Following Your Own Path Without Certainty
Seguir tu propio camino sin certeza
A question about whether not-knowing conflicts with committing to a prescribed practice, and how structure, intuition, and uncertainty relate at different stages of development.
Following Your Own Path Without Certainty
A question about whether not-knowing conflicts with committing to a prescribed practice, and how structure, intuition, and uncertainty relate at different stages of development.
When you talk about uncertainty and not-knowing, does that rule out exploring something that someone suggests is the best thing for you? For instance, our teacher used to prescribe, or strongly suggest, that as part of the group we do at least three times a week aerobic exercise followed by meditation. For a while it was like that, and then he stopped demanding it. You can take that as "I know that's the right thing to do," or you can take it as "I'm going to explore this." I'm asking because at some point it confused me. I remember I took it as: this is the right thing to do, this is the right path. And I would judge people who didn't do it. But at the same time, the exercise of using my will to do something I didn't naturally want to do helped me. Now I do it, and I enjoy it.
So I'm not entirely sure what the question is, but I can get some sense of it. There are a few points.
Structure and developmental stages
One is that it depends on the developmental level of a person. To a child who just wants to go and put their fingers in the power socket, you say: you must not do that. There can be serious consequences, and so that kind of really intense, forceful mandate is at times necessary. I think that's what the Ten Commandments were. At that stage of humanity, people needed to move to the next level because killing was just so easy. You looked at someone's wife the wrong way, and that was enough. At that stage, you need something forceful.
The same applies to a group setting. The people in the group came from such different levels of development, and most were simply struggling with life, just to function. To have some structure that helped them was obviously valuable. I don't know for a fact that this was the teacher's reasoning, though I do have some relevant information I'll share in a moment. The basic situation was: people just don't do anything. They come asking for help, and what can you do? "I need you to commit to three hours a week of physical exercise and meditation."
When the mandate no longer applies
Something I can share as a fact: I spoke to him about ten years ago. I was meditating a lot at the time, and I said, "Look, I'm doing this meditation, this meditation, this meditation, but this one I'm changing." He had always said that when you choose a form, you don't change it. I told him I was modifying it, doing this and then that and then something else. His response was: "Keep doing whatever you're doing. Meditate more, meditate less, do whatever you want. It's fine. It's all good."
I took that to mean I was no longer in the place where I needed someone to get me off the couch or to push me to put energy into introspection and inner work. I was following my own exploration. At that stage, you don't need to follow somebody's external guidance.
The risk of false confidence
But that's risky, in the sense that you could be doing a lot of work and telling yourself "I don't need anybody to tell me what to do," while actually doing something that's really not the best thing for you. I had already done so much work with him that I think he could see: no, just keep going, you're following your own intuition, your own passion and devotion.
But even after he told me that, everything I did following that still carried this uncertainty. It's not that I then thought, "Whenever I change a meditation or choose to do it differently than prescribed, I know that's the right way." That would be the other kind of wrong approach: "I'm doing it my way and I know it's right," whether it's coming from my own knowing or from following his mandate. Either way, the sense of "I know this is right and everybody else is wrong" is the trap.
Uncertainty plus action
So it really comes down to this sense of knowing versus not-knowing. If you have a sense of not-knowing, and there's a certain anxiety, insecurity, and uncertainty, but you are also in action, choosing, engaging, taking risks: that's the combination. If you go too far to one side, toward knowing, you're completely closed down. If you go to the other side, you're open because you see the reality of uncertainty, but you become dysfunctional and stop acting. You need both.
Even the sense of "something's missing, I'm not doing it right" can itself become a fixed belief, a known position. And then the sinking into the present moment is simply: okay, I feel uncertain. I feel anxious. That's it.
I have two things I wanted to share, more as friends than as a specific question about the conversation. One of them affected me quite a lot, and I wanted to see if any of you have experience with it. I tried intermittent fasting for the first time in my life, and I felt it really affected me emotionally. It sent me into a very strange looping state. Physically I felt very good, but mentally I did not. I've been doing some research and talking to people, and I was wondering if anyone has tried it and what kind of experiences came from it.
Intermittent fasting is when you eat only within certain hours of the day. There are quite a few versions of it.
The version I tried is sixteen hours without eating. Basically you don't eat overnight or at breakfast, and then you eat lunch. For eight hours you can eat whatever you want, but for sixteen hours you give your body a break from digesting. I did it for a few weeks and then I started getting out of control emotionally and mentally.
What was the "out of control"? What was the experience?
I became very anxious, and then I couldn't sleep because my brain was going on and on and on. Then it started happening during the day as well. It was very hard to be calm and have a perspective on anything. It was almost a claustrophobic thing, where my mind felt like it was in a very tiny space.
And what was the reason you did it? What was the motivation?
I did it more to see how my body felt. And my body did feel better, but my mind went off. It could have been caused by other things or many different things happening at the same time, but I think there was a significant impact from the fasting itself. My body felt lighter, more awake, more energetic.
Turning up the temperature
I don't have personal experience with that experiment. Someone I know was doing it recently and found it was kind of nice, but didn't have any intense experience with it. I think you probably did it more intensely, in the sense of more days, longer, more strictly.
The thing is, it's hard to know, because it's possible that you unlocked things from a deeper part of yourself that started coming up, and then you got overwhelmed and couldn't sit with all of it. The temperature went up.
Yeah, exactly. The theme of the day.
Those experiments of experiencing extreme things, things that aren't normal to us (and there are all levels of extremity), have two sides. One is: what's the motivation? What's missing now that I'm hoping to get from this? The other side is that you may have simply amplified something that was already there.