Some time ago I came across the phrase always already in Adyashanti's book The Direct Way. His frequent repetition of the phrase and the specific order of the words intrigued me. Then I heard James Low use exactly the same phrase again and again in several of his retreat series.
For example, in Open to Life (2025) James says:
And more recently in Open to the Open, 2026:You cannot free yourself because you are already free. How will you free the free? The effort to free the always already free is what binds you.
Part 19, 18:02
We are always already in our life. We're already always in whatever's arising. We don't come into our life. We don't come into our experience. We emerge as part of the experience, and therefore we take our place.
Part 18, 09:56
We are on a pilgrimage from here and now, to here and now. We have always already arrived, but because we are wobbly, we are always leaving, and then we have to arrive, and then we have to leave. So the issue is about stabilisation, of relaxation and just being here, but if you rely on anything external, it will be difficult.
Part 17, 12:08
It's up to you. Nobody can protect you from your own mind. That’s why meditation is lonely. Because you are being present with something you cannot share with other people. Because it’s beyond language. And if you stay within the delusional waves of language and conceptual elaboration, you’ll be blinding yourself to the open empty mirror. This is Dzogchen. The Great Completion means: all experience is always already within the mirror. It is complete, it can’t leak out, it’s got nowhere else to go. This mirror is like the sky.
My search image primed, I began encountering it elsewhere too. What seemed like an unusual turn of phrase had entered the vocabulary of several contemporary teachers. The more I encountered always already, the more significant and alive it seemed, as though the phrase itself was arising to show me something.
Eventually I became curious about its origins. The expression appears to have entered English through twentieth-century philosophy, particularly the work of Martin Heidegger. Always already is an English translation of his original German phrase immer schon. Yet the insight it points to is far older. Long before Heidegger spoke of what is always already, teachers in Eastern spiritual traditions were pointing to the same recognition in different language.
Much of ordinary life is organised around acquisition and achievement. We learn skills. We accumulate knowledge. We improve ourselves. It is hardly surprising that we bring the same assumptions to spiritual practice. We imagine that with enough meditation, enough retreats, enough insight, or enough devotion we will eventually achieve awakening. We sit. We cultivate attention. We learn to recognise the habits that draw us back into confusion. Practice matters. It may make it easier to recognise what has never actually been absent.
Gradually, I began to intuit why the words appear in that order. Awareness isn't simply already present now, as though it had arrived a moment before. It has always been so. It has never not been the case. The phrase points not just to presence, but to timeless presence.
Not someday. Not after enough effort. Not when conditions are perfect. Always already.
Understanding this conceptually is one thing. Living it is something else entirely. We expect awakening to arrive as something dramatic or special. Yet teachers keep pointing in the opposite direction—towards what is so close, so ordinary and so intimate that it is easily overlooked.
Too close — you don’t see it.
Too deep — you don’t fathom it.
Too simple — you don’t believe it.
Too fine — you don’t accept it.The Four Faults of Awareness, Shangpa Kagyu, translated by Ken McLeod.
Always already has become a kind of personal pointing out instruction. Whenever I hear or see the phrase, it reminds me to stop trying to get somewhere else. It reminds me to relax, and to recognise what is always already here.