Robert Augustus Masters. On Being Deeply Superficial
A participant in a group once very earnestly told me he wanted to “go deeper.” It was obvious that he was torturing himself with spiritual correctness - he’d just returned from India, he somberly announced, as he sat waiting for me to help him “go deeper.”
My immediate response was: “You need to be superficial.”
He brightened a little, suddenly boyish, his puzzlement rapidly unwrinkling. I told him he was trying so hard to be spiritual, to be deep, to be a somebody who was really going for it, that he’d made a problem out of the superficial, as if the waves were somehow less significant or less relevant than the currents below them.
As his forehead started to rewrinkle, I added, “You need to be profoundly superficial!”
When we truly “go deep,” there is no inner evaluator telling us that, yes, we have done so. No awards, no applause, no cosmic pat on the back, no self to proudly claim spiritual attainment. At such times, the separation between surface and depth is far from concrete, perhaps even ceasing to exist, and we recognize that Being is just as present in - and also as - the superficial as the deep.
Profoundly superficial. Try it. Give it a go. Being profoundly superficial doesn’t mean being stuck in shallowness, and nor does it mean residing in enforced lightheartedness. In fact, it doesn’t actually mean anything, existing simply as an invitation to skinny-dip in the Mystery. The moonlight laying shattered upon the sea has no depth yet displays fathomless shades of blazing deep.
It’s all bottomless, edgeless, limited neither by dualism nor nondualism, with no final rung of realization.
Remember how preschoolers play. Surface and depth having a ball together. It’s as if no one is watching. No splitting of self. No rehearsal. Just pure dance, minus wallflowers and judges. Though we may think we have outgrown such play, we have mostly only adult-erated it, forgetting to invite our suffering onto the dancefloor.
So let us open more deeply to our superficiality, let us be light-footed in our deep climbs, remaining intimate with the kind of wonder that leaves our mind speechless. If we avoid such openness, we’ll likely remain chained to the familiar, reducing the Holy Deep to an object, a something we can think about and get busy seeking.
But the depth we seek is right here, even if we are trying to convince ourselves otherwise. Every moment is the Only Moment, whatever its appearance. What happens after Death is happening right now. The wave is already the ocean. Let's not keep superficiality shallow.