What Knowing Really Means
Lo que realmente significa conocer
A question about the nature of knowing leads into a discussion of direct experience, the mind's reflective world, and the role of fear and pain in the transition from mental contraction to intimacy with reality.
What Knowing Really Means
A question about the nature of knowing leads into a discussion of direct experience, the mind's reflective world, and the role of fear and pain in the transition from mental contraction to intimacy with reality.
I've been asking myself a lot recently what it is to know. When you read something and think, "Okay, now I know this," what does that mean? What does knowing mean? I just came into contact with this line of information, and I've been asking myself about what knowing is.
The knowing is obviously a semantic problem: what do we mean? We could define it in different ways. There is a knowing of the mind, which can be very useful and practical, and which is very important for functioning and living. But the problem arises when we try to satisfy our deepest longing with that kind of knowing.
The world of reflection
What we really long for is not the knowing of what I call the reflection: the mental map, the mental understanding. I call it a reflection because it happens simultaneously. You have the direct experience, and simultaneously there is a reflection of it in the mind, which creates a map and an understanding. That is what we start to develop when very young, and then it becomes our primary world, while direct experience becomes secondary.
This reflection is very useful, but we get lost in it and lose touch with direct experience. That is what this meditation was about: shifting the energy of our attention away from the mirror, away from the reflection of the mind, and into direct experience. That shift is going to be uncomfortable for most people, or for a lot of the time, unless you have had some experience moving in that direction, because we are very attached to that kind of knowing. We get a lot out of it in the sense that it momentarily satisfies a sense of longing, but it is more of an addictive satisfaction. It is not truly satisfying.
Would it be safe to say that knowing is irrelevant in terms of intimacy with direct experience?
That kind of knowing is irrelevant, yes. It can help if it is even theoretically pointing to direct experience. You could read books that point to direct experience, and because of that they can be helpful. The guided meditation, for example, is words. Everything I am offering, and everything you are receiving in a sense, is intellectual knowing. But because it comes from a place that is not the intellectual knowing, hopefully it is useful as a pointer to direct experience. That knowing itself is useless, though. It is just a tool.
Nothing to achieve
Also, there is nothing needed. There is nothing to achieve in order to have intimacy with direct experience. There is nothing you need to prepare or strengthen or attain. It is always available. We just have this early learned misunderstanding that what we are looking for is going to be found in the world of reflection, because everybody around us is looking for it there, and because it is temporarily satisfying.
You could say what we are looking for is being, which we already are. As you live more intimately with your direct experience, you are more in touch with being, with what being already and always is. There is a challenge in the transition, in the movement from being hooked and addicted to operating from mind, obsessed and focused and fascinated with the world of mind. It is a very natural human tendency to be fascinated with that. So in a sense, there is a process involved in shifting our natural ground out of the reflection and into direct experience. And what I always say is that what is in the way, what calls us back, is the need to face and hold fear and pain.
Can you expand on that?
Fear and pain as the gateway
When we are living in this contracted mental reflection, when our attention and our energy are there, it controls certain kinds of experiences and sensations and avoids others. The key experience it helps us avoid is fear and pain. So naturally, the process of moving out of that requires us to face, feel, be present with, hold, and become intimate with the direct experience of fear and the direct experience of pain. Once you are able to have full, unfiltered intimacy with fear and pain in all their forms, you are free to not need to contract.
Is that why they say pain breaks you open? Is pain that imaginary boundary between you and the world?
Amen. I don't think there is a single story of anybody waking up who didn't have that transition through what feels like unbearable fear or pain or both. For some it might be a very short time but really intense. It is, I think, a very required part of the process. It could also go the other way: something you learn to sit with really gently, just a drop here and there over a longer period of time.
And it is not something you can fabricate with an objective. You cannot create fear and pain and then expect that to work, which a lot of people do. When somebody is very contracted in the mind, they will have a tendency to go toward scary experiences or even controlled, fabricated pain and fabricated fear. That creates a temporary relief. That is an amusement park. Scary movies.
Where would you say this fear and pain are coming from? I don't think you're talking only about physical pain.
The roots of fear and pain
Physical pain is included, but regarding physical pain, it is mostly fear that we face. We imagine the pain of dying, and then we avoid the fear of that imagined pain.
Does that pain and fear come from the image we think we are?
There is also the pain and fear that comes from simply being human. The essential fear and pain is the natural fear and pain of being a human animal. Our brain is wired to produce fear and pain. The problem is when it becomes very neurotic, because ultimately we are afraid of death because of the amount of pain we imagine, and we bring that same dynamic to other kinds of endings. For example, the ending of a belief becomes painful, because something we believe becomes something we are. There is an identity process in believing. When that belief ends, there is pain and fear.
But there is always natural fear and natural pain, which is more associated with the body. And there are true emotional feelings of pain: the pain of losing loved ones. That is very natural, very healthy pain. What is unhealthy is when we don't relate to it directly and we develop many mechanisms to avoid and deny it. That amounts to more and more contracting into the reflective reality of the mind.
Unprocessed pain and identity
Of course there is also fear and pain we haven't been able to process or metabolize because of painful relationships or experiences from the past. That can constellate around an identity, and various compensations form around it.
Yes. When I mentioned that we develop mechanisms, I was pointing to exactly this: beliefs and ways of functioning designed to avoid what has hurt us in the past, what has scared us in the past, and what has been too much.
There is a kind of finite set of human patterns for dealing with that. For example, I can get mentally caught up in self-evaluation. Am I good? Am I not good? Am I lovable? And then I extend that further: What does he think of me? What do you think of me? Then I'm not even in my own mind; I'm in my mind's version of your mind's version of me, and it just goes on and on. That is a narcissistic defense, and what that defense is doing is taking me away from some fear or pain that was too difficult to meet, probably because I was too young and unsupported when it started or when it happened.
Two things regarding that. First, there is always some fear or pain that was too much for us as children, no matter how well we were parented. It is simply the nature of development that there will always be something that was too much. I say this to counter the tendency of believing, "Because of my past, I have a problem that maybe others don't, and it is a bigger obstacle than theirs." It is actually very natural.
Pain is always present-tense
Second, the pain and fear we experienced in the past, what psychology would call repression, that we no longer consciously experience but that is still there: when the mechanisms of pushing it away open up, the fear and pain are in the present moment. They are real now. They are not pain or fear from the past. So it is always about direct experience with what is happening now.
I have one last thing I want to ask. I know we refer to the mind a lot with analogies of machinery, of mechanism. Would you say that being is more like an organism and the mind more like a machine, and that is why we think that way?
The mind as mystery
No, not really. The mind is very organic. The body is also very machine-like, and the world is very machine-like in a similar sense. I wouldn't make a strong distinction there. When we talk about the mind as a machine, the metaphor points to something we can understand: something more limited and graspable, which is what the mind is all about. But the nature of the mind is as mysterious as the universe, and as beautiful, fascinating, and miraculous.
The trouble comes from the confusion and misinterpretation of what is what: confusing direct, raw reality with the reflection in the mind. That is where the problems come from. Essentially, it is about the belief of what we are, and the confusion that we believe we are something that is a mental concept.