The Magician of the Mind
El Mago de la Mente
A student describes feeling trapped in a loop of trying to find and eliminate the belief in separateness, and the teacher responds by exposing how the mind itself acts as a shape-shifting magician that perpetuates the very identification it claims to dissolve.
The Magician of the Mind
A student describes feeling trapped in a loop of trying to find and eliminate the belief in separateness, and the teacher responds by exposing how the mind itself acts as a shape-shifting magician that perpetuates the very identification it claims to dissolve.
What you're saying is very related to being. I'm not noticing what's in the background because I'm clinging to the belief that I'm this body, that I'm separate. But there's something I do that maybe doesn't feel right. It's as if I'm clinging to a belief, and I have to see it, because I have to see where I'm clinging to the belief in separateness, because this tension wouldn't be there if the belief wasn't there. I don't know. I go into something.
What you just said is itself a belief. It's a narrative. You just described a perfect trap, because you are creating a belief, a narrative, which says: "I feel this discomfort, which is evidence that I'm believing something, therefore I have to find this belief and stop believing it." What you just described is the belief. It's not that there's another belief you need to find. That is the belief. That is the way identification is happening in that moment.
The belief as shapeshifter
We don't believe just one thing. It's not a single belief that says "I am separate, I am separate, I am separate." It has many ways of appearing, and it's a shapeshifter. It will say exactly what you said, for example, and then two minutes later something else entirely.
"Because I have this tension, the tension will not be there if I didn't believe I was separate. So I need to find the belief that I'm separate, so the tension goes away." Now, in that narrative, there's an "I" that you are believing to be you.
I have tension sometimes. I went for a swim in the ocean at 6:45 to see the sunrise and had tension. There's nothing to do with believing any particular thing. I could then create some narrative around that, but it's just a narrative that you are using to keep yourself in this loop.
Seeing how the mind fools you
What needs to happen is that you need to see how you use your mind to fool yourself. You, the capital-letter You, are using your mind, which is a part of you, to create a shape-shifting thing that you then contract with, identify as you.
I've been describing it lately as a magician. The mind is a magician, and you are asking the magician to perform these magic tricks. You go to the magician of your mind and say, "Fool me again, please." The magician knows you very well, and as soon as he starts losing you, he's going to try some other trick. You start to see that it's a trick, and he says, "Oh no, no, look at this one." He's going to have his routines for how to fool you, and you're going to say, "Please keep me fooled." That's what's happening.
A magic trick is something that makes me believe in something that's not true. At one point we can see it's a trick. But we don't want to see it's a trick. We want to believe in the magic.
Why don't we want to see it? And what makes this change?
Only your own mind can know. I can give you a general answer, which is: we love the adventure and the journey of believing we are only a small wave. There's a kind of intensity to it that is the opposite of peace. We call it suffering, but suffering has a flavor, and it can be addictive, like any substance. So the general answer is that you're addicted to suffering. It felt good at first. And it feels good often.
The addiction to suffering
The magic trick keeps you there when you believe in the magic. It's like the promise of something. But the promise is something that's not real.
This could be a whole book in itself, but the important thing is to trust this enough to experiment with it as a hypothesis: that you are addicted to what you think you don't like, which is suffering. You can then see, "Why am I wanting to fool myself?" and that will change the balance. That's why they say you will wake up when that's the thing you want the most.
There was a Zen monk who took a student on a boat, threw him in the river, and held his head underwater until he was about to drown. Then he pulled him up and said, "When you want to wake up as much as you wanted air in that moment, that's when you will wake up." It has to do with whether you are wanting to go through the process of dropping the addiction, of doing the detox.
That's when you'll start seeing how much you keep going back to that which is tight, contracting, painful. As soon as you start seeing that it's something you want and you're addicted to, you'll be able to start to see the whys. And that's going to open the door to not choosing it, and to seeing how the magic trick works.
Recognizing the trick
There are a few steps. One is to notice it's not magic. The promise of "I will feel better if X, Y, and Z happens" or "if I do this or that," the promise of a future happiness or future pleasure: that is a magic trick. It's not real. When you see that, and you see yourself buying into it, you can say, "No, that's not real. It's a trick."
Then you can see how it's tricking you, which is the example you gave. The magic sounds like: "When I stop believing this thing of identification, I will no longer have this tension. The tension is evidence that I'm identified." It's a loopy thing. When you see that it's promising you something you're wanting, that's the thing you're hooked on. Then you'll be able to see how it's tricking you, and by not buying into it, you'll be able to start understanding how the trick works.
That's where the journey to freedom really takes a turn. At first we were interested in it, but only so far, only because it was still promising us something. Then it gets very real when you have to drop these very deep attachments. That's when we start struggling, because what we're attached to is basically ourselves. Everything that you are is not what you are ultimately.
What do you mean by "ourselves"?
