step out of, to stand apart from.’ And so, we have this sense of a locus of control somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears, from which the rest of the body dangles, that is somehow outside the flow of nature. And this notion of existence, requires that we’re either controlling nature or subject to it.

But, problems come out of the illusion of control, and what is ‘allowing,’ but another, perhaps less pernicious, form of control? We use this conceptual self as a scalpel, to dissect reality; we chop the thing and then say that it’s made of pieces. Like trying to explain how the oak tree in the garden grows from an acorn; it couldn’t be more simple. But the mind and conceptual thought are relatively clumsy, linear processes, requiring sequential steps in time; whereas reality is a singular parallel process. Like trying to explain how you open and close your first. You know how to do it, and yet it would take volumes of text to explain it. And so, what makes things complicated is the explanation itself, because what is explanation but a description with a view to controlling that which is described?

It’s like talking about the human body in terms of separate components. Sure, it can be a convenient fiction, but the reality is that the body is not assembled from pieces, it’s grown out of a single indivisible whole. Itself the atom, from the Greek ‘atomos,’ meaning indivisible.

And so, what a great thing it is to not dissect with the intellect, not to generate concepts of reality, because it perpetuates the illusion that you’re something different from the experience itself. There’s no way of controlling what you’re experiencing, because what you’re experiencing is you. This is what Dionysius the Areopagite, writing in the 5-6th century CE, meant by “one attains the knowledge of God through the negation of concepts.” Discarding. This is, of course, in our Zen tradition, what we’re doing in Koan practice—to come up against, again and again, the limits of concepts. To bang our head against the wall, until we realize that the wall is of our own creation … and there’s no head to bang. It’s this shift from our common and highly valued ‘propositional knowing’—knowing something as subject-object, because we stand apart from it—to ‘participatory knowing’ and recognizing that the thing you’re looking for is exactly what you’re looking with. In Hinduistic terms, ‘tat tvam asi’: that thou art; or, more simply, you are that.

And what we are is the whole of nature. In Chinese, the word for nature is Ziran, which translates literally and so beautifully as: Of itself so. Complete spontaneity. And so, we’re not some center of control internal to the head, but the cosmos itself—the totality of all that’s being done. Rather than the action to allow, we can simply be the allowing; the continual process, unfolding, experienced through time and space.

We can even recognize, as a simple fact of being and experience, that as soon as something arises in awareness—as all of this is—it’s per force already allowed. To think that there’s an ‘allower,’ somehow upstream of awareness, acting as a bouncer to what makes it through, simply sets up an infinite regress of allowing; instead of turtles all the way down, it’s ‘allowing’ all the way down.

Which calls to mind this limerick: “There once was a man who said ‘Though, it seems that I know that I know; what I would like to see is the I that knows me, when I know that I know that I know.’” … when I allow what I allow what I allow.

True freedom lies in understanding and participating in what’s going on, not in controlling it. There’s nothing to be done; nothing that can be done, other than the totality of what’s happening.

And so, why meditate if there’s nothing to be done? As Dogen says … you can’t sit and meditate unless you’re already a Buddha, and meditation is just how a Buddha sits!

But, again, we have this unexamined notion that ‘I’ meditate—up in my head there’s this thing I’m meant to control to produce the desired state of meditation. Rather, meditation is the ‘rotation’ of perspective to dwelling as the totality of what’s being done. We, at this moment, are the whole system.

And so, the mystery of life is not a problem to be controlled and solved, but one reality to be experienced. It’s not about ‘seeking’ or ‘allowing’; it’s about really digging this dance of life; expressions of attainment, not attainment itself. Allowing the fact that there is no ‘you’ that exists—that stands apart—to attain anything.

Therefore, to practice, we remove the concept of a practitioner, and simply be the totality of what’s being done. After all, there’s no choice in the matter. “To allow, or not to allow” … you are the question!