The Illusion of Contraction
La ilusión de la contracción
A student struggles with the word "illusion" because, in moments of deep contraction, the suffering feels utterly real and inescapable. The teacher guides her into the direct experience of contraction and demonstrates how quickly identification can dissolve.
The Illusion of Contraction
A student struggles with the word "illusion" because, in moments of deep contraction, the suffering feels utterly real and inescapable. The teacher guides her into the direct experience of contraction and demonstrates how quickly identification can dissolve.
The whole point of my question is that when I'm feeling the contraction, it's very hard for me to see beyond it in that moment. Afterwards I can, but not while it's happening. That's why the word "illusion" is so difficult for me personally, because of this very specific way I experience it.
But then what illusion is happening there in that moment?
I could talk about it and see, as I said.
You just said, "When I'm in that place, I'm really contracted." And then something happens: you forget, or you can't see it, it's hard for you to see it.
Right.
Good question.
I feel like I'm answering from that contracted place.
We just said that when there's a storm, the awareness of the storm is not also stormy. You said, "Of course not."
I do feel that. Absolutely, yes.
When you're in a storm and you feel you can't see through it.
I feel the contraction, yes, and I'm aware that that's not me, but it's hard for me to go from there to there. Sometimes it happens. Obviously, I wouldn't be here today if it didn't happen sometimes.
Awareness in the middle of contraction
What is awareness? It's not hard. It's really simple. What is awareness?
I know all the right answers. I'm just saying that in that moment, I'm having a hard time. That's all I'm trying to say. I don't need to be convinced of what's true, because on some level I already am what's true. That's just what I am, period. I'm just saying that there's a very, very hard core of me that is very difficult to reach. That's really what I'm trying to say. In this discussion, no problem, but...
And you said you're speaking from that contracted place. What is hard? Just describe it. Don't try to explain, just describe the experience of contraction, of something hard.
I guess the feeling, the experience, is alone and unreachable.
Alone and unreachable. So in a sense, isolated. And what do you long for or desire?
I think to feel free and happy.
How does "free" feel?
It's flowing. No, it's unstoppable.
What kind of sensations does "free" feel like? What kind of feelings does it evoke?
I'm looking for the word, the opposite of contracting. Relaxed and floating...
Expanded.
Expanded, where things just move with no barrier. It's smooth, flowing, easy. That's the word: easy.
What do you love right now?
And the loneliness that you spoke about, is that in relationship to people?
Sometimes it can be to people. It's often just when I'm by myself. I can feel this disconnectedness, this unreachability.
At the level of your heart, what do you long for? What do you love?
To be in touch with the love in my heart. That's what I love, especially those moments.
What do you love right now?
I love this conversation. And I love just getting in touch with what I just got in touch with, which is this real strong desire to be in touch with the heart.
And where is the contraction?
Oh. Yeah, I feel it somewhat physically, a little bit in the neck and the shoulders, but no biggie.
How quickly identification can shift
Notice how, within yourself, you can choose to energize the contraction, focus on it, make it the theme of life, and how very quickly it can shift.
Thank you. Wow. Thank you so much. I had no idea what I was asking about.
In a sense, because you had such a strong reaction to the word "illusion," I felt like that was the way in.
The contraction seems to be the "me." It seems to be a big deal, the core of what's going on. The more you're there, the more it feels like infinite contraction since the beginning of time till the end of time. How do you get out of it? It's like a hole you can dig deeper and deeper.
That is the nature of identification. And see how quickly, in only two or three minutes, that can switch to the point where you kind of forgot about it. It's no longer the important thing. Then you had some moments of feeling expansion, warmth, love, and connection, to the degree where the contraction was forgotten. And then when I asked you, "Where's the contraction?" you went right back.
But that's the point: to see the contrast and how easily one can move from one to the other. That is what I'm trying to point to as the illusion. The illusion is that the identification, the contraction, the never-ending tension and suffering and struggle, is so important, so central, so hard to undo. That is the illusion.
Right. The story around the story. Wow. Thanks for your persistence. That was great.
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I think this has to do with what was just shared. During the meditation today, you said something like "being is already actualized." Something happened. I'd been feeling, not today but in the days before, something similar: this identification and mind is so sticky, it's everywhere, it sticks to me and I can't get free. And then I realized, okay, that's another thought. And now that you're speaking about it, it was like focusing on the contraction.
