Effort, Effortlessness, and the Nature of Matter
Esfuerzo, ausencia de esfuerzo y la naturaleza de la materia
A question about whether freedom means the absence of effort, leading into a discussion about whether consciousness arises from matter or the other way around.
Effort, Effortlessness, and the Nature of Matter
A question about whether freedom means the absence of effort, leading into a discussion about whether consciousness arises from matter or the other way around.
You said that in freedom, things just happen. And then you were talking about effort and non-effort. I noticed I had a connotation that "things happen by themselves" means they happen with no effort. But you're saying not necessarily so, right?
The place, or the perspective, or the reality from where things happen by themselves: there is no difference between effort and non-effort, because effort and non-effort are part of what is appearing.
What is effort? What is non-effort? It's an experience. The experience of effort and the experience of non-effort both appear equally, neutrally.
The neutrality of experience
Think of hot and cold. If you touch something hot with one hand and something cold with the other, both appearances are equally neutral. Obviously, if it's very hot or very cold it's going to hurt, so let's say we touch something two degrees colder than our skin with one hand and two degrees hotter with the other. The sensation is of equal intensity. They're both neutrally experienced.
That which is experiencing will have a neutral response to both. We could debate personal preferences ("I prefer cold, so this one's more uncomfortable"), but the point of the example is that they're both equally experienced with the same quality: a little cool, a little warm. The same applies to effort. When you're doing something that requires a little more effort or a little less effort, they appear neutrally.
Effortlessness of being versus relative effort
Now, I'm not talking about temperature in the body. I'm talking about the efforting of the experience of being a person. I can be sitting doing nothing, or I can be weightlifting. Both experiences are effortless in the sense that they appear neutrally.
For the body, weightlifting has one effect and sitting on the couch has another. But when I say true nature is effortless, I'm not talking about how it is for the body-mind. This is where language gets tricky: if I use a word that normally applies to the body-mind to describe what is experienced as true nature, it can create confusion, as if both taste or seem the same.
To our true nature, efforting and non-efforting are the same thing. They're two different flavors, which are experienced effortlessly. But I'm using a different kind of "effortlessly." It's not the effortlessness of the relative.
If I'm sitting, it's less effort for my body-mind than if I'm doing a workout. If I'm doing difficult mathematics, it's harder than if I'm just reading a children's book. My mind is going to be more strained and require more focus. Unless I'm really bored by the children's book, in which case the effort changes. Maybe I'm really passionate about the mathematics, and then the experience is relatively more effortless. If I'm reading a children's book to my nephew and I'm tired, it might be far more effortful than if I'm in my personal flow. But that's the relative, the personal.
So at the relative level, the body-mind level, something is experienced as more or less effortful. But to awareness, to consciousness, to true nature, there is what could be called wu-wei effortlessness in all of it. Effort and non-effort are two sides of the same coin. Both are equally happening, neutrally, with no effect on that in which they appear.
I was wondering what you can say about something I've been noticing. There seems to be this idea of "the reality of the body." The other day in our group someone pointed out, "Well, your body is not alive." And then, listening to a video of a well-known teacher, I got really emotional. He was responding to a scientist's questions, talking about this main dilemma in science: they haven't been able to find how consciousness emerges from matter. But the actual problem is that they have this preconcept that it comes from matter. They're breaking their heads trying to find it.
At one point he says something like: the body never really comes into existence, is never really born, becomes alive, and then dies. It's more like universal consciousness focusing into a limited perspective, identifying, and that's when the body seems to become alive, as if borrowing its aliveness from that universal openness.
I don't know what it was exactly, but it really struck me. I think I'm touching on this idea that the body is something really alive that comes to life and then dies. And he was saying that's more like an idea, just a concept.
The conditioning of identification
Yes. It's the idea that comes from identification, and it's the idea that is most pervasive in our society. But if we were in a society that had the opposite idea, then what would free us would be the opposite pointing: that what we are is only infinite.
In a sense, that's what has happened historically as we have developed. We have gone through what I described in the meditation that I called "the miracle," a term I attribute to Richard Moss. He called it the first miracle, which is the collapsing into the idea that we are only limited.
For someone who cannot create a limited sense of self (and there will be a few such people in any society), it will be important to point out: you are this body, you are this mind. These are people who have never developed an ego, never gone through that first step well enough. If you haven't developed it well enough, you face a higher risk of destabilizing. It's not the right time to transcend the mind, in a sense. Some teachers might disagree, but this is my perspective.
The value and limits of the teaching
So when a teacher like the one you're describing speaks to an audience, he's addressing not just the people coming to him but society in general, where the conditioning is of the type that we're only limited. That's why the pointing is very valuable and very universal and freeing. If you are identified and functioning on the assumption that what you are is limited, then hearing that you are not limited is freeing. But what can happen is that the experience of the infinite becomes a place of attachment. That's not the common situation, and it's not what's happening in this group, but it does happen.
The assumption science has yet to question
That's the problem scientists are having. They're asking: how does the brain create consciousness? But the real question is, how do you know the brain creates consciousness? Why are you trying to find how it does it before trying to see if it does it? Asking this question forces them to examine a deeper assumption about what reality is, one they're not willing to question. To them, it's as real as the understanding that the earth goes around the sun. They're so convinced. But people were equally convinced that the sun went around the earth before that was questioned.
It's a similar shift. It happened first with the concept of the sun and the earth and the orbit of planets. That was a massive shift, not just for scientists but in the psyche of the whole world, because it had to do with the realization that we're not the center of the universe.
Then it happened with Einstein. The effect was less of a global psychic shift, but he questioned the assumption that time and space were fundamental aspects of reality, and he proved they're not. The way he did it was by looking at the assumption that time and space were two things. People were trying to understand how time and space worked together and affected each other. Then he asked: what if they're not two things affecting each other, but one thing? Just by questioning that, all the math worked. He made predictions that took society decades to even develop tests for. That created a massive shift in science, which gave birth to, among other things, the atomic bomb.
Consciousness and matter as one
What's happening now is that scientists are starting to question the assumption that consciousness is created by the brain. They will discover, or at least come to a point where they can see, that it's not. But still: what is appearance? What is reality? What is consciousness? What is matter? How they work together is very mysterious.
I say quite often that the universe is projected by consciousness. But that is also a way to undermine the belief that it's the other way around. In fact, a better way to describe it is that both consciousness and the universe appear simultaneously as one thing. It's the same problem as time and space: okay, they're not two, but which one is creating which?
Scientists are now asking: if matter isn't creating consciousness through the development of a brain, then how is consciousness creating matter? And I would say it's not. Matter and consciousness are the same thing that is appearing.
Where do other people come from? That's where we are.
I think I got really emotional because, even though this can sound very intellectual, I connected with it very experientially. I've had the glimpse of how everything is sustained by consciousness, the non-reality of matter. It's beautiful when I hear it. Something in me gets it.
Yes. That's the recognition of being.