The Fire That Does Not Burn
El Fuego Que No Quema
A question about whether the teacher still experiences waves of conditioning disrupting peace, leading to a wide-ranging exploration of sitting with difficult sensations, Dante's Purgatorio as a map for the spiritual process, and the wound of separation that only surrender can heal.
The Fire That Does Not Burn
A question about whether the teacher still experiences waves of conditioning disrupting peace, leading to a wide-ranging exploration of sitting with difficult sensations, Dante's Purgatorio as a map for the spiritual process, and the wound of separation that only surrender can heal.
Do you feel sometimes like when you're at peace, all of a sudden all kinds of thoughts come up because of past conditioning? Does that still happen to you, or has that fallen off?
That has mostly fallen off. I did have a lot of that. To have been able to go into deeper places, I don't know if I would call it peace, because I never really knew peace until that big shift happened. I had tastes of it, glimpses, but they were never quite the same thing. In the past, peace would come after being able to be present to difficult feelings, and then there would be another cycle of deeper, more difficult experiences.
Yes, as the capacity grows, it just happens. It's an amazing process because then it has a life of its own.
Life has a life of its own, for sure. And the process, yes. Once it's put in motion, it has its own momentum. It just goes on its own.
The welcome and the unwelcome switching places
When I was in France at a retreat, it was the first time in my life that the welcome and the unwelcome almost switched. I was feeling so much come up at once, and after a point I said, "This is perfect. Bring it on." Then I got COVID, and everything got much worse. It was very painful on many levels. I thought, "Someone planned this retreat for me. Thank you." But what am I thanking? What's going on? Ever since then, I noticed a shift: less resistance, more seeing that the good is in the bad and the bad is in the good, and that this dichotomy is artificial.
Yes. The decision that something is essentially bad is just the sheer rejection of it, because we can't be present to the sensations it produces.
This is why, during the meditation, when someone was sharing, I pointed out that it's a different thing to deliberately invoke a distressing memory and contemplate it versus simply being present to what arises on its own. Deliberately bringing up distressing content isn't necessarily bad, but I wouldn't make it a regular practice because it can seem masochistic. The approach works the other way around: if something difficult is coming up for you, then contemplate it, go into it, go deeper into it. If you're sitting quietly and thoughts about something difficult from the past keep arising, the solution isn't to try to calm the mind and push them away. The solution is to go into the sensations that you are reacting to, the ones that generate the stories.
Going deeper into sensation
The more we can deeply go into the experience (and it's going to be fear, pain, shame, all kinds of difficult feelings, but those are sensations), the more we can be present with that and touch it, we become somewhat desensitized. Not because we no longer feel, but because we no longer react to the sensation.
In Dante's Divine Comedy, in the last part of the Purgatorio, the three books are Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. The transition from Purgatory to Heaven comes through actually feeling everything: feeling everything that the person in Hell cannot feel. That is why it's called Purgatory, to purge. It's a cathartic purging of feeling what one has been unable to feel.
In Hell, there is no time. It is eternal, because one is in a position of complete avoidance. In Purgatory, there is time. The person in Purgatory has a sense that the pain will end, and that is why time exists there. In the book, the souls actually possess a divine knowing. They are told by the angels that they are not there for eternity. They are there until they are able to purge.
The fire that does not burn
At the end of Purgatory, because it ascends higher and higher, there is a final transition. That is the fire that does not burn. Dante must walk through a path where it is just fire and it burns. He is told: you have to walk through, and it will feel like you are burning, but it will not damage you. That is the final transition, which leads him to Heaven. And in Heaven, again there is no time. It is eternal peace.
That burning is the ability to sit with the most difficult sensations, to feel the most difficult feelings.
So Purgatory is needed to be able to go through those. And the angels guide or help?
Yes, the angels appear throughout the whole story. One of the key messages is that Purgatory is not an eternal place. It is temporary. It is a process that will end once you are able to sit with the burning, the heat, the discomfort, the emotion or feeling that is difficult. Once you are able to sit with that for a certain period of time, you are no longer reacting to it.
It can even become something of an acquired taste. There is a sense of deliciousness in that sensation. Even fear, even pain. Not that we go looking for pain, but when it appears, there is that tingle of fear, that tingle of sensations that we are no longer in reactivity toward.
