The Universe So Intimate There Is No Room for Me
El universo tan íntimo que no hay lugar para mí
A student reflects on the phrase "the universe is so intimate, there's no room for me," and the teacher explores what it means to lose one's familiar sense of self while gaining something far more fundamental.
The Universe So Intimate There Is No Room for Me
A student reflects on the phrase "the universe is so intimate, there's no room for me," and the teacher explores what it means to lose one's familiar sense of self while gaining something far more fundamental.
You said, "The universe is so intimate, there's no room for me." I resonated with it, but the mind can't grasp what that represents. It feels like it's right on me. I haven't fully processed it, but I felt I needed to say something about it. It seems like another way of experiencing no separation, another way of expressing that. But there's something about it that hit me.
I use that expression because part of this journey, if there is a journey, involves a threshold: some form of sense of loss, separation, death. Often it is experienced as fear of death or fear of losing one's mind. That is always at the root of contraction and identification.
Losing yourself to gain the world
You could say you lose yourself but gain the world. But that is only in the transition, because what we truly are isn't lost. There is a transition where one feels an absolute loss of everything. Yet we cannot be lost. It just becomes something we cannot understand or place anywhere. We lose the sense of understanding what we are, of knowing what we are, but "knowing" in the sense of "I am a thing that I can define." The core, deepest sense of being is eternal.
As you speak, I'm seeing the contrast. The mind puts up barriers: the way I interact, the way I push things away because I don't like them. And then there are moments of spontaneity. I can see the moments that are one way and the moments that are the other.
Beautiful. You could see it as a process, an acquired taste: learning to rest into something that is your essential nature. It is not something new that arrives. It was there when you were born. But at some point it becomes uncomfortable, too vast, and so we contract. Then we need to learn how to rest there again, and how to swim in all of the flavors, including the difficult and uncomfortable ones, which are usually just fear and pain at their essence.
Acquiring the taste of fear and pain
At some point, when we acquire the taste of fear and pain and become able to swim in their depth, it becomes something almost delicious and vital. And then that can become so natural that it is no longer something we struggle against. It becomes part of the current of life, where we are no longer contracting against it, no longer resisting.
There is one part of the process, which is to understand the direction. This meditation, in part, points out the distinction between what is mind and imagination and what is raw sensation, so that we stop confusing one for the other. But when we start doing that, we will begin experiencing things we have been pushing against. Very likely, we will be awakened to what we have been pushing away. And it will be some form of fear and pain.
Whenever you have a sense of contraction and discomfort, a sense that something is essentially not okay, it is because you are pushing against a part of your experience.
And that can only be conditioning, in a way.
Conditioning and what lies beyond it
That's exactly it. And we have so many ways in which we construct those resistances. Sometimes some of these are easier dealt with in a very specific process, such as therapy. But ultimately you will get to something beyond what therapy can address. That is where spirituality comes in: it addresses the deepest sense of separation. And it is what we really long for.