The Dream You Don't Want to Wake Up From
El sueño del que no quieres despertar
A student describes feeling increasingly distracted and defensive during a meditation on distraction, and the teacher suggests that the meditation was not creating the distraction but revealing how deeply invested the mind already is in preserving its own illusions.
The Dream You Don't Want to Wake Up From
A student describes feeling increasingly distracted and defensive during a meditation on distraction, and the teacher suggests that the meditation was not creating the distraction but revealing how deeply invested the mind already is in preserving its own illusions.
The theme of today's meditation was spot on for me. The more you pointed to the mind's tendency to distract, the more my mind became defensive. I was jumping all over the place. I was trying to focus on feeling and sensing, and the more you pointed to distraction, the more my mind jumped there. I don't know if it was suggestion or my ego being defensive, but I found this meditation much more difficult. The harder I tried to focus, the more distracted I became. I would waver between trying to sense, getting defensive, having my thoughts jump from one noise to another, thinking about what I need to do today or what I did yesterday. It was all over the place. I guess it was pointing to all the things my brain does that I have no control over. I can see how defensive it is.
When you say you were trying to focus, what were you trying to focus on? Was it sensing?
Just trying to feel into my body. Listening to my surroundings, being aware of my breath, noticing how I'm feeling in my body, trying to be in the present rather than having my mind jump all over the place.
Revealing what was already there
You're saying that my pointing to distraction created the distraction. What I would suggest is that by pointing to it, the distraction wasn't being created. Rather, by highlighting it, you started to see it more.
And getting defensive.
Yes. The defensiveness is almost like having a secret that is being revealed, because I was pointing to something very fundamental and very archetypal. By archetypal, I mean it is universal and carries a very core narrative: the mechanism of the mind being our servant in distraction.
By "servant," I mean this: we can interpret the situation as though we are victims of our mind. Then we have no responsibility, no power. Or we can see the self-deception in that and face something we don't want to face. We don't want to see this, because we are playing a game of our habits. We are choosing a kind of virtual reality made of our belief systems and our thinking. We live in a world we are creating in our minds, and we want that to be reality, so we believe it is reality, and therefore it becomes our reality. We don't want to be aware of this whole thing we are doing.
The child and the fantasy
It's like being a child playing some fantasy with your toys, and then a parent comes, takes the toys away, and says, "You have to go have a bath." You were happily in your fantasy, and now you're taken out of it. You're going to have a tantrum. You're going to be in pain, because there's a sense of losing the world you've become attached to, that imagination and creation. As a metaphor, this is similar to what happens constantly, daily. We are maintaining a kind of fantasy world to distract us from something.
By focusing the meditation on pointing to the root of that mechanism, I would suggest this interpretation for you to experiment with: what happened for you was a kind of reactivity. Feeling that there was more and more distraction was actually you recognizing that you are often distracted. Pointing to it made it obvious as distraction, rather than something you take to be your natural reality.
Distraction disguised as reality
So what you think is your natural reality now gets seen as: "Oh, but that's distraction, distraction, distraction." It seems like the pointing is creating distraction, but actually you step one level deeper and see that this is happening all the time.
This is very well known. It's often said: if you want to see how completely involved in mind you are, just go sit by yourself in a room for a few hours and try to be okay with it. You will find yourself in constant turmoil.
What could have happened for you is that this pointing to distraction started revealing that you are attached to distraction being reality. By calling it distraction, the mechanism is exposed: "I want this distraction, but I don't want to experience it as distraction. I want to experience it as reality."
The strategy of "I will be okay when"
Let me speak from the mechanism of self-deception. Say, for example, I am trying to solve a conflict with my brother. I can be so involved in that, and it will feel like I'm doing the right thing, being responsible, even honorable. But if I see that I'm projecting into that conflict a strategy ("If I solve this, I will be okay"), and if I notice that dropping that strategy brings me to feeling what I really feel (for example, that I feel hurt and betrayed, that there is anguish, that something is not okay), then suddenly solving the situation is seen as a distraction. Whereas the moment before, it was experienced as reality, as "this is what's important." You don't notice it as distraction at all.
That is what I'm suggesting might have happened. We don't want to see it. Our illusion, our paradigm of what is reality, breaks. This is why one of the words for this work is "waking up," because one is literally dreaming while awake. The metaphor of sleep applies directly: you are asleep, you have dreams, and then you wake up and realize that the reality of the dream world is not the same as waking reality. Many things don't apply anymore, and you have to be responsible for different things. If you are currently, while in wakeful consciousness, dreaming a reality, then this work is waking up from that dream. And we don't want to do that. A great deal of our attachment, our interest, our energy is invested in preserving that dream.
An interpretation to sit with
I'm not telling you this is what you're going through. I'm suggesting it as an interpretation for you to take and contemplate, to see if it resonates. But I do suggest you try to explore it: there is a part of you that doesn't want to see how invested you are in the distractions you cling to. And you won't experience them as "Now I'm going to get distracted with this" or "Now I'm going to get distracted with that." You experience them as "This is what's important. This is what I must do." You will use all of your intellect, talent, and capacity to address what seem like the most important problems you have.
I'm not saying that if you have a child, you don't have to do what you have to do. The mechanism I was pointing to in this meditation is very specific. It is: "I will be okay when…" Something is fundamentally not okay now, with myself, with my moment, with this current experience of reality, one hundred percent as it is. That is not okay, and it will be okay when. That is the specific thing I'm pointing to. It's not about a task for work or something you need to do for your son. I'm not saying those are distractions you should ignore. I'm talking about the fact that you are not okay. Something is not okay, and there is a belief that it will be okay when.