Peeling layers deeper and deeper
This can get more and more intense because we go deeper to the underlying sensations. At first, the sensation might just be the stress of an active mind. But the active mind is there because we are asking it to hypnotize us and distract us from something we don't want to feel. So we peel that layer, and we find: there is actually a pain or a fear. If we sit with that pain or fear until we are more okay with it, the mind is going to calm down because it is no longer needed to distract us from that sensation.
We do this over and over again, deeper and deeper, until we cross that fire that does not burn, which is the last sensation we find unbearable. If I were to label it or describe it, it is the sense of being separate.
That's the unbearable one. The seemingly unbearable one. Beneath everything.
Yes. It is basically the fear of death. But what can die is only what is separate. Only what exists in time can die.
It's almost like the fear of death is a recognition of the absurdity of it: where could I go? But without realizing it, we're noticing the absurdity while there is still this automatic reaction. There is so much wisdom in having the fear of death, more wisdom than I realize. It comes from a knowing that death isn't really possible.
I think the fear comes from the belief that we are separate.
Yes, but we don't like it because it's not right. We notice that it's not right, but we're not aware that we notice it. It's fascinating. And also, the angels in Dante: are they portrayed as time-bound or not?
No, I think they are eternal beings. I don't remember the details of the metaphysics of the angels, but they appear as entities throughout the whole story from almost the beginning. The first angel appears in Hell.
That's interesting, this whole notion of angels. I was studying with someone who took every single word in the Jewish Bible, from beginning to end, and researched the origin of each word. The origin of each word could come from any one of ten or twelve dead languages. He came up with some amazing things. He was a physician; this was just his passion. One of my favorites was the term for angel, which in Hebrew is malach. We have a word in modern Hebrew, melakha, which means a very specific kind of work done for a very specific purpose. That's what we think of when we say "you're an angel": you showed up at just the right time. I love the notion of angels. They fit right then and there, through a divine purpose.
That's beautiful. Malach.
Maps, not puzzles
It helps me because it's like there's a whole puzzle, all these different pieces.
These are all maps. Don't expect things to resolve once you follow the pieces together. It's not a puzzle in that sense, because that could be the mind trying to figure things out: once it finds all the puzzle pieces and puts them all together, "then I will arrive." But that is what the mind believes is the solution, and it is never going to work.
These are all pointers and maps. That is why many teachers made a deliberate effort to contradict themselves, so that you couldn't create a map where all the pieces fit together neatly.
That makes sense. And I want to mention what you were saying earlier about sitting with it, allowing, going deeper and deeper, hotter and hotter. Ultimately, it's not what is happening that matters. It's our relationship with what's happening.
Yes, it's the relationship. That's what I keep pointing to: to relate to things rather than try to avoid and cut off. To touch, to go into, to sense, to be present with. So that we can actually sit with that which is why we identify as something separate.
The wound of separation
Say that again.
To be able to sit with things until we finally sit with the one thing, the last thing, the deepest thing we avoid, which in Dante's Purgatory is the fire that does not burn. What we are avoiding is the sense of being separate. We attach to a sense of being separate in order to avoid sensing that.
St. Francis described this in another way. By believing we are separate from God, we create a wound. That wound is so unbearable that we try to fix it as separate individuals. But it is a wound that the separate individual cannot heal. Only through the recognition of our divine being, only through the end of the sense that God and I are two, is that wound healed. Because the wound is the consequence of believing that I am separate.
The sense of separation and the wound are really the same thing, the pain. But the entity that is separate cannot heal it. The mind cannot assemble the puzzle pieces and fix it. The person cannot fix that wound, because the very being of that separate self is the wound. The existence of the sense and the belief in that separate self is the wound.
Your deepest desires, the ones that come from trying to fix that deep sense of a wound, that deep sense of "I'm not okay, life is not okay," cannot be fixed or healed by the "I." It can only be healed through surrendering, through the death, through going through the experience: the fire that does not burn, the sensations of the fear of death, the surrendering through that wound. Then we lose that sense of "God and I" or "the world and I," and the wound disappears.