When Ideas Stop Being Useful
Cuando las ideas dejan de ser útiles
A student expresses gratitude for the teachings while acknowledging feeling overwhelmed. The teacher responds by exploring how different personalities need different pointers, how effort and effortlessness are inseparable polarities, and how even the most liberating insight can become another thing to grasp.
When Ideas Stop Being Useful
A student expresses gratitude for the teachings while acknowledging feeling overwhelmed. The teacher responds by exploring how different personalities need different pointers, how effort and effortlessness are inseparable polarities, and how even the most liberating insight can become another thing to grasp.
I know that I'm growing, and I say thank you, but it's a very, very full plate of things. It's food for growing. Good food for all of me. But it's in a process. I think my images are from another time, and they cannot be used for so many things I couldn't see before. But I feel great. So this is me sharing myself. I don't have another way. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing. I would say that these topics and conversations are just words and ideas. They're not important in themselves, and they're not something you would particularly need to know or learn. It depends on the person, the mind, and the kind of beliefs and functioning each of us carries. For some people, a conversation on science can be completely unnecessary, and at most interesting. But for another person, it could bring a very profound breakthrough. It really depends on the structure of ideas and beliefs that each of us has.
So I wouldn't say you need to give it too much thought if this isn't the kind of question you find juicy or interesting. That's totally fine. Maybe sometime later it becomes interesting, and then it's an important conversation. But maybe it never does, and it never needs to be.
Yes, I like that. Thank you.
It really depends on the type of personality and mind: whether it's more rational, materialistic, or scientific, or more oriented toward feeling, emotion, spirituality, religion, or none of those.
I like to hear it all, because I don't feel opposed to it. I don't feel the need to reject any of it, and that is very good for me.
Thoughts that undo thoughts
Good. In the end, it's all ideas and thoughts and words that can help undo other kinds of ideas and thoughts. But when that undoing happens, the old ideas shouldn't simply be replaced by the ideas that were used to remove them.
I have been asking myself that for many months. So, thank you very much.
It's very similar to the conversation about effort and non-effort. One person could have a really strong attachment to non-effort. We all have a preference and inclination. Some of us have lived trying to get what we want through effort, others through non-effort. Freedom is neither and both, where "neither and both" points to the place where it doesn't matter which one is happening, which one is needed, or which one is the flavor of the moment.
The allure of the formless
This happens even at the level of spiritual realization. There can be an attachment to the formless, to the infinite. You can see this in the literature of spiritual realization. The discovery of nirvana is so alluring that an entire process of teaching has developed around the renunciation of nirvana. It is really the realization that the formless and form are the same. This has been described as a higher realization. As one teacher put it: only if you are in heaven while you are in hell are you truly free.
When there is the experience of freedom and nirvana while there is the experience of attachment and identification of being human, when both are the same, when you can taste effortlessness while you are efforting, then you are free. Because effort only exists in opposition to effortlessness. So when there is an experience of effort, there has to be the experience of effortlessness. To experience contraction, there needs to be present an experience of expansiveness in order to recognize the contrast. When there is experience of expansiveness, there must be present a sense of contraction in order to compare and recognize expansion.
Cutting reality in half
Through our mind, we cut one side out and focus only on one side of reality. Then, in ignoring the other side, we can search for it in the future or escape from it in our past. When we are attached to efforting, we are escaping from the effortlessness that is present. If our identification is with effort, we are running away from effortlessness, because the recognition of effortlessness brings that identification to an end. It kills the belief. And vice versa for the person attached to effortlessness.
Can you repeat that quote you mentioned?
I can send it in the chat so you can copy it.
What is the part in the middle that was being discussed? The idea of cleaning up one side so the other triumphs? Effort, no effort, effort, working that way back and forth?
Yes. What was being referred to is what we are talking about here. It has to do with the fact that at any moment, if I have a conditioning rooted in the past (a belief that the best way is to the right or to the left, toward effort or non-effort), that conditioning is based on a belief that something is a certain way. And that is only the past.
So the conditioning says, "I will lean to the right." The work being pointed to is: well, maybe right now, if I lean to the right, I fall. That is a poor form of functioning because it is based on a belief, on conditioning. If I am free, it doesn't matter whether I lean to the right or to the left. If I don't have a conditioned direction, I can lean to the right when it's necessary or lean to the left when it's necessary, staying balanced in the metaphor of functioning more freely. If you function less freely, you will fall, because you are functioning based on an attachment to conditioning, a belief, an idea that defines who you are and what you are.
