The Constructed Self and What Lies Behind It
El yo construido y lo que yace detrás de él
An exploration of how the mind constructs a sense of self through thought and what we might discover when we turn toward direct experience instead.
The Constructed Self and What Lies Behind It
We are able to put our attention less in our thoughts,
and at their depth, feelings are sensations.
It's just of a different nature than touch, for example.
But it's an energy, it has a texture,
has a tone,
has a way in which it moves, but it's just a sensation.
It can be more intense,
more subtle,
more unformed and generalized and vast,
or localized and focused.
It's all sensations.
Mental sensation versus felt sensation
When the mind fabricates a mental sensation
to push away the deeper, more physical feeling sensation.
For example, if I am looking at the space behind the screen here and I'm lost in thought,
I will stop really seeing what's there,
and I will be living the images of the narrative in my thoughts, right?
Same with feelings.
I get immersed in my thinking,
and that will produce an emotional landscape,
which is a kind of mental image of a sensation.
And in that way, push away or distract from the deeper feeling sensation.
Just as you see images,
you can also in the mind create them as a reflection,
and then focus on the images in the mind versus what's coming through perception,
raw perception.
Same with dialogue or sound.
I can create a dialogue,
which is sound that's imagined versus sound that is perceived.
And with emotions,
I can invoke and create the texture of feeling,
the sensation of feeling,
but it'll be removed from the deeper feeling sensation.
And it'll be the mental emotion sensation.
Two kinds of reality
So I'm describing two kinds of aspects of reality.
One is raw perception: sensation, sound, feeling.
And the other is mental imagery: dialogue, time, space, emotion, sensation.
And when we believe, when we make this into what is actually happening,
that's what we call identification.
We are in a story, in a narrative,
and that's keeping us from relating to what is actually real.
It's a superimposed reality,
which is the reality of thought, of mind,
and it helps us cope with what's behind.
Because what's behind that is mystery.
It's a mass, it's infinite, it's deep,
and the feelings can be very intense.
Stepping back from the movie
And so the work here is: the more we shift into taking some distance from that,
seeing it as thought and taking some distance.
So once it's no longer "I'm immersed in the movie,"
I see it as movie.
Now I start to have a relationship to the body on the couch, the movie on the screen.
And there's the reality of the sensation (as a metaphor, right, watching a movie),
but it's the same thing as functioning, going out on the street.
And then there's the world of inner mind,
which becomes 98% of our reality.
As long as we're not stepping in front of a car or putting our foot on something,
we're not paying that much attention to reality.
The reality is the world we're mentally constructing.
But as we see that to be thought,
and we see what it's in service to,
and we lose interest in what it's in service to,
we become interested in reality.
Then thought just becomes thought,
and it's a tool, and it's useful and practical.
Who am I
And the key, that's why the question "who am I" is so powerful,
because what it's really doing is creating a sense of self that is knowable, known,
limited, experienced,
something I can experience as me.
And what it's pointing to is that that's not.
Really, when you say an experienced I,
there is something there that's not in the world of thought.
What is experienced as I is normally thought.
And the work is to disentangle that.
Oh, that's thought, that's not I.
Oh, that's thought.
And that's what I point to with a different word, just to call it a different word:
beingness.
Which is still a word,
but just to contrast it from this sense of me.
A glimpse
And that can happen in glimpses.
It can happen in a flash,
where that which was seen and known and experienced as what I am and always was is seen,
it goes for a second,
and something is perceived,
something is known.
It's difficult to describe.
It's known, and then that can come back.
But once that happens,
there's a glimpse into: oh, I'm not that.
You've seen it.
And that's the beginning of a shift where that can become a permanent shift.
Facing the fear directly
And the first time that happened for me,
it happened a few times very powerfully in a similar period of time.
But one of the first is when I was looking into something I was terrified of,
and I was having a hard time managing.
Before then I had no experience of that fear even.
Then I started to recognize the fear and get directly into it,
and I would wake up in the morning and meditate on it,
invoke it, look at that fear,
and my body would start shaking just from contemplating
that which I was, up until then in my life, unable to even contemplate.
And after a while facing that, there was that very brief (or ten seconds),
and it reminded me of reading these stories of people who have near-death experiences,
where they're about to crash in an airplane but they survived,
and in that moment before, they say
the experience of your life flashing by.
And it was exactly like that.
I just saw all of my life in just a couple of seconds,
all of my life, the story, super fast,
and seeing how through that whole thing
there was this constructing of this I through thought, obsessive thought.
And then it was gone.
And there was this massive expansion,
terror, absolute terror,
absolute wonder, absolute beauty,
and then back.
It was just too much.
But then after that,
there was just no way to fully believe that again.
Moving toward what you want
And I'm sharing it because it was specifically when I started to move into that fear
and relate to it directly.
Just the direct relationship to what I was afraid of,
which came up because I was moving towards what I wanted, really.
And so there was this tension.
What I want brings up fear.
I could move away into what is comfortable and feel depressed.
And now I'm in this back and forth.