The Arrogance at the Root of "Not Good Enough"
La arrogancia en la raíz del "no soy suficiente"
A student describes the experience of shedding layers of inner resistance and contraction, then wonders whether the parts she stops identifying with might go into shadow. The conversation moves through the nature of anxious thought during moments of shift, the roots of humility, and the discovery that the one who resists is itself only a story.
The Arrogance at the Root of "Not Good Enough"
A student describes the experience of shedding layers of inner resistance and contraction, then wonders whether the parts she stops identifying with might go into shadow. The conversation moves through the nature of anxious thought during moments of shift, the roots of humility, and the discovery that the one who resists is itself only a story.
I felt a lot of resistance and inner storminess, a kind of inner chatter that was really fighting something. Call that the wave. Then at some point I felt a kind of attuning, where something more central or core seemed to rise out of all that, and everything else just dropped off. It felt like losing an arm or a leg, though not as hard as it used to be. I could see clearly: that's really a choice. I don't identify with that. I want to identify as this other something that feels more pared down, but also more loving and more at peace. It feels like a comfortable temperature, not shockingly different.
But then, what I notice is that the shift is very sudden. It's all gone and I feel better. And then there's just this slight looking back over the shoulder: "Oh, but do I need those things?" If I don't continue to pay attention to that part of me that is maybe more negative or could be destructive, is that going to be a bad thing? Is it going to end up in my shadow? There's just this slight hesitation, this looking back.
First you described a more contracted sense, and then a shift happened where something dropped, like losing an arm. And now you look back at what was lost and wonder, "Do I really need that?"
Yes, it's like a sculptor taking the excess marble away, just shedding chunks. It wasn't that I'm looking back now; it was right at the time of the transition. Just a little bit of, "Oh, but should I?"
The pull of familiar identity
That's because those are attachments. They give you a sense of security, because security comes from a solid sense of self. And a solid sense of self is impossible.
That's all really clear. I guess the question is: can I ignore this doubt?
You can recognize it as a thought. Recognize it as an anxious thought, and notice that it is one hundred percent thought. The mind is doing its thing, and you can buy into it, or you can recognize it as thought. Where we're going is out of thought, so anything thought does is thought. That doesn't mean we never think again, or never use our minds, or stop listening to anything the mind says. But in a process of opening up, it is all thought.
Anxious thought amplifies at the threshold
Even thoughts about the instability of the new are thought. Even the thought "I'm going to die." Even "This feels shaky" or "Am I going to be able to come across as a knowledgeable therapist later?" It's all anxious thought.
I don't mean to say there isn't any truth to the worry. It could be an anxious thought around "Will I be able to function?" and maybe you won't, for a while. So the anxious thought could have some truth to it. But what matters, and why it's important to recognize it as thought, is that 99.9 percent of thoughts that come up in these moments of shift are super-amplified. The likelihood of the dysfunction being too significant is low compared to the actual experience of the anxiety. The anxiety will say, "I'm going to die, I'm not going to make it," or at a lower level, "I won't be able to get on a call with a client in an hour." That amplification is a part of you activating the anxiety to convince you to step back.
But actually, you're right. I do have those questions now. It's not just at the moment of transition. The parts I stopped identifying with: is there a risk those go into the shadow? Where do they go?
Nothing unseen goes into shadow
No, they don't go into the shadow. If you're seeing it and it's going away, it's dissolving until it activates again. When it activates, you'll see it. The shadow is something you can't see. Where you're going is toward the shadow. Where you're going is going to bring up material that will be leaving the shadow.
That's very helpful.
Something I was told many years ago is that eventually it's going to feel either like you're going to die or like you're going to go crazy, and the feeling will be so powerful that it literally feels like dying or going crazy. That's the threshold to cross. For some people it takes two minutes and it's passed. For others it's not like that. For me it was many, many years of coming to that edge, and then the transition was brutal, but the peak intensity was very short: one minute, two minutes, maybe longer. It is basically the moment where the localized, identified sense of self, that solidity, finally releases.
Can you say something about humility? That seems to be coming up for me a lot today. I'm thinking of humility from the point of view of the progressive path, working with it or toward it. Is that helpful?
Humility as byproduct, not goal
We all know humility is a virtue. But if you're seeing a lot of arrogance and you look at its nature, then by seeing through it, humility appears naturally. It's not something you develop. What you can do is look at energies, moments, thoughts, and movements of arrogance: where it's coming from, what its motive is, what the agenda is, what the need is. As you see through that, a natural humility will start to appear.
Maybe for you it's important to have a sense of going toward humility, but I wouldn't recommend it as a goal. I would recommend investigation, truth. If you're interested in humility, it's because of a concern with arrogance. So investigate arrogance. The sense of separate self: its nature is arrogance. That's the root. It's always available to look at. To see the nature of that arrogance is the birth of humility. It's a byproduct. It's not something you can get by working toward it directly.
And if one doesn't have an experience of arrogance very regularly, one can look at an experience of suffering. At the root of suffering is arrogance.
The discussion last week on the separate ego and the addiction to identifying as that helped me tremendously, and it feels connected to this question. It was extremely opening for me. I feel it even today. The more I look, I mean, I've known this, and it's even been part of my experience: I see the thing, I don't like it, I resist it, and I notice that resisting just increases it. So then I can just see the resistance. I don't have to worry about the thing itself; it's the resistance. But last week's discussion helped me be even more solid in just looking at the resistance and not worrying about the effects. It was a revelation.
My pleasure.
Who is resisting?
Something happened in the meditation today that connects to this. I was very uncomfortable, first with rage, then with resistance. At one point I had a kind of insight. I asked, "Who is resisting?" And something shifted. The answer was: there is no one resisting. It's a pretense, a pretense of a being that resists, but there can't be someone who resists in the essence. Something changed.
That's a revelation. I've said in many of these meditations that you cannot stop resistance, and you cannot accept things, because acceptance and non-resistance are your nature. It's the most natural thing, and it's happening all the time.
It's amazing. It blows my mind.
Literally, because when you ask that question, there's an idea of an "I," a person who is resisting, and there's a felt sense of that "I." When you ask "Who is resisting?" you step out of that. It's a moment of truth. You drop the thought, and then there is no thing that's resisting, because it's the thought, the story, that resists. It's a story of resistance.
There's a story that you have a problem with this, that this isn't okay. It feels real, it feels like there's resistance, and you're trying to stop it. You're fighting a story, but it's just a story, just a belief in something that's happening. As soon as you ask "Who?" that story pauses, if the question is deep and true. You step out of it, and then all there is, is acceptance.
"Not good enough" as the core arrogance
I have one quick question. I struggle a lot with the sense of "I'm not good enough." But that implies there's someone or something out there that is good enough, or better than me.
Or a potential you in the future.
Right, or somewhere else. And that's projected.
But we all really are good enough. The arrogant one is really the one that thinks "I'm not good enough." That's the core arrogance.
That's so crazy.
It's arrogance.
It feels like to give that up is so shaky.
Last time I started talking about obsession and addiction. This is exactly the kind of thing we are addicted to. It's not pleasant stuff. You can't create a limited, known sense of self without separating from totality. You have to say that what you are is different from it. If totality is beautiful, loving, present, and peaceful, then you have to create something that is not that, and you have to say everything else is wrong. "I know how it is. I know how I am." There's this whole body of knowledge, and to know better than the universe, that localization of knowing better, is an arrogance.