When you said today that being is already actualized, I started noticing something super core to this: focusing on the contraction, focusing on the idea that something is wrong, that something needs to change. When the contraction is there, something's wrong because there's contraction. When I start thinking about the contraction, something is wrong because I'm thinking about it. But as I noticed this "something's wrong," it started relaxing. I got into a space where there's nothing to do but watch.
Something like that. And when you say "there's nothing to do," do you mean nothing I want to do, nothing that's needed?
Nothing. Nothing's wrong, nothing's needed, nothing needs to change. Something like that.
The engine of identification: something is wrong
That starts to sound like being. The more you ground in that, the more your doing can come from freedom.
This idea that something's wrong and something needs to change is pretty core. It is the basis of how identification works. You have to split the world in two, call one side "me" and the rest "not me." So it's going to be "my hair's too long," "my back hurts," or really big problems and challenges. But it requires this sense that something is not okay with this body-mind in relationship to the world. It could also be that what's not okay is the government, or my job, or relationships.
You cut experience in two. You call one part "I" and the other "not me." And then the part that is "me" is going to be in trouble, because it's going to have challenges and problems. Now I am not going to be okay until some condition is met. One part of the universe is relating to the other part of the universe, trying to get one of them to be okay.
You have to meet that with the same kind of not believing. If you want it to be more specific: this body, this mind, is "I"; the rest of the universe is "not I." For example, if I feel rage or pain or fear, just go into the feelings without the story that the fear needs to go away, the pain needs to go away. Because that story brings up the mechanism. That creates the identification again. There is always, because of the identification with "I am this body-mind," something that needs to be not okay for it to function.
Why does it need a negative? Can't the ego exist on "I'm so awesome, I'm better than everybody else"?
The ego needs something to be not okay
The ego always exists, but it's not what it appears to be. The ego is a very important aspect of the body-mind, but the problem is believing that I am exclusively that. It's one part of the experience, one part of the universe: my body, my mind. There's an aspect of that which is ego, which is the mental mechanism that creates a perspective in the world, that manages and regulates. But if I believe that is all I am, I am identifying with one part of the universe.
That identification requires something to be missing. The experience of "everything's great, I'm the best" is one form of belief, one mental construct. It's one state the ego can take. But being an illusion, being a belief that is not true, it will have another side. It will come with isolation and the feeling "I'm the worst." And so it will be about propagating the sense that I'm the best and avoiding the sense that I'm the worst, trying to continuously maintain "I'm better and better." But it's coming from the doubt in the belief, the fear that I'm not the best.
That's why it's so tricky. This experience of mind is one part of the world, and it can only define itself in relationship to other parts of the world. That's why it's always going to be black and white, up and down, positive and negative. You could identify with something negative as well: "I'm the worst, I'm the worst." But that identification will collapse if you start to see you're not the worst, that there are actually good qualities. If that belief falls away, you cannot identify with it. You would have to identify with something else.
Once you stop identifying, you can have a more accurate perspective. You don't need to believe in anything. All the beliefs you need to keep up to stay identified can go away, and you can see things more clearly. You can see, "I'm really good in these ways, not so good in these ways," because by not being identified, you can see how things actually are. Something always has to be wrong with the moment for identification to work, because if it wasn't, then we can't try to escape it.
Seeing clearly what is wrong with the world
How do we reconcile with all the violence and senseless things that happen in the world without making a judgment of "this is wrong"?
I'm talking about the sense of self. You can only see clearly what's wrong with the world when you are free from the beliefs about what's wrong with you. That's what Jesus was pointing to: focus first on the log in your own eye before you try to remove the speck from your neighbor's. Otherwise, you will project into the world. If you think you know what's wrong with the world, but there's still something unexamined in you, and usually people who focus on what's wrong with the world are often unaware of their conditionings and beliefs, those get projected. They might feel great about themselves and the work they're doing to fix the problems of the world, but they're usually coming from unconscious beliefs about what's wrong with themselves.
When I'm saying to look at and undo the beliefs about what is not okay right now, that goes to a specific, core, existential terror. When that is met, you can see more clearly what you need to work on in yourself and what you can do about what's happening in the world.
Absolute uncertainty
The way you can know whether you're seeing clearly is this: if it feels like you and the world are two things, if there's a "me" which is a physical body and the rest of the world are two separate things, then it's not a good idea to try to do something in the world first. It's infinite not-knowing. I cannot know what the world needs. I cannot know what this body-mind needs. There's just no ability to have that kind of certainty.
