The Edge Between Sleep and Waking
El borde entre el sueño y la vigilia
A student asks about the tendency to fall asleep during meditation when approaching a state of present emptiness, and the teacher explores what happens when the mind encounters the unknown.
The Edge Between Sleep and Waking
A student asks about the tendency to fall asleep during meditation when approaching a state of present emptiness, and the teacher explores what happens when the mind encounters the unknown.
When I go to this space of being present, or what I think is the present, there's a feeling of nothingness. Sometimes my brain just shuts off. Is that a wall, or just where I'm at right now? Maybe you can expand on that or share your experience.
The habit of filling every moment
When we do this work and things start to unravel, we discover that we've been so accustomed to thinking that all we've ever done is either fill every moment with thought or sleep. There's no in-between, and so we lose touch with the experience of being.
Being never leaves, but we fill every moment with so much thinking. When we start to do this work, that begins to unravel. We start to move closer to being. It happens for many reasons, but it has to do with a group energy, an attunement. When this is invited by somebody who is more in touch with that, even just a little bit more in touch than we are, it starts to attune our own mind, our own being. That can also have a group movement: an energy, a transmission, a resonance. "Entrainment" is a more scientific term. Literally, your brainwaves will start shifting, and your mind states will start moving into unfamiliar places.
Words can also invite and convey that, but it's often said that it's the silence between the words. It's a combination of addressing the mind with words and then creating space. As that moves, something starts to slow down. You will experience all kinds of things that might be new or unknown.
How the mind interprets emptiness
The experience of emptiness is the reflection of that on the mind. By that I mean: the mind interprets something unknown, and it often flavors it with something familiar. The mind can't contemplate something without trying to know it, label it, and understand it. So it will give the experience a flavor of a mental category, like "emptiness." Even when I use the word "emptiness" to point to that, the mind is going to interpret what that emptiness looks like, feels like, is experienced like.
If that keeps unraveling, the direct knowing of that emptiness can start to be glimpsed. That which is pointed to with the word "emptiness" is not really empty. It's just that "emptiness" is a word that works as a contrast to our common experience of a fullness of thinking. That's why you have so many teachings and expressions like "one must empty the cup for there to be new tea." I was playing with that metaphor today, and I took it further: there is no new tea that comes in. What happens is we relate to the emptiness directly and recognize that it was never empty in the first place. It is fullness.
But to the mind, at first, there will be a reflection of it, a projection of it as something likely negative: something missing, something scary. It could be a deactivating of the things that keep us engaged. We can lose motivation or curiosity, because in a sense we are moved by and addicted to the fullness of thinking.
Why the mind reaches for sleep
The mind's cure for this is falling asleep. You get close to something, and when it's too close, the mind goes to sleep, because it also knows that place as the place of sleep. When we go to sleep, we actually go to that place, but we go to it in a state where there is only mind, or only that which is empty. In meditation, what we want to do is allow the emptiness while there is mind. Then you will have consciousness, wakefulness, knowing the emptiness.
At first it might be a little too much. It's an acquired taste; there's a certain muscle that needs to be exercised. What's happening is a positive thing, even when you fall asleep. It's not something wrong. You're getting close to something. The exploration, the dance, could be: how can you invite going to that place where you fall asleep and play with not falling asleep totally? Come in and out. Find that edge where you're almost falling asleep, and see what lies between the falling asleep and the staying awake. That's where the discovery is.
So the mind associates that emptiness, that flavor, with falling asleep.
Yes. And not only that, but the mind also cannot relate to it without being in the state of sleep. The actual brain needs to learn how to function in wakefulness while that emptiness is present. This has been extensively studied with fMRI, for example. Researchers know what happens at the level of brain states when somebody has been able to access what is called the fourth state while awake. There is significant scientific evidence that the brain and mind function differently than in normal waking life. This is what is referred to as "being awake," not awake versus asleep, but the waking up that is pointed to in spiritual work.
It's interesting when you say it's like trying to work that muscle.
The brain must physically change
The brain isn't a muscle, but the metaphor points to the way we understand a muscle needing to strengthen and get used to something. Our body, mind, and even the brain need changes in the synapses, literally, for the way energy moves to shift. The way the brain is organized, the literal electrochemical energy in the brain, has to change. The brain needs to physically change. For some people that happens suddenly, which is why the experiences can be very intense. Sometimes it's more gradual. Often it's both. But for some people it's really sudden, and then the brain needs to reorganize quite quickly.
I find that I'm also experiencing something almost like a flash, and then it disappears.
A flash: do you mean like light, or energy, or warmth, or sensations?
It's more of a sensation. My whole body is awake for a split second. A flash.
Glimpses and quantum shifts
Yes. Those are what you could call partial glimpses. "Glimpse" is a word that points to this very brief, momentary seeing of something, opening to something, a movement of something. It happens like that because the change is discontinuous. But if it happens over and over and over again, something starts to become accustomed to it.
You could call it a quantum change. I don't want to obscure things with quantum science, but a "quantum leap" actually refers to a discontinuous change. It's not moving smoothly from here to there. When an energy state in an atom shifts, it doesn't change continuously. It changes from one place to another in an instant. As a metaphor, it's similar to these shifts in identity, and even energetically: you're in or you're out.
The change over time can be experienced as something continuous, but it's actually a series of glimpses until they become more regular, until they become more constantly accessible. For example, if you're asked the question, "Are you having an experience now? Do you exist? Are you aware?" When that question is asked, there is instantaneously a shift to the answer: yes. Naturally you might think, "That's obvious." But when you refer to awareness in response to the question "Are you aware?", you can have all kinds of interpretations about what's happening, and various sensations about what's happening. Yet there is going to be a shift toward a knowing that is absolute: the recognition, "Yes, I am aware." And then you come back to an interaction that is outside of pure awareness. That movement is a leap. It's not a continuous movement.
Interesting.
When that becomes more and more known and accessible, when we become more and more able to not react to it, then it starts to permeate our waking experience.
This was a great question and a mind-expanding answer. I haven't heard this explained in this way before.