The Beauty of Forgetting
La belleza del olvido
A student reflects on how presence and openness have deepened throughout the week, then asks why the mind so consistently veils what has been clearly seen.
The Beauty of Forgetting
A student reflects on how presence and openness have deepened throughout the week, then asks why the mind so consistently veils what has been clearly seen.
During the meditation and listening to everyone share, I felt this unusual harmony. I was just taking it all in, and it was giving me so much. I kept wanting to stop in the middle of the meditation to write things down, and then I noticed the mind wanting to hold on. Finally I said, okay, that's not where it's at.
I want to report how present the themes of freedom and not-knowing have been throughout the whole week. In my interactions, in my self-talk, in hearing about what's going on in the world, they just keep coming up again and again. There's this process where it gets deeper and deeper, and it's so beautiful. It's so effortless.
I do have a question, though. It just won't leave my mind: why is there so much forgetting?
What do you mean by forgetting?
It's like when the mind comes in again, everything is forgotten. Everything that was beyond mind is just gone. Even the experience of, say, your feet. You don't think about them right now, and you forget you have feet. It's so strange. I feel like I'm tuning into one experience, and then it's gone, and now I'm in another, and that's gone too. You can never know where you are. And even the "I" is a temporary experience that comes and goes. It's just so bizarre.
Two kinds of forgetting
It sounds like you're talking about two kinds of forgetting. One is what the mind knows: because its nature is quite linear, you focus on one thing, then another, and the rest drops away. What you're describing with the feet is not just forgetting but the temporary nature of reality, where the feet don't exist, in a sense, until you focus on them.
The other forgetting is when the mind comes in and veils reality. That forgetting happens because it is the nature of mind. We forget because, in a sense, we want to. By veiling, we have an experience that is limited, and there is a positive aspect to that veiling. It is what allows us to live in what you could call the dream of the separate self. There is a certain beauty to that experience, and there is a reason why we choose it. Consciousness has that ability. It's just that at some point, for some reason, we get tired of it and want something less veiled. That's all.
It resonates, totally. I guess the question "why" isn't even really the point. The actual experience of it is quite remarkable and wild.
Wild, yes.
It's more a way of marveling at it. Like, if I look at that plant over there, there are moments where it's so clear that it's not a separate object. It's so luminous. But then in the next moment, I'm quite happy to think, "I've got to water the plants, now I'm going to work."
What objects?
Something you said earlier about it not being in the phenomenal world, in the world of objects. I just have one thought for you: what objects?
Yes, I can see that. Maybe what I was experiencing is the directionality of a certain way of looking outward. But "outward" here means everything that appears, not outward in the physical sense. It's everything that arises from the background. In that sense, everything is outer. But there is a background; that's my experience. What I was trying to say is that everything that is not the background seems different. But I guess that's what you're pointing to: why do I assume everything is not the background?
Exactly. Phenomenal, non-phenomenal.
The open gate
I get it. I keep drawing a line there. There is this space where everything appears, and it is so beautiful, but I keep separating the things that appear from the space itself. I get it intellectually, but in the moment of the experience, I still experience them as separate. Thank you. But I just want to reinforce this: nothing that appears is as beautiful as being an open gate for everything to appear. That was the whole thing.
Yes.