When the Chaos Feels Like Too Much
Cuando el caos se siente como demasiado
A student asks how to know whether intense, overwhelming experience is a sign to pull back or simply part of the process. The conversation expands into energetic intensity, the struggle between identification and raw reality, and the addictive nature of spiritual experiences.
When the Chaos Feels Like Too Much
A student asks how to know whether intense, overwhelming experience is a sign to pull back or simply part of the process. The conversation expands into energetic intensity, the struggle between identification and raw reality, and the addictive nature of spiritual experiences.
I wanted to follow up on something you said about how this chaos could be too much if there's not enough of a center. How do I know if I have enough of a center? What would be a good guide? It made me wonder which side I'm on.
Usually there isn't a rule, but there are some pointers. It will always feel like "I'm not ready." So feeling like you're not ready, or feeling that you can't, isn't a sign that you actually can't.
For me it doesn't come up so much as "I can't." It comes up as there being so much chaos that it's overwhelming. And then I feel like maybe it's more than I can handle, and maybe I need to do something so I can handle it better.
That's what I'm trying to simplify: "It's too much. It's overwhelming. I can't." That isn't really a sign that you can't, or that it is too much, because at points it will always feel like that. In fact, if it doesn't feel like that, there isn't a true transition or shift. It will always feel like the worst thing you want.
I'm not saying it's always going to feel that way. I'm saying it must, at some point, be experienced as the last thing you want to experience. That is the flavor of what we, as identified minds, experience as death. It has also been referred to as the dark night. So experiencing it as "too much" isn't a sign that it is too much.
Signs that something needs to be addressed
Now, what are signs that something does need to be addressed? If you can't function; if you have things to do and responsibilities in your daily life and you cannot function for an extended period of time. I'm not talking about a day or two or three. But if you start to have real problems in functioning, that is a sign that something needs to be addressed or slowed down. The challenge in functioning needs to be met, and that is going to involve developing a stronger center.
Can you say more about what you mean by developing a stronger center, and how that happens?
For example: what is it that's in the way of functioning? By meeting those challenges, the stronger center is developed. If you have things to do and you don't do them, meetings to attend and you skip them, responsibilities and commitments you don't fulfill. It's very context-dependent. I'm not sure exactly how your daily life is structured, or what your responsibilities and commitments are.
But it has to do with how well we respond to responsibilities and commitments in our daily life. If we start to notice we're not responding to them well, and it becomes not just "I had a difficult week" but something systemic, then that should be addressed.
If you tell me this resonates, and you describe what's happening in your life, we can talk about how to address it, because it will be very specific to your situation. But as a general example: getting out of bed in the morning and doing the things one needs to do, and doing them from a place of impeccability, responsibility, and integrity. If that kind of functioning is in place, that's a sign of a strong center. Usually that needs to be developed before a process of transcending can unfold. Otherwise, sometimes transcending happens a little too early, and a lot of challenges come with it.
What do you mean by challenges?
For example, there was a well-known teacher who was doing a graduate degree at Cambridge. That took a lot of structure and center. He was in his twenties when he had a big shift, but then he spent years without much ability to function, sitting in parks, having a hard time managing daily life. He had already done a lot of ego work, which made a difference.
This is also why therapy helps. When we start doing this work of going into the present moment, our psyche begins opening up material from the shadow. Old wounds and pains start coming up, and all of that needs to be addressed.
I so agree with you. This is not discussed nearly enough. I can't thank you enough for addressing it. This is reality, and reality has many sides and many surprises.
It's my pleasure. This is where the human and personal, and the spiritual and divine, are truly inseparable. Both have to be worked on, in a sense, or at least addressed.
Energetic intensity and raw experience
On the same topic, I was wondering about energetic phenomena. For a few years now, I've been feeling very intense energetic movement. Just now in the meditation, it was happening. Sometimes it feels like something is pouring out or through my body. My whole body goes super tense and it feels chaotic. What has changed with time is that now the response is more like, "Okay, my body is going crazy again, just watch it." It has helped me a lot to see the strong identification with the body, because images of the body come up and it's as if the body is saying, "How can you think you're not the body? Look at all this intensity! How can you not be your body?" It feels like something is trying to pull me back. Usually I don't give it much importance, but I was wondering if it's part of the same process.
The energetic aspects are a little different, but related. It has to do with getting closer to reality, meaning having a more direct experience of raw sensation and perception. By "more direct," I mean less interpretation. The mind creates a map, interpreting raw experience, and then we believe the map is more real than the experience itself. What seems most real becomes the map, and we don't even realize this is happening.
When that interpretive layer starts to get thinner, raw sensation and perception start to feel more activated. There is more intensity in the present moment because we're attached to that interpretation. Now you have a struggle between the belief in that interpretation and raw sensation and experience. That battle is the intensity you're describing.
