The Perceiver Is a Thought
El perceptor es un pensamiento
A student describes the experience of everything seeming to be "outside," and the teacher explores the subtle construct of the perceiver, the nature of agency, and why awakening never leads to apathy or nihilism.
The Perceiver Is a Thought
A student describes the experience of everything seeming to be "outside," and the teacher explores the subtle construct of the perceiver, the nature of agency, and why awakening never leads to apathy or nihilism.
I've been having the experience lately that everything I experience, even thoughts, is outside, not inside. But I don't know how to put this into words. If everything I can experience is outside, even thoughts, because I can observe them, they are not that which is observing them. And that's where words fail me.
You're describing a very traditional process of meditation: dis-identification. It's expressed as neti neti, "not this, not this." It has to do with the answer to the question: What am I? Who am I? Anything that I'm experiencing, I'm not that. If I experience a hand, I'm not the hand. I can lose the hand and still be here. The same applies to sensations, perceptions, thoughts, everything.
But when you do this process to a certain point, you arrive at exactly what you're describing: everything's outside. And outside of what?
Exactly.
The subtle construct of the perceiver
There is a subtle construct, which is thought-based: the perceiver, that which is perceiving. The sense of being separate from what is experienced. This perceiver is a thought. So for you, the exploration I'd suggest is really subtle. We're talking about very subtle forms of thought.
You can call it awareness, consciousness, but it will be a thought. There is so much talk about consciousness and awareness that the mind makes an image of it. That image then becomes a subtle point of reference: the perceiver, the witness.
This is, in a sense, a proper step in a form of practice. It's not the only way, but it is a step: to arrive at a point where you've refined identification to where you can regularly see that you are not what you are experiencing. But still there is a sense of an "I" that is this subject-perceiver. It's very subtle.
In the sound, there is only sound
In the sound, there is only sound. In the sensation, there is only sensation. In the thought, there is only thought. This is the Heart Sutra from Buddhism.
So just look: when you experience this sense of everything being outside, look at the subtle sense behind it. It will be thought-based. What can happen is you recognize, "Oh, what I'm sensing, what I thought was this perceiver," and it will seem real until you recognize it as thought. This is the whole process. Noticing what something actually is transforms something illusory into something real.
The rope and the snake
In Hinduism, they talk about illusion and ignorance. Ramana Maharshi spoke about the metaphor of a rope and a snake. He said: illusion is to see a snake when there is in fact a rope. It's not that the snake isn't there. It's just not a snake.
With this metaphor, it's not that what you sense to be the subject isn't there. It's just thought. It's not the subject. He described a two-step process of disillusion. First, you experience a snake, which is a projection of the mind. Then you see it's not a snake, but there's still a further step of seeing, when you look more closely, that it's a rope.
In a similar fashion, there's a sense of a separate, localized subject-perceiver, and everything is outside. That sense of a self there is the perception of a snake. There is no self-subject there. It's projected onto a sensation. Once you see that it's thought, you can see that the sensation isn't self.
It's like two bubbles very close to each other that suddenly go "plop" and become one.
That's a metaphor of what you imagine could happen. But that's already how it is. What's happening is that you're imagining a bubble, or you're having sensations that you call "the bubble self" and pushing everything outside.
It's quite literally mind-bending.
And they've been doing many studies with fMRI, seeing all the neurological changes in this process.
Does awakening lead to apathy?
I'm interested in how all of this relates to goals. Do you still have goals in the same way? If you want to make something happen, change something, and there's no one there, how does it work? Do you still have goals, or has your relationship to goals changed? Is there less motivation? I've seen people go through this and almost fall into apathy, as though there's no point doing anything.
That's actually a misunderstanding, or a form of unskillful teaching and interpretation. What happens is: there is still a sense, a thought, an identity, a mental construct, and that construct is given attributes of emptiness. So "I" am now something that has nothing in it. That's not real. It's just another construct, one that is negative, empty, or lacking in qualities.
The challenge is more subtle. There is being. There is life. The mental construct is practical and useful, as the hand is. But we don't go around believing, "I am my hand and only my hand," making the hand the totality of what I am. That's what happens with the mental construct. It's a practical, useful, wonderful, miraculous thing. But then we go around believing that's all of what I am, rather than, in a sense, a part of me.
If I'm not this mental construct, then what I am is a lot more mysterious.
Emptiness as pointing, not as identity
When the teaching says "there's no one there" or "there's emptiness," it's a form of pointing to the belief that there's someone there who is localized and has a specific form. But then we can turn "no one there" into an identity: an "I" that is no one. There is still a construct, and there's identification with that. Even teachers who are realized use this language, and I might as well at times. But it's a matter of how it's interpreted, and it's hard to communicate.
The problem you're describing has to do with making this idea of what I am into a thing that is empty, and therefore having no direction. But what we are naturally has life, naturally has passion, naturally has love, naturally has direction, as a bird has direction flying across the sky, as a baby has direction before it has developed identification.
The identification and construct, which we can call ego, is a miraculous thing. The problem is when we believe that's all we are.
Goals still exist, but they transform
To the question about motives and goals: yes, there are goals, there are motivations, but they are very different. It did happen that many things stopped interesting me. Many of the goals and motives that were based on preserving a narrow sense of self, the ones foundational to that construct, stopped having energy. But many things I was interested in, I still am. A lot of what was fear-driven stopped having energy.
A more helpful image than thinking of ourselves as a body-mind is to use the image of the universe. This body is not separate from the universe. What we are is not limited to the body. It's vast. So the question becomes: What do I want as the universe? Or, what does the universe want as me? I'm all in favor of desires and passions. The problem is when they're driven and distorted by a contracted sense of self. Then what we're looking for is not very profound; it's more on the shallow level, fear-based.