Freedom to lean either way
The key is to see that there is something to which it doesn't matter if you go right or left. I don't have a preference to lean to the right or to the left a priori. I just lean whichever way is better in the moment. In that sense, with effort or non-effort: if I have nothing to do, I have an hour, and I'm tired but I can't stop doing things, then there will be more freedom in leaning to the side of effortlessness, relaxing, resting, recovering, or sleeping. The anxiety that won't let me rest is what I can be free from. Vice versa, if I have a lot to do and I can't get up because I'm attached to some form of non-effort, that will be a kind of attachment to a certain mental or emotional state that reinforces the conditioned way of functioning.
There are two aspects to this. One is working on the human experience: the body, the mind, the thoughts, the beliefs, the emotions. The other has to do with recognizing that we are not that. And that recognition frees you from the attachment to your body-mind being in a specific state.
What do you mean by being in a specific state?
For example, "I must be in effort" or "I must be at rest." There can be a strong attachment to one or the other. If I can glimpse that both are equally neutral, that it doesn't matter whether I'm in effort or in rest, then I can bring that glimpse into integration. The integration into my functioning becomes the freedom to be more in effort when that's necessary and more in rest when that's necessary. That is what is described as integration of a glimpse, or any kind of recognition of truth, where it becomes part of our natural functioning.
So if I say our true nature is effortless, after today's conversation I would say more accurately: our true nature is peace. But effortless and effortful are both peaceful.
Peace, not effortlessness, as the ground
But here I go again. My sense is that peace and effortlessness seem to me to be inextricably connected, and that doesn't preclude effort. But underneath the effort, it feels like... maybe I can find a different way to ask it. It's similar to how sometimes I'm hostile, aggressive, and loving. If I resist the hostility, then I'm not being present. But underneath the hostility is love. I don't think that underneath love there is still hostility.
You're right. And this is where it becomes semantics. That's why I'm trying to change the words: let's say peace instead of effortless. You're right that underneath the hostility, or the aggression, there is a truer, more fundamental nature, which is peace. But it's not the other way around. That's how I would agree.
I'm still not sure. I could go on and on about this, but because it's such a personal issue it's hard for me to keep going round and round. It just feels like effortlessness is also fundamental. It feels like underneath the effort, there is an effortlessness.
That's right. And that's why I was saying: let's call that which is underneath "peace," if we are putting effortless and effortful as two polarities. What is more fundamental, let's call peace. But I have also, quite a lot, called what is fundamental "effortless."
But when I was describing my experience of effortlessness, I don't think there was effort underneath it.
No, I'm not saying there is.
Okay, good.
We are agreeing. We are just going back and forth about the word.
The grasping in understanding
If there's anything I seem to be getting again and again, maybe from this conversation, it's what you've said before: there's no knowing, there's no center, there's just now, and now, and now. I can go on and on about what I think about "now," but at the end of the day, all there is, is now. These conversations are helpful in understanding more deeply what that actually is. Sometimes it looks like "I know," or it looks like there is a real concept, but we're just using these to let go. So that's why I think I keep going in circles with it.
For me, the most important thing is: am I deluding myself? Am I slipping in a concept for reality? That's my concern. And it seems like maybe you saw that I was doing that, and I want to catch it.
There's a grasping in what you're describing, right? A grasping to understand and get. In a sense, I am intentionally making things a little confusing so that you can't so easily turn them into a thing you can grasp.
I'm catching on to you finally.
Pointers that dissolve themselves
That's why I generalize things. For example, when a certain teaching was described, I generalized it and contradicted it at the same time, so that it doesn't become an idea or a thing to believe. But there is a risk, because what was described was a very fresh recognition. So if I'm saying something that contradicts what it brought, I don't want to invalidate it. I want to validate it, but also say: for it to not become a thing to grasp. It's really about removing a belief with a teaching, a pointer, which was offered and did that successfully. It's probably the right direction for a while to contemplate, because it's working. But at some point it can become another idea. We can turn consciousness, or awareness, or even infinity or being, into a subtle idea that we identify with.
I feel I can tell a little bit when I'm in a healthier place, because it sounds like, "This is not how it is. I used to believe it was like that. Now I have no clue." It doesn't mean I don't fall into other ideas as well.
The taste of not knowing
The taste of not knowing, if it's true and deep, will always have this sense of wonder, aliveness, openness, mystery, joy, and love. That's what I was trying to refer to with that childlike exploration. When I use the metaphor of a toddler exploring a room, it's because a toddler doesn't know the room. So there's this: "Oh, what's this? What's over there? What does this feel like? How does it taste?" There's this open not-knowing. The more we understand the way our mind knows, the more we realize there's always a non-knowing, always a mystery. It's the antidote for that false sense of knowing, false because we believe we know reality more than we do. When we notice that limitation of the mental kind of knowing, the wonder, the joy, and the sense of mystery become the deeper reality. All of the greatest scientists describe this as they come to the edge of their knowledge.
I love the image of the toddler exploring, because there's also this love, a passion, a joyfulness.
It was enjoyable for me too. Thank you so much.