The Vertigo of Seeing Through Thought
El vértigo de ver a través del pensamiento
A student describes moments of vertigo in meditation when the constructed nature of identity becomes apparent, and the teacher explores how the mind reifies thoughts into solid objects and what it means to see through that process.
The Vertigo of Seeing Through Thought
A student describes moments of vertigo in meditation when the constructed nature of identity becomes apparent, and the teacher explores how the mind reifies thoughts into solid objects and what it means to see through that process.
There's a curiosity about seeing what's going on. What happens quite a bit in meditation is really trying to see what's happening, what I am, how this mind works. On one hand, there's that investigation. On the other hand, I also see that it's a thought, but there's this idea that something has to happen. Nothing has to happen, but I just have to see it. It feels like it's so obvious, but I'm not yet seeing it.
I had an experience meditating the other day, on Sunday. I was realizing what you were talking to us about: that everything is thought. Suddenly I was in a place where all the ideas of me, my body, everything was thought. And being in that place, there was suddenly a feeling of, how do you say, vertigo.
Yes, very good.
Like, "I'm not all this. What am I? Where am I?" That sense. And maybe it mixes with something else, because a lot of the time when I'm paying attention to sensation, it's pretty intense what's there. I don't know exactly what the question is, but it goes around that.
The body needs to adapt
There is a part of this process which requires the body to change. Biologically, things need to be rearranged. So when you have the experience of vertigo, metaphorically, it's like you're free falling. You're falling from the world of identity and thought.
If you know anything about being in orbit around the planet, you see astronauts floating. They could be in a ship that's in orbit, but they're actually free falling. From the perspective of physics, an orbit is a constant free fall. It is literally the same experience of free falling, but it stabilizes to a point where their biology no longer experiences the vertigo of it. The mind adapts, the body adapts.
When you have that experience, there's a moment, a shift, a vertigo. You enter a free fall, and then what happens is a return to the identity of the mind. But what can happen is that the more you see that, the more you enter this free fall, and the free fall will start feeling more natural and less like a free fall.
Noticing the subtler layers of thought
Now, look at the more subtle aspects. You were talking about something needing to happen, this idea that you need to see something. Notice how much of that is thought. The idea that there's a shift, that there's a realization, and then a transformation: all of that is based on thought and memory. So what is here now, if you cannot access that world? You see it, you know it, that's what it is. You put it aside. What's here now?
Who needs to realize what? The sense that there is something, a thing that needs to realize or see some other thing: what is that based on? It's another thought. Just keep seeing at the more subtle level that it's thought. And the more you see it's thought, the more you lose the ability to hold on to it.
Reification: turning thoughts into things
We can hold on to thought because we make it a thing. In the world of thought, a thought is an object, a real thing. We make ourselves a thing, a solid mental object. The process is called reification. You turn something that belongs to the world of thinking into a real object. Then you call that "I," and therefore every other mental object becomes equally real. There's a me and a that, a multiplicity of objects, but all of them are mental constructs.
The more you see that they're mental, the more you see that they're actually like an ocean of waves that come and go. The substance of it is one field of moving energies, and the solidity of it starts to break down. It was never solid. It appears to be, and we choose to make it that because we need to buy into the solidity of it in order to function in that world as if it were reality.
The collapse of separation between sense fields
You can start to notice that sound and thought and sensation and perception are not separate. They are all a fluid substance without any separate qualities, without any sense of "here is a thing that is a thought, here is a thing that is a sensation." It's as if the identification gives it the solidity, or the sense of solidity.
In a sense, it's a choice to believe that a concept of "I" is what I really am. With that as a foundation, everything else becomes a real thing, as real as I can make that "I" to be.
The body as anchor for identity
This is why identity is so attached to the body, because the body is what seems to be the most permanent thing in our experience. There is an image of the body, conceptually. When I think of a hand, I rarely experience only the sensation. I have the image, the memory of what my hand is, what it does, what it's done in the past. The same is true of the whole construct of the body. And then on that we attach all of our memories.
This creates a person that feels like a real thing. The sense is that this person is real beyond the world of thought. It's not seen as thought. It's seen as "this is what I am, and this is real." And then that person becomes more real than the body. It becomes the foundation of what I am. We become so involved in it that everything we think of in relationship to this person, this mental construct, becomes as real as we make this to be. Now we're very attached to the mental construct of what we are, and very attached to the story, the past and the future, that preserves this construct in a state that is comfortable.
What came before the construct
But if you do just a bit of checking with yourself, you would know that you existed before you were able to build this thought construct. We know this. Babies develop this over time. We are not born with this image-construct of what I am. I say this only for you to realize that there is something that we are before this construct.