So it's more like liberated action, or free action, than some construct of what it should be or look like.
Exactly. Not some sense of no action, no motivation, no desire. That level of action is always a process of refinement, of rebalancing, discovering, and deepening. The more it's liberated action, as you called it, the more it's joyful and loving, even if scary. Often it moves toward an energy that, for the limited sense of self, carries a sense of risk and uncertainty. But that fear, which at first is paralyzing and seems to point in the wrong direction, later becomes an energy, an aliveness, a passion.
Where does the choice come from?
When there is no longer a sense of a located self, there is no doer. The universe is doing, but there's no doer. "Doer" means a limited entity that's choosing. There is choosing, there is choice, but where is it coming from? Where is it happening?
If you look at a choice closely, at where it happens, when it happens, you cannot find a located entity choosing. You can have a mental construct about it: "I chose." But if you really look at the experience (and I've done this exploration with people, where you just hold a finger out and play with moving it and not moving it), you could sit for thirty minutes and explore: where does the choice come, where does the movement come from? If you look closely and honestly, you won't find the self that is choosing, that is doing it. It's happening. There is a sense that "I am doing this," but if you get really close to it, it's universal. It's this being lived.
Seeing through the last illusion
A few years ago, I still had this sense of a perceiver who was also choosing, and this perceiver was consciousness who was also choosing. At one point I was making coffee, and I just saw so clearly that this sense of awareness that I am has no located center, no agent that is choosing. It needed an agent that is choosing for me to create that sense of identity. In that moment I started laughing. I was making coffee and laughing, because I just saw through that illusion still hiding in this sense of consciousness as the chooser. It was still a sense of a separate entity choosing.
Rather than saying "there's no one here" and "there's no one there," I'd rather say: what we are is so vast. It includes everything, it includes every choice. But we're not localized, we're not separate. The sense of what felt like a separate will is seen to be God's will all along, and never was not.
Trust the process
There is also an important development of trust. I heard a phrase recently: "Whatever you need, you don't need to be looking and efforting and trying to work on yourself waking up. Whatever you need will come to you." And I had this sense afterward of imagining the development of a human being: all those years of developing the ego, learning in school, and then, at least in my case, all those years of working on yourself. It seemed endless. But at the same time, the vision was so beautiful. It's as if the universe wants me to, and is helping me to, wake up. And it doesn't matter if I die before arriving at whatever needs to happen. It's still beautiful.
There's something with trust. One of the most direct ways I try to point to it is: nothing is needed. Just trust. Part of the experience could be that something is missing, and you could say the source of that experience is distrust. In the same way that we are born and we grow and develop, our body grows naturally, so does our waking up progress naturally. Trust that when the tree must bear fruit, it will, in the right time. That sense of something missing is almost like imagining the tree before bearing fruit, worried that it won't, or that it will take too long, or "why not now?" Trust the vertigo. Free-fall like an astronaut.
The body's intensity during the shift
When we were doing the meditation with memories, the body sensations felt stronger, but actually louder. I was wondering if there were memories in the body, in the sensations, and there was that sense of free-falling as it got stronger.
There is some research about memories being stored all over the body, and experientially I do have a sense of that. 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. What is relevant is to know that as we do this process, changes are happening in the body and biologically in the brain. It takes time for some things to adjust and become stable.
That kind of loudness in the sensations occurs because the meditation process I'm proposing is shifting the way you normally function. If we were in an fMRI monitoring brain processing during that, you would see changes. They've done many of these studies now, where whole parts of the brain shut down and others activate. The brain is habitually wired to function with energy moving in certain parts, and that takes time to shift. What can happen is that when we talk about an awakening, that 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 our understanding, where we now cannot help but see things differently.
I could still have a lot of thought, but I can no longer buy into that being me.
Thought has no effect
When the bigger part of the shift happened for me, I was noticing there was very little thought. But then I was curious: what would happen if there was a lot of thought? Would that experience of peace, well-being, and freedom go away? So I experimented, just out of curiosity, and got to points where there could be a lot of thought 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've had teachers since I was a teenager, I've been around people who have been awake for many years, spoken to them at length, and I've had a fairly close personal understanding of how that was. But subjectively, I had imagined something that had nothing to do with what actually occurred. When the shift happened, I couldn't recognize it, couldn't understand it. It made no sense in relation to how I had imagined it. I realized it was impossible to imagine, because it was beyond imagination.
The body, the sensations, the mind, all of that activity can just be part of this shifting. Things do stabilize and become more ordinary, but they never stop being extraordinary at the same time. There's a constant sense of mystery, wonder, and magic with life.
There were times when the intensity in the body was extreme. I ended up in the hospital several times from the pains and worries. In my case, 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's more normal. The exception is people who don't 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 bad is happening, because it's easy to interpret it from a place of "I'm going in the wrong direction." It usually isn't.
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 things, 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," and if it's coming from a true teaching, it's true in a subtle sense. It's real, but it's not real in the way you think it is. It's not what it appears to be. The sense that it 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 goes for the sense of agency, of will, of self. It's 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's separate, localized, with agency and will. And it's not. But then the mind, hearing that, is going to imagine a thing that's a self with no control. That's not it either, because then you're making it the identity of "me without control." That's not true either.
That's where the nihilism comes in. When the teaching says "no doership, no self, no person, no me," people hearing that can create the sense of "me, a separate self that has no doership, no control." And then it starts to create a lot of problems.