If everything changes, what can I rely on?

There is a saying that goes: “The bad news is: We are falling through the air, with nothing to hang on to and no parachute. The good news is: There is no ground”. If you are searching for permanence and a sense of security in the world of things - in objects, relationships, circumstances, ideas - then you are like someone who is falling through the air without ever having looked down. You believe that there is a ground you will hit sooner or later, and because of this belief you are very scared. You desperately try to secure yourself by holding on to something. But all people and all things in this world are falling as well, so holding onto them doesn’t help.
But when you stop grabbing at all these falling things around you, and at all these falling people around you, and you just calm down for a moment and dare to look down, you might see -

nothing.

And that would be very good news in this scenario, wouldn't it?

How to find nothing ...

So what is the equivalent to “seeing that there is no ground” in our world, where we are not literally falling?
It is the realization that there is no world outside of you.
Sounds nuts?
Well, for the falling people, the suggestion that there really is no ground below also sounds quite nuts… And, just as for them, when you realize the truth behind the nutty claim, nothing changes, yet everything looks different.
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I know, it totally looks like there is a world “out there”. But what would be left of this apparent outside world if you subtracted everything from it that you think? All judgements, ideas, projections, memories, comparisons, descriptions, names and beliefs? Would it still be “unreliable”? Or would it be completely neutral? Or maybe not even that? Because “neutral” already implies that you are comparing it with something that is less neutral, which again would be your thinking…

It is your thinking that creates your unique experience of the world. For you, autumn might be depressing, tea fascinating and japanese city-pop exhilarating. Someone else experiences autumn as enchanting, tea as boring and city-pop as unsettling. This is possible because the feeling is not in the thing, it is in your thinking. Always.

And thought is always changing.
Have you noticed how the way you perceive something can change drastically when your mood changes? How the world can seem frightening, then beautiful, then confusing, while you are all the while just sitting alone in your room? How you feel love for someone in one moment and indifference in the next, without the other one having even said anything? How you see yourself as successful on Tuesday and as a failure on Friday, as ugly at noon and as handsome in the afternoon?

So, when you live inside your thinking, you will feel unstable, insecure, and like there is nothing you can rely on. Because there actually is nothing to rely on in your thinking.

But when your thinking calms down, when you stop fretting about possible future misfortunes or past mistakes and sink back into the present moment, your insecurity fades and automatically you start to feel more peaceful and happy. When you are present, the idea that nothing is reliable won’t trouble you. Because when you are present, you are deeply connected to that in life which is totally stable and reliable: The Now.

Now is reliable

Have you ever experienced anything that was not now?
You can think about the past and the future of course, but you can only ever do that now. Because Now is not a moment in time. It is the timeless space in which the thoughts arise which create the sense of time.

Can you find the instant when Now began? Or when it ended? No. Because Now does not have a duration. It is not one second long, or four seconds, or one nanosecond. It always is. In this sense, Now is eternal.
How could anything be more reliable than that?

So, when you feel there is nothing to hold on to in life, nothing stable, nothing reliable, you can be sure that you are overlooking the Now at the moment.
Why does this happen?
Because of a simple misunderstanding: You don’t understand that your feelings are 100% caused by your thinking, not by a world “out there”. Therefore, when you have a feeling of insecurity, you believe it informs you that life is dangerous and that there is nothing to rely on. While in truth, this feeling just informs you that you are experiencing insecure thinking. You are falling, and you believe that there is a ground below. So, you search for something to hold onto. That is, you think more.
You think more and more about how unreliable everything is, how you might lose your job or your relationship and how awful that would be, and what on earth you could do to prevent that from happening. And soon, you feel even more insecure. You then believe that your feeling of insecurity is a proof for how unreliable everything is (instead of seeing it’s just a proof that you are experiencing more insecure thinking). And so you think even harder, looking desperately for a solution in the next thought, and the next thought, and the next… This is like hitting yourself, and believing that you could stop the pain through hitting yourself more.
The more you understand this dynamic, the more often you will catch yourself thinking.
The more you understand this dynamic, the more often you will catch yourself thinking. This “catching yourself thinking” is the equivalent to the falling person’s “looking down”. You see again that there is no ground. You see that you are feeling your thinking, and not an unreliable outside world. And instead of thinking more, you will then become quiet. You will come back to Presence. You will rediscover that which is truly reliable. Again. And again.

So, how to find nothing, no-thing?
Don’t go looking for some-thing. Presence is not a thing. It has no size, color, smell, duration or structure to it. That’s why, if you try to find it through thinking, you’ll just end up very confused. Because you can only think about things. But the moment you drop out of your thinking, you find yourself back in the Now again. It’s always here. Impossible to miss.
Completely reliable.

Your true identity

This “dropping out of our thinking” is natural to all of us, it happens many times throughout the day. But mostly we are not aware of it. As you become conscious of this process and understand that this is the key to your peace of mind, the “dropping out” will happen much more often and much faster. Thought will still continue to create the appearance of an outside world, and you will still feel the whole spectrum of feelings which go along with that. But now you don’t feel lost in them anymore. Because you understand how the game works. You understand that the falling doesn’t have to stop, because there is no ground below. You understand that thought doesn’t have to stop creating a changeful world, because you see that it can only do so in the changeless Now.

Like this, the Now becomes your stronghold. Presence becomes your identity. Only that you have no need for a stronghold or an identity anymore. Because you discovered that everything you felt you needed to protect yourself from, was actually made out of your own thinking.

There really is no ground.

Look.