Union with the Unknown
Unión con lo Desconocido
A meditation exploring how letting go of fixed ideas about who and where you are can open into a deeper, more spacious sense of self.
Union with the Unknown
There are so many kinds of meditation,
and there are different angles, different purposes, mechanisms.
Valuable meditation has one purpose, if any at all,
and it is to reconnect or reestablish a relationship with the unknown.
The relationship can also be seen as a union,
and that's where the word yoga comes from.
So you could say: union with the unknown.
The language starts to point to or imply something about ourselves,
so it is the essence of our identity that changes.
We cannot remain the same.
It is not just a relationship where we remain the same and relate to something new.
And that's why in the West it's more commonly known as "know thyself."
You could say: know thyself as mystery,
know thyself as unknown.
And then every meditation practice is a different approach
to bring about this experiential knowing.
What it means to not know oneself
So what is it that is confused?
What is it like to not know oneself?
If I say "know thyself as unknown,"
then to be confused or mistaken
is to know oneself as something that can be known.
And if we take something as simple as a paper cup
and we want to study its essence,
most advanced physicists today will say that its essence, there is emptiness.
And it is mysterious.
Yet we think we know ourselves.
There's only one place where we can find this kind of knowing that is false knowing.
That's at the level of the mind, concepts, thoughts.
Scientists will be very clear that all of the theories, all of the knowledge,
they're not reality, they're maps.
They know this.
Yet when we look at ourselves,
we forget that we're looking at maps.
Two approaches
There are two ways to work with this.
One is to direct our attention away from our thinking, away from our map-making,
and get more directly in touch with raw experience and reality.
You can do that by bringing our awareness to our breath,
sensations in the body.
Those are baby steps away from thinking.
Start to notice the difference between the world of thoughts
and the world of sensation, perception.
That movement towards sensation and perception
can have moments of discomfort or fear, anxiety,
as we leave the known.
But it can also bring a deep experience of expansion and spaciousness.
The other approach is the reverse.
It can go consciously, intentionally into the world of mind, thoughts, maps, emotions.
Look at its functioning, effects, mechanism.
This direction will bring about a kind of discomfort,
a sense of contraction.
But it'll be rich with insight and discovery.
The approaches are very complementary,
almost necessary, required,
to fully inhabit our creation.
Away from mind
We approach away from mind.
We can bring our attention to a sound,
feel into its nature,
the mystery of it.
Toward mind
Approach towards mind:
you can look at the experience of time,
past memories, future hopes,
the ideas of myself,
and start to see that we are not what we thought we were.
Preparing the ground for investigation.
Investigation into self.
What am I, really?
What brings us here
What motivates this investigation?
What brings us here?
A longing for something more,
a sense of suffering,
an intuition,
an experience that something's not quite right.
Trust in something that we feel in ourselves,
or something we felt in another,
saying: something more.
The key discovery is you're not what you think you are.
And although that discovery can be a shock,
at times scary or painful,
it is eventually freeing.
Where am I?
We can play with different questions,
since the confusion around identity is so deep.
Sometimes these questions can sound absurd.
It's like going back in time to the 1300s
and asking someone:
Is the sun going around the earth?
Is the sun moving, rising, setting?
It's absurd.
So is the question: where am I?
What if you're not where you think you are?
Inside of a body, in a room.
Are you behind the eyes?
Or is the identity just purely associated to the body?
And so where you are is not behind the eyes, it's your whole body.
And if your feet are over there, you can see them.
Aren't you over here?
So eventually we tend to get fixed on a location,
somewhere around the upper torso, behind the eyes.
There's this sense of a me, a person,
with chattering minds.
So are you really behind the eyes,
or is that the convenient location to identify with, attach to?
Between the ears, behind the eyes,
in the head, above the body, inside.
Contracting into location
You can explore.
Focus on the notion of being something small,
located in the head, behind the eyes,
or wherever you feel the location to be.
Focus on that being you,
and the rest of the world around you, outside of you, beyond you.
In some sense, you have to contract yourself to be located.
Almost accentuate that experience, emphasize it, explore it,
bringing in the sense of time and of your past.
Contract into this location where you find yourself to be.
Expanding beyond location
Then you can explore reversing that.
What if you are nowhere?
There is no location.
The whole notion of location is a mental experience,
and you step out of that like a balloon inflating.
Every part of you expanding,
starting to include everything you experience, everything around.
Now, in a sense, everything is inside.
The sense of body appearing and happening inside of you.
All sounds are appearing and happening inside of you.
Every sensation.
The air that you feel and breathe is all existing and happening inside of you.
All thoughts, memories, fantasies existing and happening inside of you.
The room, the house, streets.
The sense of the world, of time, of space, all of creation, all individual beings.
Your loved ones, strangers,
all existing and happening inside of you.
Isn't all you know and experience happening inside of you?
Do you ever know or experience something outside of you?
If everything is happening inside of you,
how could there be an inside and an outside?
How could there be a localized you inside of you?
When the inner becomes the outer,
the outer becomes the inner,
you will enter the kingdom.