The Body Shifts Before the Mind Understands
El cuerpo cambia antes de que la mente comprenda
A question about intense body sensations and a feeling of free fall arising during a memory inquiry practice, and how the process of awakening reshapes the body, the mind, and the sense of control.
The Body Shifts Before the Mind Understands
A question about intense body sensations and a feeling of free fall arising during a memory inquiry practice, and how the process of awakening reshapes the body, the mind, and the sense of control.
When we were doing the memory exercise, the body sensations felt stronger, but actually more like louder than stronger. I liked the framing that "memory is not allowed," and it made me wonder: is the sense of those sensations getting louder itself a kind of memory? I was trying to see if there were memories stored in the body, in the sensations. And as it got stronger, there was this sense of free falling.
There is some research about memories being stored all over the body, and experientially I do have that sense. When certain muscles relaxed, memories would come up. But where exactly the memories are stored, I'm not sure, and it's not important for this work to know that.
What could be relevant is to know that as we do this process, there are changes happening in the body and biologically in the brain as well. It takes a bit of time for some things to adjust and become stable. That loudness in the sensations arises because the process I'm proposing is shifting the way you normally function. If we were to monitor brain processing in an fMRI during that, you would see changes. There are now many studies showing that whole parts of the brain shut down while others activate. The brain is habitually wired to function with energy moving in certain patterns, and that takes time to shift.
Sudden shifts and what remains
What can happen is that when we talk about an awakening, the shift happens suddenly. Then something might go back to the previous form of functioning, neurologically and in the mind. But something gets released in our experience and understanding where we can no longer avoid seeing things differently. I could still have a lot of thought, but I can no longer buy into that being me.
This is something that happened for me a few years ago, when the bigger part of the shift occurred. I noticed there was very little thought happening. Then I got curious: what would happen if there were a lot of thought? Would that experience of peace, well-being, and freedom go away? So I experimented, just out of curiosity, and reached points where a lot of thought was happening and it was completely irrelevant. I realized none of the thought does anything. It has no effect.
I was still trying to understand what had happened. It was so strange, so beyond anything I had imagined. I had had teachers since I was a teenager. I had been around people who were awake for many years, spent many hours talking with them, and I had a fairly close, personal understanding of how that was. But subjectively I had imagined something that had nothing to do with what actually happened. So when the shift occurred, I couldn't recognize it. I couldn't understand it. It made no sense relative to how I had imagined it. And I realized it was impossible to imagine, because it was beyond imagination.
The body's intensity is part of the process
The body, the sensations, the mind, and all of that activity can just be part of this shifting. Then things do stabilize and become, in a sense, more ordinary, but they never stop being extraordinary at the same time. There is this constant sense of mystery, wonder, and magic with life, but it is not as intense as it was in the beginning. There were times when the intensity in the body was extreme. In my case, I ended up in the hospital several times from the worry and pain. I know that's more unusual. Some people have a lot of physical pain, and I was of the unlucky kind. But the emotions and sensations can get really intense, and I think that is more normal. It is the exception, not the rule, for people not to have a part of the process where the body is screaming with sensations, with fear, with pain. The mind can get very active.
What matters is to know that nothing wrong is happening, because it is easy to interpret it from a place of "I'm going in the wrong direction, something is moving the wrong way." Usually, it is not.
The illusion of control
Is it also something about not having control, and that suddenly not being there? That could be one of the hardest parts, because it has to do with realizing you never had control in the first place. That which thinks it has control isn't real. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist; it's just not what it appears to be.
When people say the world is an illusion, if it's coming from a true teaching, it's true in this sense: at the subtlest level, the world is real, but it's not real in the way you think it is. It's not what it appears to be. The sense that the world is how one believes it is, that is illusory. But the world is real. It's just not where we think it is.
The same applies to the sense of agency, to will, to the sense of self. It is illusory in that we think we know what it is, and it's not what it appears to be. It appears that there is a "me" that is separate, localized, with agency and will. And it's not. But then the mind, hearing that, is going to imagine it as a thing: a self that has no control. That's not it either, because then you're making an identity out of "me without control." And that's not true either.
The trap of nihilism
That is where nihilism comes in. When the teaching of "no doership, no self, no person, no me" is heard, people can create the sense of a separate self that has no doership, no control. Then all the natural impulses of planning, doing, creativity, living, and passion start to become suppressed. A mood of darkness and depression sets in. That is not natural, and it is not free. It is still an identification, now with a construct of a "me" that has no control.
Another way of saying it is: you do have control, you do choose, but you are not what you think you are. That "you" is much vaster than what you imagine it to be. Because you confuse it with something small and limited, the choices come from that filter of limitation. The passion comes from that filter. The direction comes from that limitation. This is a spectrum. It is not fully limited or fully free. We can move into more identification and more limitation, or less.
Falling into less-limited being
That is why the simple exercise of looking into your current experience, asking "What am I? Who am I?" and putting memory aside will allow you to fall into that beingness that is less limited. It is a strong practice.
Fear and deeper desire
We will come up against our fears. As we deepen in connection with our desires, those desires will come from a place beyond our limited sense of self. When they do, they will not be in service of our fears. Then we will be in a position of choosing whether to move in service of fear or not.
When desire is in service of fear, it is in service of not feeling fear: doing what I think I need to do so that I'm comfortable, so that I'm not experiencing fear or pain. Whereas the other, deeper drives and directions will likely take us in directions where fear will come up. And we all have to do this in our lives all the time, but it can go deeper. There are desires that we often have, of a universal kind, that we struggle with because they are moving us to a place of risk and discomfort, outside of the known world.