The Wavering of Interest
La Fluctuación del Interés
A question about the natural fluctuation of interest in meditation, and why the desire for spiritual progress can itself become an obstacle.
The Wavering of Interest
A question about the natural fluctuation of interest in meditation, and why the desire for spiritual progress can itself become an obstacle.
For me, it goes in waves, where suddenly I feel more interest in meditating and then suddenly not so much. I wonder if you have something to say about that.
Meditating is an activity, and the interest in an activity is always going to come and go. If by meditation you actually mean a more spiritual inquiry versus just a practice, that will also come and go, but it would be more determined by whether you're suffering or not, or whether you're aware of your suffering.
The hidden layer of suffering
The most normal thing is that people suffer, but they're only aware of a fraction of the suffering they're going through because of all the mechanisms of defense, coping, and avoiding. Usually somebody comes to this work already having seen that they are struggling or suffering in some form. Otherwise there's no reason to do it. Just live your life if you're not suffering.
What happens is that the initial work is to uncover the avoiding strategies, so you can actually become aware of what you're really going through, what you're really experiencing. That's the trickiest phase. I'm not telling you that you're in this phase; I'm just describing it in general terms. It's the trickiest phase because naturally we don't want to do that. We don't want to see, we don't want to become aware of our pain and our suffering. People even go to therapy with the objective of being patched up, and a good therapist (which is the minority) will not do that. A good therapist will move you toward what you're trying to avoid.
The choice to look
That's the choice of the blue pill and the red pill. Do you really want to see what reality is? Do you really want to? In the movie, it's a journey about something external. But in reality, it's about seeing what you really feel. What is your deeper experience? What is your deeper truth? That's where the metaphor of the rabbit hole applies: a way of seeing, perceiving, and experiencing that is completely new.
A big part of us doesn't want that. The only reason we go there is because we can't avoid it, or because where we are is so difficult and uncomfortable that we'd rather have something new. We're experiencing the suffering of being in our cage. One way to describe it is that you're very tight, living in a very small world. And I would say you would be lucky if you experience that tightness.
Because most people are not aware of it.
Exactly. For most people, the tightness becomes numb, so you're not aware of it. The mechanism is to just do what the mind is saying, which is experienced as doing what I want. And "what I want" is to get this job, do this thing, succeed at this thing. Then all of the energy and time is put into pursuing a goal in time.
For you, there isn't a single, clear-cut phase. All of this happens through all of us at all stages. But the work for you, I would say, is to go deeper into what you're feeling. If you lose interest, that can be a natural thing, but you should check if there's some avoidance. It would matter, though: when you say you lose interest in meditation and it comes and goes, when it goes, what exactly is it that you lose interest in?
More the activity, not so much the self-inquiry.
Then one way you can explore is to do it anyway and see what happens, because you might discover there's a resistance, and it will come up if you do it regardless. Otherwise, you can try a different kind of meditation. What kind of meditation are you doing? If you don't lose interest in inquiry, you could have a meditation that is inquiry. If you lose interest in that, then you are losing interest in inquiry.
I guess I framed my question the wrong way, because it's not exactly that I lose interest. Let me think about this. I wouldn't say it's a loss of interest. It's more a shift in the relationship with it.
But you're bringing it up because you're experiencing a problem or a discomfort, even if you experience it as curiosity. There's a reason why you're bringing it up. What is that?
The illusion of progress
I guess this comes from a dual understanding. There's a moment where it feels like I'm reaching somewhere, getting closer to something. There's a movement. And then there's a place where that movement plateaus. That's the moment where what I would call the loss of interest arises: there's no movement, no going forward.
The movement that you're experiencing is mind. All of the work here is to point to something that doesn't move. What you're describing is the mind, which you will experience as "me," "I." "I am seeing, I'm wanting to get to a thing that I'm describing as a shift, and then it's plateauing, and then there's a loss of interest." But all of that is an interpretation of experience, because experience is always moving.
Actually, there isn't anything that doesn't move. So when I say the work is to find that which doesn't move, in a sense there isn't such a thing either. It's almost like realizing there isn't anything that doesn't move, and that includes you. So what are you? You aren't anything. And right there, words can't continue. Beyond that, there are no words that can be said. Words have been said, of course: "What you are is empty," "There is no you," "It's non-duality." But those are still words.
I'm very familiar with all the maps. The terrain, though, is another matter.
The addiction to states
The work for you would be to see how deep the mind landscape goes. When you are sitting to meditate, you're not refining your observation enough, and you're falling into a strategy, a mental strategy. You're trying to do something in the meditation. You're trying to get somewhere, to have something happen. That is the addiction to states. It's not specific to you; it's human beings. The mind is addicted to something it can grasp onto, because that's what the mind is. It creates maps of objects (and the objects can be emotions as well), and it tries to preserve them in time, to prolong them. It tries to attach to them and say, "Me, here, I am." In a sense, what we are is doing that, or trying to do that. It's the mechanism of identification. And it becomes the strategy of trying to get somewhere.
Nowhere to get to
A teacher I studied with would start almost every meditation by saying, "There's nothing to do, nowhere to get to." It's really that important. There really isn't anything to do or anywhere to get to. But that has to be realized. By that I mean you have to see it. It can't be a thing you practice. It has to be something you look at and realize: there isn't anywhere to get to. There's only now. I can't get anywhere. Any attempt at getting somewhere is going to fail. And it's not needed.
There's a negative aspect, which is seeing you can't get anywhere because there's only what is happening now. And then there's the positive aspect: actually, what's happening now is not that bad. Because at a deep level, we experience what's happening now as very uncomfortable. And, as I was describing, we can numb that. We can have a way of feeling it's okay because we're trying to get to that thing over there. "That's why now is okay. Now is okay because I have a strategy to change it into that." That's the defense mechanism. That's how we experience "now is okay" in a false way, in a rudimentary way.
The pain of presence
When you start this work and people start pointing out to you (teachers, books) that there's nowhere to get to, that time isn't real, that it only exists in the mental, psychological landscape, you can become desperate. You start to fall into the present, and the present is scary and painful at first. For very few people, transitioning into letting go and into presence is smooth and pleasant. For most, the transition feels like, "I feel like I'm going to die, and all my repressed trauma is coming up." Your deepest fears and your deepest pains surface.
The wavering of interest has to do with this: "I want to be free, as long as it's not too painful and scary." That's the condition. So usually what happens is that not being free starts to become so difficult that you're willing to take more pain and fear, until the balance flips and you'd rather go through all the pain and fear than stay where you are. It becomes, "Give it to me once and for all."
Trusting the process
But in that sense, the process is also a process of trust. You can't rush it. You have to trust that there's a natural aspect to how you develop and how you grow, and there's only so much you can do. You do your part, and then you let nature (you could call it nature, mystery, grace) do its work. Consider it like a tree blooming. You cannot go to a baby tree and shake it and try to get it to give fruit. Well, you can, but it's not going to work.