Anything that is different from anything else
When I say ourselves, I mean anything that is different from anything else. Anything that is separate, that is special. That is what we're attached to. The magic trick, the promise of happiness in the future, keeps that attachment and the illusion going. Because if I don't expect any well-being or pleasure or solution in the future, that entity that is me, separated from the rest, will fall. The entity is a mental construct that can go somewhere, that came from somewhere, that will go somewhere. The only way it can stay active is with hope and a promise, because it needs to constantly be imagining time.
What we're attached to is that. That's why I said it's ourselves. But our true self is what you can discover if you drop the addiction. It's tricky to point to, but you can discover it as: "Oh, I was this all along." It's not something you can discover in the future, something that is going to develop. It's something that is outside of time. It's always been there, and you've always been that. But it's also the same as everything else. And that's where language fails; better to read Rumi.
It's very interesting how you said it. Something about "anything that is different from anything else" created a kind of shock. So everything that I am that is different from something else, that's what I call "me." That self is mental.
The dissolution of the separate I
I know this could turn into a topic of much debating, because when you express it this way, there are risks of the message not really being clear. The point is not to provoke the mind into saying, "Well, no, but I am this body, this is what I've experienced." The mind is going to completely want to override this and explain how it's wrong. But it really is that radical.
When that falls, it's that radical. It's everything. "I" is everything, and there is no longer any "I," because there isn't something else that the "I" is not. Even anything that can be seen as God will fall. Not a religious God, but if you say "the universe," "the aliveness of creation," and call that God, that too will fall, because it only exists in opposition to what I call "I." When I call something "I," I create the universe as "not I." That separation is valid as a functioning map, but when it's believed to be reality, it's false. And when it's believed to be reality, it sustains a mechanism which says: this "I" is not okay in this present moment, something needs to change, and it's going to find that okayness in time. But time only exists in fantasy.
We can say things change and move, but the future that this entity imagines, where it's going to be okay, is like trying to reach the horizon while walking toward it. It's constantly going to be moving away. We say there's past, there's future, and then there's the present, as if it's a dot on that line. But actually, time is existing within the present moment.
The arrogance of ownership
For me, there was a deep arrogance that I believe is, in some form, very collective. It's not my story only. There was this deep arrogance that was the blueprint of this "I." It had to do with taking ownership of my life.
What caused the seeing through of that was to recognize how everything I thought I had independent creation over, independent will, independent ownership, was just something that was given. A wave cannot be independent from the ocean. When I saw that everything that made what I am had nothing to do with "me," that "me" had no existence, because the "me" was defined as "not the universe, not God," at some point it was seen through as false.
But it was a very difficult process. It was basically death. It was an immense amount of terror and pain, kicking and screaming, and a sense of dissolving or disappearing. And then, when that which dissolved had dissolved, what remained was presence, substance, reality. There was no sense of anything that could be not that.
But there still is a function, which is the map-making of body and mind. I can still have the experience of "I" just like before, but it's seen like a sound is seen: it's just one aspect of reality. It's not something that is a subject separate from the rest.
And it became very obvious that this is the nature of everyone. That this was always my nature, and it can't be disturbed or broken or lost or forgotten. It's just something that we choose to have a ride with, a kind of journey. Until we really want to see through it, we will keep riding that, living that journey.
Non-locality as reality
So, for example, right now you might have a notion of being where you are, which is different from where I am. There's a sense of locations, and we're connecting through the internet. All of that is true in a sense, but in a deeper sense, there is no distance. This is starting to become a reality for physicists, so it's not mystical jargon. They just gave a Nobel Prize to physicists who ran experiments that, to put it very quickly, proved Einstein was wrong: things can travel faster than light. What it does is completely obliterate the absolute reality of distance. It proves the non-locality of the universe, that locations are not an essential part of reality. Science is moving quite quickly into proving a lot of what mystics have been saying for a few thousand years.
What are their names?
I don't remember their names, but it was just awarded a couple of months ago. I think there were two people. I mention physics not to get into a physics conversation, but to undermine the tricks of the rational mind that wants to say, "Well, no, this isn't actually real."
These things I hear about quantum physics have an effect of pulling the rug out from under the feet of the mind. I read an amazing interview with Carlo Rovelli. Very exciting.
I was at a retreat once, talking to some people at a lunch table about time, and I said, "Just read Carlo Rovelli." And then that evening, the retreat teacher mentioned him. A nice synchronicity. Basically, Einstein later in his life was in strong opposition to what quantum theory was doing. He wrote a paper with two other scientists trying to prove how absurd quantum theory was, and made it a kind of satire by saying, "If it's true, then these things would be true, and look at how ridiculous they are." And then these physicists ran experiments that proved the things Einstein was calling ridiculous are in fact true.
So no matter how brilliant you are, it's good to stay detached from whatever you've figured out. Just let go of your insights.
Exactly.