What It Is Made Of
De qué está hecho
A meditation exploring what all experience is made of, noticing the pull of thought, and resting in the quiet knowing that holds everything.
What It Is Made Of
Settle into the direct experience of sensation.
Our experience seems to have the nature of sound, sensations, images, sight.
And then there is a layer which is the same but made of thought.
Imagined sounds, imagined images, imagined sensations.
Discerning the raw and the imagined
Normally, as we sit in meditation, we want to discern what is direct raw experience and what is imagined.
We don't want to change anything.
Discernment is not a quality of thought; it is a quality of that which sees, that which sees thought.
There is sound, or the human voice.
The one that knows the sound is not thought.
Thought knows it's a human voice and the meaning of the words.
The pull of thought
Just notice the labeling, the map-making of everything you're experiencing.
Notice the tendency we all have of diving into the world of thought, the world of imagination, map-making.
There's no need to stop that.
Just notice the pull.
It's like gravity pulling over and over again.
You live with this magnetic gravitational pull every day.
What is the pulling?
Feel into it and don't try to control it or stop it.
Become intimate.
It pulls us away from something and towards something.
Feel into it.
That which does not move
And notice that in this dance, where attention is being pulled, there is something that is present.
It does not move.
It is not touched.
It is as the ocean containing all the waves, holding, embracing, supporting.
Its presence so vast it can't be seen.
Keep noticing the pulling of attention into the world of thought, the familiar world.
The story of you is at the center, the story of your past remembered, your future imagined.
And the world divided into me and not me, over and over.
What is it made of
Just notice that this experience of raw sensation, sound, perception, sitting in a room, listening to a voice, the pulling into thought.
All of this is happening within something, made from something.
What is this sensation, thought, imagination, sound, sight?
What is it made of?
It's all made of one thing.
Don't try to know it through thinking.
What is thinking made of?
The same as the sound of my voice.
The question "Who am I?" points to this.
The question "What am I?" points to this.
Don't try to understand it.
What is understanding made of?
Its essence is alive.
If there is discomfort, frustration, contraction, let it be and feel into what it is made of.
The taste of biting an apple: you can remember that.
And the description of the taste of biting an apple.
The taste of the raw experience of the palm of your hands right now, and the description of that.
Sensation and thought, and yet they are both made of the same thing.
To recognize that is what we long for, to know ourselves to be that, to be this.
Silence, spaciousness, absence
When sound is known, silence is there.
When sensations are known, spaciousness is there.
When thoughts are known and experienced, there is the absence of thoughts, always.
A thought does not know a thought.
The absence of thought knows the thought.
When pain is there, the absence of pain is there.
When fear is there, the absence of fear is there.
That which knows the fear is not afraid.
Fear is fear, sound is sound.
The knowing of it is beingness.
When there is an experience of "I am suffering," simultaneously there is peace that knows the suffering.
Suffering cannot know suffering.
Only the absence of suffering can know suffering.
It is our nature.
And the beauty of it is known by our heart, the loving of all experience.
The radical love for life is our nature, including suffering, including pain.