Yeah, it makes sense. It does feel like a battle. Sometimes it feels like I'm going to explode.
The tension between the finite and the infinite
That sense of "I'm going to explode" is exactly that tension between the two. And it can happen that you do "explode," in a sense. If you completely disidentify with the mental image of the experience, it can feel like an explosion, especially if it happens suddenly. The mental image is localized and small, while raw reality is infinite. So it is, in a sense, the tension between the limited and the infinite.
The part you're describing, where it seems like the body is saying, "How can this not be real? How can you believe you're not the body? Look, here I am. See how intense the body is," that is also part of this struggle, this tension. But it is a part of you that is resisting the letting go of that small identification. That storm is being created by your own attachment. You then project it onto the body as if the body is speaking to you, but it's really you projecting that onto the body. It is your own resistance and attachment to that belief.
In that tension, the body is going to have intensity. But there is also an intensity that is naturally the intensity of raw experience. When we are in this identification and we move in and out of it repeatedly without fully disidentifying, the back-and-forth can become, on one side, a little addictive. There's a sense that something is happening, that I'm getting close to something, that something is going to happen. And there's this subtle feeling: "If only something happens here, then I will get to that place where I'm okay." Does that resonate?
Yes. But I also find this very interesting because I've never really talked to anyone about this, and you're putting it into words that resonate deeply. I think I may have seen through it a few times, seen that it's a kind of circus and that reality is behind it. But yes, it resonates.
Think of it as two things. One: there is a tension between the finite and the infinite, but there isn't a truly finite thing. So it is the tension between the belief in, and attachment to, a mental construct on the one hand, and reality, which is vaster, on the other. That creates intensity and a sense of struggle, a battle between the two. But it's all part of you. It's not your body as a separate thing sending you messages. See it as very close to you.
Two: there can also be an attachment to that dynamic itself. Notice: "If only I can get through this intensity and this battle, on the other side there's going to be this big release, and once that happens, I will be okay. Then I will arrive." That is the same thing I was describing in the meditation: a dissatisfaction now that the voice says will go away. "It's so obvious. If only this, then I will be okay." There's almost no doubt about it, and that is the voice of dissatisfaction.
So even when you're in that tension, contemplate that what you're looking for already is. That whole dynamic of tension doesn't have to go away. It doesn't need to change or resolve for you to know the underlying reality. This points to a subtler, deeper belief. There is something that can shift, and that is a bit of a paradox, because if I were saying, "No, there's no real shift, this is already it," and yet there's a dissatisfaction, then I would be pointing toward a shift that can happen.
The addiction to spiritual experiences
Did this struggle happen to you?
Yes. What you're describing, I know from experience. At that level of tension, I had the experience of it completely breaking down, absolutely and completely gone. And then I was able to see that the whole thing wasn't needed. But that's a real paradox.
Another aspect I did see is how there was an addiction to experiences. It's almost as if only through realizing there was an addiction to these intense spiritual experiences did the bigger shift happen, which itself involved deeper spiritual experiences. But only through the letting go of having them, and seeing the nature of the addiction in having them, did that tension fully release.
How did you see it as an addiction? Because it could just be a preference.
It was noticing how much I was expecting those experiences to give me, how much of my future well-being I was placing on them. And it was always my future well-being: the well-being I would have, experience, and arrive at. That depended on imagined experiences, which were subtle variations of past experiences. "I experienced this in the past. If in the future I experience that, but a little different, then I will finally get to that well-being." That is an addictive process. Think of alcohol or drugs: it's always the next high, or the next bigger one, or trying to make it more permanent. "If I could have that, but make it stay more permanently, then I will find that well-being."
It's the same with everything: relationships, money, substances, the body. The mind attaches to a story that, based on the past, "if only I could have more of that, or a subtle variation of it," I'll be okay. We've lived that in the past and it didn't work, so we imagine it a little differently, something that's in our control to some degree, something we can do.
For me, for instance, it didn't work in the past because with these glimpses, when you see the beauty of it, my mind says, "No, it didn't work because it wasn't permanent." And I project that for you it's permanent, but that is more of the same thing.
Exactly. You project onto me and onto others something you imagine. There is something permanent, but it's not where you imagine it. The paradox happens because you imagine, based on your experience and your past, something being a little different. You imagine, "That's what he has." But it's not like that.
I know this because I've been there. I know the imagining of what it must be like. For me, it was some form of projection based on glimpses, based on spiritual experiences that I then imagined: "Oh, it must be like this." It became so habitual and real that I was trying to recreate it, because "that's how it is for that person, so I just need to control this and make it happen." Whether it's a big experience or something permanent or whatever your particular preference, however your mind is constructing it, I can tell you with absolute certainty: it is not how you imagine it. You can only imagine a mental thing, and it has nothing to do with the mental. It has nothing to do with anything you can imagine. It has nothing to do with your past experiences, either. It is not like anything you have experienced.