Otherwise, it's a form of arrogance: "I know what the world needs, I can fix it." That kind of way of functioning is almost like living as if Santa Claus existed, the way a child would believe. It's just not very possible to do.
The other way, which can't really be described: it's as if this body, this mind, the world are all one experience, one world, completely inseparable. There's no real inside and outside. I can't even know that there is anything wrong with it, even with all the pain and suffering and all the horrible things that happen. Even with that, I can't have a certain knowing that it's wrong.
There's a Zen saying: "There is no right nor wrong, but right is right and wrong is wrong." You could turn everything around. "Everything is fine with the world." No. "Everything is wrong with the world." No. What I'm saying is: I can't specifically say "that's wrong and that shouldn't be happening." I can make a decision, make that call, take action in that direction, but I can't really know that it's right.
I can say, factually, that there are things that are wrong and things that are right, because otherwise I would be saying there's nothing wrong and nothing right, and that would be a belief too.
There's only one statement that I feel can be stated as absolute. Even in words, it points to something that words can never perfectly capture. But the only statement that points to something absolutely true is: being is, and non-being is not. That's the only thing I can say with certainty. Everything else cannot be stated absolutely as truth.
It's more difficult with extreme examples. If right here, in front of me, someone is trying to rape a child, it's probably wrong and I know it's wrong. But are you saying that you can't say for sure it's wrong?
I have to say there is a place where I can't know. But it's not a place. There just isn't any certainty that it is absolutely always wrong. Expressed that way, I know I can't really communicate what I'm intending to communicate. Because it's hard to communicate, I would just say: yes, that's absolutely always wrong. It's better to express that kind of ethics than to try to communicate something that probably cannot be communicated.
It's an absolute uncertainty, an absolute not-knowing. But if I'm putting it into words and you ask, "Can't you say it's always wrong?" then yes, I can say it's always wrong, because I'm using words, and I'd rather have my margin of error go in that direction than the other. The other place I'm trying to communicate from is simply not going to work in words. The best way I can say it is: it's this absolute uncertainty. And speaking is an action. So in acting, in this moment, I would say it's always wrong.
Freedom and not-knowing
Is freedom and absolutely not-knowing the same thing for you?
No. Related, but not the same. Freedom cannot be defined. Absolute not-knowing is a statement. I wouldn't say it's a close definition of freedom. I would say absolute not-knowing is possibly a nice way to describe being. But it's a description. I wouldn't take that statement and try to have it be a definition of anything.
Ethics, realization, and guiding principles
It's a tricky conversation because these are two aspects that, to the mind, are paradoxical. I think from the beginning of time, a lot of the work of consciousness in humanity has been work in ethics. You have the Ten Commandments, and there's a lot of progression in ethics, but it comes from realization.
Until you realize more deeply what you are, which is to see what you are not, you have to have some guiding principles. For example, the Ten Commandments: don't kill. But once you are more free, you're able to see more clearly what is needed, when, and in what situation, based on the context. There is less need for guiding principles. They become innate. They come from within. They don't need to be passed down.
I remember reading in the Tao Te Ching something about this: the highest level is when there are no laws because everyone knows how to govern themselves. But laws are for when people are unconscious.
Which is most people. So laws are needed.
Acting from freedom rather than fear
We still need to do what we want, because otherwise it becomes "then I don't do what I want." You still have to do what you want, but look at where that wanting comes from and dig deep. Be able to suppress action if you recognize it's coming from fear, anxiety, or a need to control. And by suppressing action that comes from fear, you will feel fear. So we need to learn to sit with fear, to sit with pain, so that these are not where we're acting from.
When we are able to feel all the fear we have, feel all the pain we have, and still connect to deep desire, then that deep desire is going to be coming from something beyond the mechanisms of fear and pain, because we're not trying to avoid or suppress them.
This applies to every decision we make, even whether to make a coffee or not. Where is the decision coming from? What's the impulse? What's the drive? Is it an anxiety I'm trying to manage and control, or am I just loving the flavor, and there's a different quality?
The problem is it's not easy to know when we are acting and moving and living from fear. Something can feel like "this is truly what I want and need" most of the time, and most of the time it can be based on fear. These are general statements, and the more general a statement, the more wrong it can be. I'm offering relevant pointers and guidelines, but when they're very general and they're regarding action and choices, there are a lot of ifs and buts and exceptions.